The street scene becomes distractingly lively at Fifth. Tourists waiting for the cable car, street vendors behind tables and street entertainers on tiny stages, gaggles of adolescent girls in low-cut jeans and too-small shirts, fine-pored puppy bellies belting their prance: nearly a 3-ring circus. From the high windows of the trolley I can almost ignore the cars.

I was a late bloomer. I didn’t start to menstruate until I was four months past my 14th birthday. I was old enough to keep a diary and I did. Keep it and keep it: white imitation leather on a middle shelf in my study. It records my very first diet. Exactly two weeks, fourteen days, a fortnight, half a lunar cycle, spans the time from my first diet to my first (at last!) period. Coincidence? Or a sudden flooding onslaught of diet-inducing hormone?

The doors of the club then opened. I began to fit into shared secrets about sweet foods and calorie counting, girdles that would evolve into lycra outfits, sympathetic dressing-room lies. I had never been comfortable with groups of girls, I had always been repelled by squealing jumping hugging creatures, but it seemed right and natural to back into the warm cuddling embrace of a dozen plump peers. Trying to diet was nearly as cool as trying to smoke.

Eventually I blundered into a bout of success. The one class I feared was P.E., and I tried out for the marching corps because my friends were, and the marching corps members had P.E. together, and P.E. alone would be intolerable. I joined the corps and started marching instead of munching after school, which unaccustomed activity and abstinence produced fast impressive results; I slimmed down at 15.

And was gently but thoroughly removed from the club.

It would have been remarkable how completely it happened, except I was too stunned to remark. Suddenly my best friend Norah didn’t want to tell me what she had for dinner. I overheard Cindy and Gail snickering about me after I told them how hard I was working to lose the last three pounds. Plump girls who formerly tried on underwear with me, now looked at me the way I used to glance at our bikini-clad summer neighbor at the lake: as if I had no idea what it was like to turn down a hot fudge sundae in favor of a dream about a dress.

We’re invaded at the Civic Center stop. Two shabbily-dressed black guys board by the rear door.

“Uh, hello fellas,” the driver says back to them, smiling the words into the mirror above his head. “Back door workin’ okay?” and one guy, the beefier one, ambles up toward the front of the bus. But the other one sits down next to me.

I’m not pleased but I’m not worried. Full bus, daylight, and I’m not frail. I’m dying to look at him but I don’t want to encourage anything. I can see blue jeans, loose but not too, clean and not old, medium-brown arms, hands older than young but not yet too veined. I test the air, gently, tentatively, and he doesn’t smell bad.