When they decide they might as well be penniless husbands and wives as penniless campus sweethearts, three couples at a Midwestern university, against the advice of their friends, get married. Joe and Susie Tucker prove that two can live as cheap as one by setting up housekeeping in a trailer, and working at whatever odd jobs turn up.

Two football players fight over the same girl.

The setting is a city block during a sweltering summer, where the residents serve as representatives of the not-very-idealized American melting pot. There is idle chitchat, gossip, jealousy, racism, adultery, and suddenly but not unexpectedly, a murder.