Snap

By Abby Frucht

Frucht's first novel, a look at six people, many of them strangers to each other, whose paths cross during the separation and rejuvenation of a marriage. The world of SNAP is skewed, oddball, surreal, feeling as if the characters have entered an intricate hall of mirrors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Release date: Dec 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781936873555

Abby Frucht

Abby Frucht is the author of two short story collections, Fruit of the Month, for which she received the Iowa Short Fiction Prize in 1987, and The Bell at the End of a Rope (Narrative Library, 2012). She has also written six novels: Snap; Licorice; Are You Mine?; Life before Death; Polly’s Ghost; and A Well-Made Bed (Red Hen Press, 2016), on which she collaborated with her friend and colleague Laurie Alberts. Abby has taught for more than twenty years at Vermont College of Fine Arts and has served as a judge for the Pen Faulkner award for Fiction. She lives in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Book preview

I

PIECES OF CAKE

1

CLOSE TO NINETY DEGREES, today is typical of June in St. Louis. Like a flat, wide gray ribbon limp in the heat, the Mississippi River slips steamily past, so the tourists, sipping milkshakes at the dockside McDonald’s, swear, wipe the sweat from their eyes and wonder aloud why they came. If after lunch they gather in the park beneath the arch and shake their heads or sway on the balls of their feet, then the arch will seem to waver and to undulate above them, a hazily glinting mirage.

In Forest Park, even the willows are wilting; they look thirsty, impatient and sad. A bicyclist, following the sidewalk along Skinker Boulevard on the western perimeter of the park, stops, jumps down from the seat and, balancing the bike between her knees, removes the elastic from her wrist and pulls the hair from her face, so she can see again. Skinker is a beautiful street, an avenue really, lovely and wide, flanked by tall, ancient plane trees with a breezy green aura of peace. To the east is the golf course at Forest Park, to the west a historic row of churches and temples with curved, sunstruck marble steps.

It was alongside one of these marble façades, just the other day, that a man exposed himself to her. Linell didn’t know what he was doing, at first. She was walking at the time, part of her exercise routine. The man was lounging on the steps against a column, an old man dressed in baggy, tangerine-colored trousers and a white T-shirt. He had a face like boiled pudding. He said hello in a Mickey Mouse voice and wiggled his penis. Linell saw only a piece of flaccid rubber and watched uninterestedly as it flopped back and forth in his lap, until she knew. Then she turned away and kept on walking, neither slowing down nor speeding up, because the creep was too limp and pitiful to be worth altering the pace that she had set for herself, a steady clip of a walk designed to firm up her calf muscles.

However, she was shocked, not by the man so much as by her own reaction. For a brief, absurd moment she felt flattered.

How long had it been, since a man had even looked her way?

But he is gone now, thank goodness; they must have taken him away. Linell climbs back up on the bike and resumes pedaling, turning into the woods where the bike route begins, seven miles of paved trail circling the park. In Linel’s mind the trail passes through five distinct zones, first winding through the woods beyond the art museum; then speeding along the embankment paralleling Highway 40 and dipping into a graceful arc along a chain of oblong willow ponds only to straighten out again along Lindell Boulevard, with its sweeping lawns and fancy houses. Then the trail swings left on a steep upward climb among golfing greens toward the museum, behind which the woods begin all over again, a dense stand of oak and hickory with an odd, decaying smell. The smell makes Linell uneasy, so here she pedals warily, looking for trouble. She sees a man’s sock snagged on a branch and wonders how such a thing could be. Then she comes to a road that cuts a brief dark slope through the trees, and crosses over it holding her breath. A car is parked on the hill, and three men stand around it conversing. Drug deals take place on this road, and homosexual assignations, so there is always a car parked and men in patent leather shoes, who ignore her, thank God.

