Anna

Her name was Anna Griffin. She was 20. Her blonde hair had been turning darker over the past few years, and she believed it would be brown when she was 25. Sometimes she thought of dyeing it blonde, but living with Wayne was still new enough to her so that she was hesitant about spending money on anything that could not be shared. She also wanted to see what her hair would finally look like. She was pretty, though parts of her face seemed not to know it: The light of her eyes, the lines of her lips seemed bent on denial, so that even the rise of her high cheekbones seemed ungraceful, simply covered bone. Her two front teeth had a gap between them and they protruded, the right more than the left.

She worked at the cash register of a Sunnycorner store, located in what people called a square: two blocks of small stores, with a Chevrolet dealer and two branch banks, one of them next to the Sunnycorner. The tellers from that one--women not much older than Anna--came in for take-out coffees, cigarettes and diet drinks. She liked watching them come in: soft sweaters, wool dresses, polyester blouses that in stores she liked rubbing between thumb and forefinger. She liked looking at their hair, too: beauty-parlor hair that seemed groomed to match the colors and cut and texture of their clothing, so it was more like hair on a model or a (continued on page 174)Anna(continued from page 137) movie actress, no longer an independent growth to be washed and brushed and combed and cut, but part of the ensemble, as the boots were. They all wore pretty watches, and bracelets and necklaces, and more than one ring. She liked the way the girls moved: They looked purposeful but not harried. One enters the store and stops at the magazine rack against the wall opposite Anna and the counter, and picks up a magazine and thumbs the pages, appearing even then to be in motion still, a woman leaving the job for a few minutes, but not in a hurry; then she replaces the magazine and crosses the floor and waits in line while Anna rings up and bags the cans and bottles and boxes cradled in arms, dangling from hands. They talk to each other, Anna and the teller she knows only by face, as she fills and caps Styrofoam cups of coffee. The weather. Hi. How are you? Bye, now. The teller leaves. Often, behind the counter, with other customers, Anna liked what she was doing; liked knowing where the pimientos were; liked her deftness with the register and bagging; was proud of her cheerfulness; felt in charge of customers and what they bought. But when the tellers were at the counter, she was shy; and if one of them made her laugh, she covered her mouth.

She took new magazines from the rack, one at a time, keeping it under the counter near her tall three-legged stool, until she finished it; then she put it back and took another. So by the time the girls from the bank glanced through the magazine, she knew what they were seeing. For they always chose the ones she did: People, Vogue, Glamour. She looked at Playgirl, and in Oui she looked at the women and read the letters, this when she worked at night, not because there were fewer customers then but because it was night, not day. At first she had looked at them during the day, and felt strange raising her eyes from the pictures to blink at the parking lot, whose presence of cars and people and space she always felt because the storefront was glass, her counter stopping just short of it. The tellers never picked up those magazines, but Anna was certain they had them at home. She imagined that, too: where they lived after work, before work. She gave them large pretty apartments with thick walls so they heard only themselves; stereos and color television, and soft carpets and soft furniture and large brass beds; sometimes she imagined them living with men who made a lot of money, and she saw a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi.

Near the end of her workday, in its seventh and eighth hours, her fatigue was the sort that comes from confining the body while giving neither it nor the mind anything to do. She was restless, impatient and distracted, and while talking politely to customers and warmly to the regular ones, she wanted to be home. The apartment was in an old building she could nearly see from behind the counter; she could see the gray house with red shutters next to it. As soon as she left the store, she felt as if she had not been tired at all; only her feet still were. Sometimes she felt something else, too, as she stepped outside and crossed that line between fatigue and energy: a touch of dread and defeat. She walked past the bank, the last place in the long building of bank, Sunnycorner, drugstore, department store and pizza house, cleared the corner of the building, passed the dumpster on whose lee side teenagers on summer nights smoked dope and drank beer, down the sloping parking lot and across the street to the old near-yardless green wooden apartment house; up three flights of voices and television voices and the smell that reminded her of the weariness she had just left, It was not a bad smell. It bothered her because it was a daily smell, even when old Mrs. Battistini on the first floor cooked with garlic; a smell of all the days of this wood. Up to the third floor, the top of the building, and into the apartment whose smells she noticed only because they were not the scent of contained age she had breathed as she climbed. Then she went to the kitchen table or the bed or shower or couch, either talking to Wayne or waiting for him to come home from Wendy's, where he cooked hamburgers.

