From that point on, things went better than expected. At home, each boy had pictured the Lisbon girls amid the stock scenery of our impoverished imaginations—cavorting in the surf or playfully fleeing at the ice-skating rink, dangling ski-hat pompoms like ripe fruit before our faces. In the car, however, beside the actual living girls, the boys realized the paltriness of these images. Inverse properties were also discarded: notions of the girls as damaged or demented. (The crazy old lady in the elevator every day turns out to be, when you finally speak to her, perfectly lucid.)