Then into the woods again. The heat enters in flickering sunlit shapes, like isolated flames. Humidity makes Linel’s hair frizz, and she hates it most for that reason. Also, she is likely to break out in pimples, and she feels one now, a red dot of pain on the inside of her lower lip. She teases it with her tongue. Tomorrow the thing will erupt, and Linell will have to fight herself not to play with it. She is thirty-one years old, and this very same pimple has been plaguing her since adolescence like a hated relative for whom she feels, in spite of everything, helpless affection.

Rounding a bend in the trees, Linell brakes suddenly for a young couple sharing a pair of binoculars, passing it between them as they part to let her through.

In the splayed, shaggy branches of a hickory sits a small, plain bird. A warbler, she supposes, female, because females are the ugly ones. Linell had been surprised to learn, while reading the feature section in the Sunday Post-Dispatch a short time ago, that warblers come in more than one color, shape and size; she had thought a warbler was a warbler, with a little dot of yellow on the wing, a brush stroke of olive on the tail, some black and white for emphasis. Of course, the bird-watching couple must know all the names of all the various warblers likely to visit the Forest Park woods; probably at night they curl naked on pastel sheets, their pale limbs encircling an Audubon guide which they flip through in search of the birds they’d sighted that afternoon.

Even during her brief, failed marriage, Linell was insanely jealous of lovers. The jealousy brought with it an odd twinge of nostalgia, which confused her every time. How can a person get nostalgic for something she’s never had?

Linell optimistically supposes: Surely I was in love once, in another life, and I will be in love again, in another life.

As if to make it happen sooner, she stands on the pedals and pumps hard as ever, out of the woods into white sunlight, sweating like a pig beneath her new pink warm-ups.

Linell means to have sweated off, by the end of the month, thirty-five pounds. She pumps harder, racing along on the trail as it mimics the highway, the rushing cars just yards away from her on the other side of a chain-link fence. It is always at this junction, leaving the wooded zone for the speedy promise of the highway, that she feels most spirited, shot through with adrenalin and exhilaration. Here she zips between twin boulders past a blur of constant traffic, not seeing the boy when he jumps out from behind and throws himself into her bike so that it skids and falls on top of her on the warm, moist grass.

"You shit!" she screams, but the boy yanks the bike from her legs and jumps onto its seat and races off, faster than she could ever hope to follow.

"You shit!" she screams a second time, louder than before, and then cries for a minute, although she knows she’s not hurt, not really, just stunned, the knees of her sweat pants smeared with grass stain and dirt. Her blood throbs audibly; she can hear it slowing.

But how expert he was, Linell thinks, suddenly thankful that the boy had not actually harmed her. At the speed she was going, he could have broken her leg or killed her. Really, she ought to feel sympathy for a person who needs a thrill so badly that just stealing is enough to maintain his spirit. Perhaps Linell ought to steal something, too. For most regrettable is this perceptible loss of spirit, chipped away by not-loving and by not-being-loved. She is thirty-one, not terribly old, when you think about it. Possibly, only a third of her life has passed her by.

But it’s true he could have broken my neck, Linell thinks, still sitting on the grass above the highway.

And then: But he didn’t. I’m still alive. I’m barely bruised. I’m okay. I’m not dead, like Gracie Mack.

Gracie Mack lived in the house across the street from Linel’s and died suddenly a few months ago. Now Gracie s son, Ruby, is cleaning out the house to prepare it for sale. Linell knows this because Ruby introduced himself to her at his mother’s funeral last March, requesting that she keep an eye on the house until he had a chance to come out and take care of things himself. He had asked her to see that the pipes didn’t freeze and that the windows weren’t smashed. All she had to do was take a quick look around every week, check the thermostat and turn the water on and off in all the sinks. Ruby gave her the key and offered to pay her.

Linell refused the money, of course. She had liked Gracie. Who hadn’t? Gracie was a somewhat crazy lady. Also, Gracie s son was very nice-looking, fuzzy and gentle in a way that Gracie wasn’t, almost shy. His wife, who had stood beside him at the funeral, and had pulled Gracie’s house key from her jacket pocket when Ruby couldn’t find it in his own, apparently has not accompanied him this time.