At those times, she liked her home. She rarely liked it when she woke in it: a northwest apartment, so she opened her eyes to a twilit room and, as she moved about, she saw the place clearly, with its few pieces of furniture, cluttered only with leavings--tossed clothes, beer bottles, potato-chip bags--as if her night's sleep had tricked her so she would see only what last night she had not. And sometimes, later, during the day or night, while she was simply crossing a room, she would suddenly see herself juxtaposed with the old maroon couch that had been left, along with everything else, by whoever lived there before her and Wayne: the yellow wooden table and two chairs in the kitchen, the blue easy chair in the living room and, in the bedroom, the chest of drawers, the straight wooden chair and the mattress on the floor, and she felt older than she knew she ought to.

•

The wrong car: a 1964 Mercury Comet that Wayne had bought for $160 two years ago, before she knew him, when the car was already 11 years old, and now it vibrated at 60 miles an hour, and had holes in the floor board; and the wrong weapon: a Buck hunting knife under Wayne's leather jacket, unsheathed and held against his body by his left arm. She had not thought of the car and knife until he put the knife under his jacket and left her in the car, smoking so fast that between drags she kept the cigarette near her face and chewed the thumb of the hand holding it; looking through the wiper-swept windshield and the snow blowing between her and the closed bakery next to the lighted drugstore, at tall Wayne walking slowly with his face turned and lowered away from the snow. She softly kept her foot on the accelerator so the engine would not stall. The headlights were off. She could not see into the drugstore. When she drove slowly past it, there were two customers, one at the cash register and counter at the rear, one looking at display shelves at a side wall. She had parked and turned off the lights. One customer left, a man bareheaded in the snow. He did not look at their car. Then the other one left, a man in a watch cap. He did not look, either, and when he had driven out of the parking lot to the highway it joined, Wayne said OK and went in.

She looked in the rearview mirror, but snow had covered the window; she looked to both sides. To her right, at the far end of the shopping center, the doughnut shop was open; and in front of it, three cars were topped with snow. All the other stores were closed. She would be able to see headlights through the snow on the rear window, and if a cruiser came, she was to go into the store, and if Wayne had not already started, she would buy cigarettes, then go out again, and if the cruiser was gone, she would wait in the car; if the cruiser had stopped, she would go back into the store for matches and they would both leave. Now, in the dark and heater warmth, she believed all of their plan was no longer risky, but doomed, as if by leaving the car and walking across the short space through soft angling snow, Wayne had become puny, his knife a toy. So it was the wrong girl, too, and the wrong man. She could not imagine him coming out with money, and she could (continued on page 236)Anna(continued from page 174) not imagine tomorrow or later tonight or even the next minute. Stripped of history and dreams, she knew only her breathing and smoking and heartbeat and the falling snow. She stared at the long window of the drugstore, and she was startled when he came out: He was running, he was alone, he was inside, closing the door. He said Jesus Christ three times as she crossed the parking lot. She turned on the headlights and slowed as she neared the highway. She did not have to stop. She moved into the right lane, and cars in the middle and left passed her.

"A lot," he said.

She reached to him and he pressed bills against her palm, folded her fingers around them.

"Can you see out back?" she said.

"No. Nobody's coming. Just go slow; no skidding, no wrecks. Jesus."

She heard the knife blade slide into the sheath, watched yellowed snow in the headlights and glanced at passing cars on her left; she held the wheel with two hands. He said when he went in he was about to walk around like he was looking for something, because he was so scared, but then he decided to do it right away or else he might have just walked around the store till the druggist asked what he wanted and he'd end up buying tooth paste or something, so he went down along the side wall to the back of the store--he lit a cigarette and she said, "Me, too"; she watched the road and taillights of a distant car in her lane as he placed it between her fingers--and he went around the counter and took out the knife and held it at the druggist's stomach: a little man with gray hair watching the knife and punching open the register.

She left the highway and drove on a two-lane road through woods and small towns.

"Tequila," he said.

In their town, all but one package store closed at 10:30; she drove to the one that stayed open until 11, a corner store on a street of tenement houses where Puerto Ricans lived; on warm nights, they were on the stoops and sidewalks and corners. She did not like going there, even on winter nights when no one was out. She stopped in front of it, looked at the windows and said, "I think it's closed."

"It's quarter to."

He went out and tried the door, then peered in, then knocked and called and tried the door again. He came back and struck the dashboard.

"I can't fucking believe it. I got so much money in my pockets I got no room for my hands, and we got one beer at home. Can you believe it?"

"He must've closed early--"

"No shit."

"Because of the snow."

She turned a corner around a used-car lot and got onto the main street going downhill through town to the river.

"I could use some tequila," she said.

"Stop at Timmy's."

The traffic lights were blinking yellow so people would not have to stop on the hill in the snow; she shifted down and coasted with her foot touching the brake pedal, drove over the bridge and parked two blocks from it at Timmy's. When she got out of the car, her legs were weak and eager for motion and she realized they had been taut all the way home; and, standing at the corner of the bar, watching Johnny McCarthy pour two shots beside the drafts, she knew she was going to get drunk. She licked salt from her hand and drank the shot, then a long swallow of beer that met the tequila's burn as it rose, and held the shot glass toward grinning McCarthy and asked how law school was going; he poured tequila and said, "Long but good," and she drank that and finished her beer and he poured two more shots and brought them drafts. She looped her arm around Wayne's and nuzzled the soft leather and hard biceps, then tongue-kissed him and looked down the bar at the regulars, most of them men talking in pairs, standing at the bar that had no stools; two girls stood shoulder to shoulder and talked to men on their flanks. The room was long and narrow, separated from the dining room by a wall with a half door behind the bar. Anna waved at people who looked at her, and they raised a glass or waved and some called her name and old Lou, who was drinking beer alone at the other end of the bar, motioned to McCarthy and sent her and Wayne a round. Wayne's hand came out of his jacket and she looked at the bill in it: a 20.

"Set up Lou," he said to McCarthy. "Lou. Can I buy you a shot?"

Lou nodded and smiled, and she watched McCarthy pour the whiskey and take it and a draft to Lou, and she wondered if she could tend bar, could remember all the drinks. It was a wonderful place to be, this bar, with her back to the door so she got some of the chill, not all stuffy air and smoke, and able to look down the length of the bar and at the young men crowded into four tables at the end of the room, watching a television set on a shelf on the wall: a hockey game. It was the only place outside of her home where she always felt the comfort of affection. Shivering with a gulp of tequila, she watched Wayne arm-wrestle with Curt: knuckles white and hand and face red, veins showing at his temples and throat. She had never seen either win, but Wayne had told her that till a year ago, he had always won.

"Pull," she said.

His strength and effort seemed to move into the air around her, making her restless; she slapped his back, lit a cigarette, wanted to dance. She called McCarthy and pointed to the draft glasses, then to Curt's highball glass and, when he came with the drinks, told him Wayne would pay after he beat Curt. She was humming to herself, and she liked the sound of her voice. She wondered if she could tend bar. People didn't fight here. People were good to her. They wouldn't-- A color television. They shouldn't buy it too soon; but when? Who would care? Nobody watched what they bought. She wanted to count the money but did not want to leave until closing. Wayne and Curt were panting and grunting; their arms were nearly straight up again; they had been going slowly back and forth. She slipped a hand into Wayne's pocket, squeezed the folded wad. She had just finished a cigarette, but now she was holding another and wondering if she wanted it, then she lit it and did. There was only a men's room in the bar. "Draw?" Curt said.

"Draw," Wayne said, and she hugged his waist and rubbed his right biceps and said: "I ordered us and Curt a round. I didn't pay. I'm going piss."