Entering the woods on foot, Linell finds a large hickory branch from which she peels some already frayed streamers of bark, crumbling the fibers before letting them fall. The stick is straight save for one kink at its end where the bough seems to have knotted around itself. It is this warty, swollen protuberance that attracted Linell in the first place. She holds the stick firmly by its smooth, perfect end, the bulbous knot smacking the ground as she walks. If anyone comes near her, she’ll make him see stars, all right.

In Ruby’s naptime dream, the bathroom in his mother’s house is not his mother’s bathroom. It is a fantasy enclosure done in floor-to-ceiling black onyx tiles, the floor itself a glossy sea of identical quarter-inch parts like the squares of a mosaic, a popular style these days among wealthy renovators.

Ruby is barefoot; the tiles are smooth as mirrors. He fills a glass with tap water, waits for the bubbles to dissipate, drinks and spits. The sink is pale orange marble sculpted like a clam shell; the regurgitated water funnels through the scalloped bowl in numerous small rivers that swirl round the drain at the bottom.

In the dream, Ruby is thirsty. How long has it been since he has had a glass of water, a glass of anything, for that matter? His tongue is thick, his gums cottony, the roof of his mouth burns like dry ice. Why not a drink, then? The thought comes to him as suddenly and unexpectedly as it has a hundred times before; each time he lifts the glass from the edge of the sink, depresses the faucet lever, holds the empty glass beneath until it fills with liquid, drinks and spits. Each time the hope is new, and so is the despair. Salt water. When he holds up the glass, he sees thousands of grains of salt that will never dissolve. They are snowflakes in a wind, whirling round the surface of a small oval pond. Ruby approaches the pond, kneels on the frozen, moss-carpeted bank, cups his hands and immerses them in the cold, still water.

And drinks.

And spits.

More salt.

But does he want to wake up yet? No. Dreams are pleasurable, no matter what their message. He enjoys the horror of the cruel-innocent oval pond, and of his thirst, and his search for water, and the harsh, stinging taste of the salt. In dreams, Ruby knows, we punish ourselves in advance for our inevitable petty crimes. Once awake, having suffered, there is nothing to do but carry them out.

Flipping onto his belly, he slides his hands underneath and explores the furred underside of his testicles. Aware that this action has nothing to do with his dream, he is certain as well that the dreaming itself will continue, one way or another. His penis gets hard; he thinks of Ida, who will suck him off but at the last possible second stop and take him apologetically into her hands, pulling him on top of her so he comes all over her belly. She can’t stand the taste; it’s too salty, she complains, and makes a salty face. They both laugh when she makes the face, but all the same it’s an awkward moment, the one awkward moment that they persist in sharing, like embarrassed adolescents. Ruby is hurt, and Ida knows it, but neither one of them will admit it. She used to swallow him, gagging. Stupidly he had mistaken her choked sounds for pleasurable ones. Once she said, when they were finished, "Well, that didn’t work."

What didn’t work? Ruby asked, in his blurred, after-sex voice. Still, his mind was keen. He remembers rearranging his body so that he held its weight away from her and stared intently down into her face, and then ducked to kiss her ear.

Audrey said if a man eats a lot of sweets before you do it it tastes better, Ida said. It doesn’t.

How would Audrey know, anyway?

Ida shrugged. Before bed, Ruby had eaten a plate of brownies and ice cream, the chocolate taste of which still lingered in his mouth, in a gluey way.

Dreaming, Ruby fills another glass of water, then wakes before he lifts it to his mouth. He is out of bed already, in his mother’s bathroom, the bathroom that is not the bathroom in his dream. This one is tiled only halfway up, with celery-colored plastic squares, some of which have come loose and now sit in a stack on the floor, to be reapplied with Liquid Nails. Above the level of the tiles, the wallpaper is peeling, and below it the floor is corroded. Earlier today Ruby passed ten minutes contemplating the broken hinges of the medicine cabinet, before realizing how silly it was to consider a cure for the little cabinet when the whole house might collapse on top of it. It is the house of a happy loner, the house of a person who talks to herself while propping beams with broomsticks and wrapping frayed electric wires with double-sided sticky tape. How can she have let it get like this? Worse still, how can he have allowed her to allow this to happen? Of course, how could he have stopped her, fifteen hundred miles away in his own fastidiously restored colonial, whose sole imperfection is a dent in the wainscoting in the dining room, caused a century ago when a Founding Father rose too hurriedly from the dinner table? How could he have saved her, in any case, from her very nature? Here, everything is haphazard, as if repair required only charming ingenuity and prudence. The roof, the foundation, the ceilings, the floors, all need something done to them, but what? Ruby has yet to determine if the damage is structural or merely cosmetic. He recalls his mother’s eyeglasses, their snapped bridge fused by a Band-aid. Months passed; the lenses held together. Was that structural, then, or cosmetic? Ruby doesn’t know. But for God’s sake, there aren’t even enough light bulbs to go around, a fact that makes Ruby smile, knowing very well his mother’s thrifty solution to the problem. Instead of buying new ones, she would simply carry the few existing bulbs from room to room and lamp to lamp, screwing and unscrewing them whenever necessary.

He found a working lamp in his mother’s study. Removing his T-shirt, he covered his hand when he unscrewed the bulb and held it to the window; sure enough, there it was, a dim milky nimbus of his mother’s fingerprints.

Ruby’s mother had suffered from a hyperactive thyroid gland and its classic symptoms: weight loss, hyperactivity, forgetfulness, sleeplessness, breathlessness, anxiety, carelessness, tremors and a propensity to engage in senseless discord whatever the topic at hand.

Ruby, as a child, had only to remark that it was raining outside in order to elicit such a response.

No, it isn’t, she would declare, without a glance at the window. It can’t possibly be.

Then I’ll go out and play.

And get soaked? Stay inside and help me bake some cookies.

Then off she’d run, bing, bing, bing, leaving Ruby to mess with a bowlful of flour and brown sugar while she involved herself in something entirely new. Like the time she played hostess to a witch and the witch’s husband. The witch was guest lecturer for one of Washington University’s extracurricular courses in which Ruby’s mother forever enrolled. The witch was terribly fat, not like a witch at all, round as a hot-air balloon and dressed only in a giant leotard draped with a gauzy negligee. As far as Ruby could gather, the witch’s sole contribution to the Paganism course had been to oversee the construction, on the wide stretch of lawn fronting Brookings Hall, of a Maypole of crepe paper streamers, around which she’d danced embarrassingly while everyone snickered.

And it wasn’t even May Day, Ruby’s mother later said. "She sat in my house and gloated all night while her tiny husband waited on her hand and foot. Her name was Marybell. Marybell, my ass. Feel my heart! It’s beating in my stomach."

Ruby lifted his hand familiarly to his mother’s flat stomach and felt her heart throbbing madly inside as if it had slipped from her rib cage.

It’s the thyroid, she announced.

However, she accepted no treatment at all, because the prospect of a cure frightened her. She enjoyed being hyperthyroid. She liked running for the phone the second it rang, so that she would be out of breath upon answering it, and she liked her impulsive frantic errands, and she liked the way her hair looked when she neglected to braid it.

She was not fond of Ida and called her Ima by mistake.

I don’t want to visit your mother anymore, Ida had said last winter. You can go without me.

I don’t think I can.

She wouldn’t miss me, and I just don’t see the point of hanging around there. She makes me nervous. I don’t like myself, really, when she’s around.

Neither do I, sort of, Ruby said. But what difference does it make? She’s my mother, for better or worse.