He smiled down at her. The light in his eyes made her want to stay holding him. She walked toward the end of the bar, past the backs of leaning drinkers; some noticed her and spoke; she patted backs, said, "Hi. How you doing? Hey, what's happening?"; big curly-haired Mitch stopped her: Yes, she was still at Sunnycorner; where had he been? Working in New Hampshire. He told her what he did, and she heard, but seconds later she could not remember; she was smiling at him. He called to Wayne and waved. She said, "I'll see you in a minute," and moved on. At the bar's end was Lou. He reached for her, raised the other arm at McCarthy. He held her shoulder and pulled her to him.

"Let me buy you a drink."

"I have to go to the ladies'."

"Well, go to the ladies' and come back."

"OK."

She did not go. Her shot and their drafts were there and she was talking to Lou. She did not know what he did, either. She used to know. He looked 60. He came every night. His gray hair was short and he laughed often and she liked his wrinkles.

"I wish I could tend bar here."

"You'd be good at it."

"I don't think I could remember all the drinks."

"It's a shot-and-beer place."

His arm was around her, her fingers pressing his ribs. She drank. The tequila was smooth now. She finished the beer, said she'd be back, next round was hers; she kissed his cheek: His skin was cool and tough and his whiskers scraped her chin. She moved past the tables crowded with the hockey watchers; Henry coming out of the men's room moved around her, walking carefully. She went through the door under the television set, into a short hall, glanced down it into the door-less silent kitchen and stepped left into the rear of the dining room: empty and darkened. Some nights she and Wayne brought their drinks in here after the kitchen closed and sat in a booth in the dark. The ladies' room was empty. "Ah." Wayne was right: When you really had to piss, it was better than sex. She listened to the voices from the bar, wanted to hurry back to them. She jerked the paper, tore it.

Lou was gone. She stood where he had been, but his beer glass was gone, the ashtray emptied. He was like that. He came and went quietly. You'd look around and see him for the first time and he already had a beer; some time later, you'd look around and he was gone. Behind Wayne, the front door opened and a blue cap and jacket and badge came in: It was Ryan from the beat. She made herself think in sentences and tried to focus on them, as if she were reading: He's coming in to get warm. He's just cold. She waved at him. He did not see her. She could not remember the sentences. She could not be afraid, either. She knew that she ought to be afraid so she would not make any mistakes, but she was not, and when she tried to feel afraid or even serious, she felt drunker. Ryan was standing next to Curt, one down from Wayne, and had his gloves off and was blowing on his hands. He and McCarthy talked, then he left; at the door, he waved at the bar, and Anna waved. She went toward Wayne, then stopped at the two girls: One was Laurie or Linda, she couldn't remember which; one was Jessie. They were still flanked by Bobby and Mark. They all turned their backs to the bar, pressed her hands, touched her shoulders, bought her a drink. She said tequila and drank it and talked about Sunnycorner. She went to Wayne, told McCarthy to set up Bobby and Mark and Jessie--leaning forward: "Johnny, what is it? Laurie or Linda?"

"Laurie."

She slipped a hand into Wayne's pocket. Then her hand was captive there, fingers on money, his forearm pressing hers against his side.

"I'll get it. Did you see Ryan?"

"Yes."

She tried to think in sentences again. She looked up at Wayne; he was grinning down at her. She could see the grin, or his eyes, but not both at once. She gazed at his lips.

"You're cocked," he said. He was not angry. He said it softly and took her wrist and withdrew it from his pocket.

"I'll do it in the john."

She wanted to be as serious and careful as he was, but looking at him and trying to see all of his face at once weakened her legs; she tried again to think in sentences, but they jumped away from her like a cat her mind chased; when she turned away from him, looked at faces farther away and held the bar, her mind stopped struggling and she smiled and put her hand in his back pocket and said, "OK."

He started to walk to the men's room, stopping to talk to someone, being stopped by another; watching him, she was smiling. When she became aware of it, she kept the smile; she liked standing at the corner of the bar smiling with love at her man's back and profile as he gestured and talked, then he was in the men's room. Midway down the bar, McCarthy finished washing glasses and dried his hands, stepped back and folded his arms and looked up and down the bar; and when he saw nothing in front of her, he said, "Anna? Another round?"