For worse, they both said.

Jinx, said Ida. This meant that Ida had laid a jinx on him and that he was forbidden to speak until she lifted it. It was a game Ruby had played as a child but had since forgotten. He loved the way Ida refreshed him and made him feel playful. He shut his mouth and assumed the sullen expression appropriate to a little boy who has been jinxed. In the silence that followed, the telephone rang. Ida picked it up and said hello.

Yes, but he can’t talk now, she said.

Ruby snorted and lunged for the phone.

Yes, I can talk! he shouted into the receiver.

He was sure it was his friend Dale Lewis, calling for a swimming date. It wasn’t. It was one of his mother’s friends, calling to say that Gracie was dead.

She would have been proud of the way she’d been found, in a chair by the window, a book of poems open on her lap. She was dressed in those painted-up army fatigues and a sweat shirt and high-top sneakers. The sweat shirt was inside out. Bits of dryer lint clung to it. No make-up whatsoever. Fingernails bitten, knuckles slightly chapped, eyes open, hair down. Which troubled Ruby. The friend who had discovered her that morning provided, along with condolences, a detailed description of the corpse. She said his mother’s hair was only halfway braided, loose at the ends. Around her middle finger had been wrapped, like a gaudy ring, an elastic band secured by two translucent blue plastic globes.

Ruby wondered, Was she braiding her hair or unbraiding it, when she died?

At the graveside, Ruby shuddered. Ida squeezed his hand. It was late in March; in St. Louis the redbuds were starting to bloom. Glancing at Ida, Ruby saw that her eyes were closed. Her lashes were long, black and fell precisely in the hollow created by the high tilt of her cheekbones.

Ida was aware, even with her eyes closed, that Ruby was watching her. She ran the tip of her tongue along the edges of her teeth, nearly imperceptibly. She had the smallest teeth imaginable, uncannily lovely, like cultured pearls. Ruby got an erection. He fought the urge to smile. At the minister’s urging, he gathered a fistful of soil and tossed it down into the grave. There was the thwack of wet dirt hitting wood.

But the sound, Ruby thought, his muddy fingers laced again through Ida’s, was not of finality. More of promise, of goodwill, of things to come. It lingered. It had an echo, like that of two wine glasses meeting briefly over candlelight.

Ruby removes a book from the shelf in his mother’s library, clasps it by the binding and shakes it so the pages fan apart. Out drops a coupon for Post Grape-Nuts, expired in 1957, when Ruby was six years old. Had his mother fed him Grape-Nuts then? He can’t remember. Closing his eyes, he sees her fumbling with her purse at the check-out counter in Tri-City Market, a line of bored shoppers lengthening behind her. I could have sworn I had that coupon, she is saying.

Maybe it happened, maybe it never did. Of absolute certainty is the fact that she had shopped at Tri-City only so Ruby could stare at the boxes of rabbit meat stacked alongside the TV dinners in the frozen-food aisle. He has not seen rabbit meat since. Had Ida come along on this trip, they might have driven down Vernon Avenue and taken a look. But Ida hadn’t. Ruby drops the Grape-Nuts coupon into a paper bag that is filling quickly with other coupons, clipped recipes, newspaper columns and assorted ancient yellow papers on which the ink has smeared like awkward brush strokes, bluish, purple and red. Here are unused shopping lists, unmailed letters, jotted telephone numbers and calendar appointments, the phone calls never made, the appointments never kept because his mother forgot them, having thrust the notes between the pages of a book and put the book back on its shelf. His mother had left two rooms of books, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, all to be dusted and loaded into boxes, all read just partway through, the bookmarks twirling to the floor at Ruby’s feet. He doesn’t know yet what to do with all these books. He thinks of carting them to Goodwill to be disposed of piecemeal, separated like orphans. He thinks of selling them en masse, but who would buy them? He thinks of burying them in the yard as if they were a pet, or shipping them all home to Williamsburg.

No solution seems right, but that’s no surprise. Ruby knows he has been sidetracked all day, distracted from his purpose. First he’d glued the tiles in place in the bathroom, but the job only left him wondering what to do next. In fact, the bathroom seemed no nicer than before, only greener and smelling of Liquid Nails.

LIQUID NAILS Adhesive creates a permanent bond between most surfaces, Ruby read on the back of the tube.

And then he read it again. A permanent bond. Most surfaces. He put his hand to his cheek, stroking upward. In the car at the airport just this morning, where Ida and Ruby had parted, she had put her hand to his cheek and stroked upward until it grazed his ear, and then she took the hand away. That was goodbye. Ruby would be gone for nearly a month, and Ida’s gesture, her cool knuckles traversing the length of his face, seemed at once to communicate the brevity and the horrible duration of that time. After a second she turned wordlessly away and fixed her eyes on the windshield, cupped her fingers around the knob on the gear shift and rested them there. Ruby marveled. His lovely wife. Ida’s body is punctuated with angular juttings of bone: the shoulder blades, the collarbone, the spine in which each vertebra is miraculously apparent, the hips which particularly in summer acquire the precision and transparency of the sails of toy ships. Her limbs are delicate and strong as the limbs of saplings. Her pulse, when he touches her, is as quick as a bird’s. Not long ago Ida enrolled in a dance class, and lately she incorporates a balletic detachment into everything she does. Cracking an egg, for instance. Ruby had never considered that such an act, the tapping of an egg against the rim of a cup, could be so moving.

Then, climbing from the car to get his luggage from the back, Ruby saw how Ida’s foot inched forward so the toe of her shoe tapped the accelerator, the engine idling beneath it, an impatient, purring sound. He circled the car; the hatch sprang open with an automatic click. He got his luggage, slammed the hatch and watched the car glide off as if he’d pushed it himself.

Was he surprised? Not really. If he thought of marriage as a series of warming-ups and cooling-offs, and if the easy, temperate plateaus were dotted here and there with angry jagged canyons and brief excited peaks, then this was one of those canyons, or more exactly the fall down into it, a fall broken here and there by ledges and snags so that he felt the change in the atmosphere, the air chilling by degrees as he fell.

Has he hit bottom this time? There is never any sure way of knowing. Ida is a mystery, full of meaningful shifts in mood and behavior. For days, she seems content to give him all of her attention, then all at once she’ll act as if she doesn’t even see him.

Ruby always asks, What’s the matter?

Nothing.

Are you mad?

Nope.

But he has learned not to press her. Lately, he feels like someone testing a rare fruit for ripeness; if he is careless and applies too much pressure he might bruise it. On the other hand, if he puts it aside for a day it might ripen, burst and be lost. His marriage has never before seemed so precarious, so vulnerable, so frightfully organic.

The other night, when he woke, they were lying with their backs to each other. The room was still dark but the sky was purple. The fan was whirring. In his mouth was an aftertaste of the gin and tonics he and Ida had shared before bed. Well, not shared, exactly. He drank his on the hammock in the garden, Ida sat on her spot on the roof, close to the sky. She looked very small. When he lifted his glass, it seemed to encompass her.

Cheers, he had said, but she hadn’t heard him. Now he tasted, on the edges of his tongue, the lime and sour tonic. He sighed, stretched, turned over and placed the flat of his palm against the curve of Ida’s back. Gently, so as not to wake her.

She jumped so suddenly the impact nearly threw him out of bed. She did not wake up. It was as if she had been shot. She settled back into the same curled-up position in which she had been lying. Her breathing was just audible. He touched her again, experimentally, between the shoulder blades. One arm flew out, hit him hard in the face, and snapped back to her side.

Nothing like this had ever happened before. Their nights had been calm, warm, measured. Ruby often thought their nighttime lovemaking to be a sort of sun shower in the midst of pleasant weather, an unexpected release of moisture and fragranee that freshened the earth and then vanished.