"Just a draft, OK?"

She looked in her wallet; she knew it was empty, but she looked to be sure it was still empty; she opened the coin pouch and looked at lint and three pennies. She counted the pennies. Johnny put the beer in front of her.

"Wayne's got--"

"On me," he said. "Want a shot, too?"

"Why not?"

She decided to sip this one or at least drink it slowly, but, while she was thinking, the glass was at her lips and her head tilted back and she swallowed it all and licked her lips, then turned to the door behind her and, without coat, stepped outside. The sudden cold emptied her lungs, then she deeply drew in the air tasting of night and snow. "Wow." She lifted her face to the light snow and breathed again. Had she smoked a cigarette? Yes. From Lou. Jesus. Snow melted on her cheeks. She began to shiver. She crossed the sidewalk, touched the frosted parking meter. One of her brothers did that to her when she was little. Which one? Frank. Told her to lick the bottom of the ice tray. In the cold, she stood happy and clearheaded until she wanted to drink, and she went smiling into the warmth and voices and smoke.

"Where'd you go?" Wayne said.

"Outside to get straight," rubbing her hands together, drinking beer, its head gone, shaking a cigarette from her pack, her flesh recalling its alertness outside as, breathing smoke and swallowing beer and leaning on Wayne, it was lulled again. She wondered if athletes felt all the time the way she had felt outside.

"We should get some bicycles," she said.

He lowered his mouth to her ear, pushing her hair aside with his rubbing face.

"We can," his breath in her ear; she turned her groin against his leg. "It's about two thousand."

"No, Wayne."

"Ssshhh. I looked at it, man."

He moved away and put a bill in her hand: a 20.

"Jesus," she said.

"Keep cool."

"I've never--" She stopped, called McCarthy and paid for the round for Laurie and Jessie and Bobby and Mark, and tipped him a dollar. Two thousand dollars: She had never seen that much money in her life, had never had as much as $100 in her hands at one time; not of her own.

"Last call." McCarthy started at the other end of the bar, taking empty glasses, taking back drinks. "Last call."

She watched McCarthy pour her last shot and draft of the night; she faced Wayne and raised the glass of tequila: "Hi, babe."

"Hi." He licked salt from his hand.

"I been forgetting the salt," she said, and drank, looking at his eyes.

She sipped this last one, finished it and was drinking the beer when McCarthy called: "That's it. I'm taking the glasses in five minutes. You don't have to go home--"

"But you can't stay here," someone said.

"Right. Drink up."

She finished the beer and beckoned with her finger to McCarthy. When he came, she held his hands and said, "Just a quick one?"

"I can't."

"Just half a draft or a quick shot? I'll drink it while I put my coat on."

"The cops have been checking. I got to have the glasses off the bar."

"What about a roader?" Wayne said.

"Then they'll all want one."

"OK. He's right, Anna. Let go of the man."

She released his hands and he took their glasses. She put on her coat. Wayne was waving at people, calling to them. She waved: "See you, people. Good night, Jessie. Laurie. Good night. See you, Henry. Mark. Bye-bye, Mitch--"

Then she was in the falling white cold, her arm around Wayne; he drove them home, a block and a turn around the Chevrolet lot, then two blocks, while in her mind still were the light and faces and voices of the bar. She held his waist going up the dark stairs. He was breathing hard, not talking. Then he unlocked the door, she was inside, lights coming on, coat off, following Wayne to the kitchen, where he opened their one beer and took a swallow and handed it to her and pulled money from both pockets. They sat down and divided the bills into stacks of 20s and tens and fives and ones. When the beer was half gone, he left and came back from the bedroom with four Quaaludes and she said, "Mmmm," and took two from his palm and swallowed them with beer. She picked up the stack of 20s. Her legs felt weak again. She was hungry. She would make a sandwich. She put down the stack and sat looking at the money.