He touched her tentatively a third time. Her body shook mightily and subsided. He said, Ida, are you up?

There was no response.

Are you dreaming?

Nothing.

Do you love me?

Of course, Ida said, sleepily. He kissed the nape of her neck, relieved. She kicked him hard in the belly. This went on. By morning, when the light fell on the two of them, he was wounded, battered and weak. Ida rubbed her eyes, opened them and studied him critically.

You look awful. Didn’t you sleep?

Bad dream, Ruby said.

About what?

Ruby shrugged. Ida frowned.

About your mother, she guessed. I can see her in your eyes.

What do you mean?

I can see her, Ida said. She’s in there, looking out, right past me.

The now empty bookshelves are free of dust, their knotty pine spotted with black spinning whorls. Ruby buttons his shirt; he’s been taking it off and putting it on again all day. How can a person be cold in St. Louis in June? This morning when he first entered the house, its coolness had been welcome. The drive from the airport had sweated him up, and the chilled metal touch of the doorknob when he’d let himself in had refreshed him immediately. But now it’s too much. Emptied of his mother, of her frenetic opening and shutting of doors and windows, the house has acquired the living hiburnal chill of a cave; it seems to breathe him in and out like a vapor.

He steps over to the window in the front hallway, where a shaft of gaudy light angles down. The house is on Kingsbury Avenue in University City; the street buzzes with a residential, summery, red brick peace. In the center is a grass island with a bench no one sits on, strewn about with tricycles and soccer balls. But there are no children around at this hour, and their absence gives the toys a desolate, abandoned look, like debris left behind by an ice floe. It is six-thirty, dinnertime. Ruby hunts in his pockets for cash. He will have to buy his dinner at the Majik Mart. Just what does a person eat, when he eats alone?

Outside, he follows the sidewalk to the alley that leads between some houses to Delmar Avenue. He is wearing wading sneakers, the canvas snipped away to expose his toes. There is the noise of traffic, the odor of exhaust fumes, the busy hum of the city. From the open upper window of a brick building floats the tinny scratch of a cheap stereo. Some people gather on a front stoop in silence, eating fried chicken off china plates. Ruby sees the smiling face of Colonel Sanders. Hungrily, he hurries past. At the Majik Mart he selects a can of orange juice, some frankfurters, rolls and a jar of good mustard. The prices are higher than in Williamsburg. It is a neighborhood grocery; in the aisles people chat offhandedly and pocket their lottery stubs. He feels out of place and preppy in his khaki slacks and braided rope belt, but his bare toes help him blend in.

Across the street from the store is a gas station with a phone booth. He’ll call Ida. He wants to hear her voice. The idea comes to him with a shock, as if the notion of the telephone were new to him. With impatient pleasure he crosses the road, pulling change from his pocket. He slips the coins into the slot and dials, and hears his own phone ringing in his own house, miles and miles away.

Maybe Ida is having a bath. Or a shower. He likes to watch her in the shower, how the water beads slide down her backside, filmy with soap. And the way she soaps herself up, her deft hands reaching even the trickiest spots.

He lets the phone ring a long time, and then hangs up and waits a minute and tries again. She is there, on the second ring.

It’s me, says Ruby, grinning.

I know, says Ida.

I called a second ago but you didn’t answer.

Yes.

I miss you, says Ruby.

There is a pause.

I know it.

Say something else, says Ruby.

Something else.

Say you love me, he says, playing along. He likes the way she jokes with him, over the telephone.

You love me, says Ida.

Come on, say it.

It, says Ida.

Come on, he pleads. In the silence that follows, it dawns on him that Ida is not joking; there is no laughter in her voice or in the rhythm of her breathing, only a vague impatience.

The operator asks for another quarter. Ruby hesitates, puzzled. He fingers his change. A car