He was counting: "Thirty-five, forty, forty-five, fifty--" She took the ones. She wanted to start at the lowest and work up; she did not want to know how many 20s there were until the end. She counted aloud and he told her not to.

"You don't, either," she said. "All I hear is ninety-five, hundred, ninety-five, hundred--"

"OK. In our heads."

She started over. She wanted to eat and wished for a beer and lost count again. Wayne had a pencil in his hand, was writing on paper in front of him. She counted faster. She finished and picked up the 20s. She counted slowly, making a new stack on the table with the bills that she drew, one at a time, from her hand. She did not keep track of the sum of money; she knew she was too drunk. She simply counted each bill as she smacked it onto the pile. Wayne was writing again, so she counted the last 12 aloud, ending with: "And forty-six," slamming it onto the fanning 20s. He wrote and drew a line and wrote again and drew another line and his pencil moved up the columns, touching each number and writing a new number at the bottom until there were four of them, and he read to her: "Two thousand and eighteen."

The Quaalude bees were in her head now and she stood and went to the living room for a cigarette in her purse, her legs wanting to go to the sink at her right, but she forced them straight through the door whose left jamb they bumped; as she reached into her purse, she heard herself humming. She had thought she was talking to Wayne, but that was in her head, she had told him, Two thousand and eighteen, we can have some music and movies now and she smiled aloud because it had come out as humming a tune she had never heard. In the kitchen, Wayne was doing something strange. He had lined up their three glasses on the counter by the sink and he was pouring milk into them; it filled two and a half, and he drank that half. Then he tore open the top of the half-gallon carton and rinsed it and swabbed it out with a paper towel. Then he put the money in it, and folded the top back, and put it in the freezer compartment and the two glasses of milk in the refrigerator. Then she was in the bedroom talking about frozen money; she saw the cigarette between her fingers as she started to undress, in the dark now; she was not aware of his turning out lights: She was in the lighted kitchen, then in the dark bedroom looking for an ashtray instead of pulling her sleeve over the cigarette and she told him about that and about a stereo and Emmylou Harris and fucking, as she found the ashtray on the floor by the bed, which was a mattress on the floor by the ashtray; that she thought about him at Sunnycorner, got horny for him; her tongue was thick, slower than her buzzing head, and the silent words backed up in the spaces between the spoken ones, so she told him something in her mind, then heard it again as her tongue caught up; her tongue in his mouth now, under the covers on the cold sheet, a swelling of joy in her breast as she opened her legs for him and the night's images came back to her: the money on the table and the faces of McCarthy and Curt and Mitch and Lou, and Wayne's hand disappearing with the money inside the carton, and Bobby and Mark and Laurie and Jessie, the empty sidewalk where she stood alone in the cold air, Lou saying: "You'd be good at it."

•

The ringing seemed to come from inside her skull, insistent and clear through the voices of her drunken sleep: a ribbon of sound she had to climb, though she tried to sink away from it. Then her eyes were open and she turned off the alarm she did not remember setting; it was six o'clock and she was asleep again, then wakened by her alarmed heartbeat: all in what seemed a few seconds, but it was ten minutes to seven, when she had to be at work. She rose with a fast heart and a headache that made her stoop gingerly for her clothes on the floor, and shut her eyes as she put them on. She went into the kitchen: the one empty beer bottle, the ashtray, the milk-soiled glass, and her memory of him putting away the money was immediate, as if he had just done it, and she had not slept at all. She took the milk carton from the freezer. The folded money, like the bottle and ashtray and glass, seemed part of the night's drinking, something you cleaned or threw away in the morning. But she had no money and she needed aspirins and coffee and doughnuts and cigarettes; she took a cold five-dollar bill and put the carton in the freezer, looked in the bedroom for her purse and then in the kitchen again and found it in the living room, opened her wallet and saw money there. She pushed the freezer money in with it and slung the purse from her shoulder and stepped into the dim hall, shutting the door on Wayne's snoring. Outside, she blinked at sun and cold and remembered Wayne giving her $20 at the bar; she crossed the street and parking lot and, with the taste of beer in her throat and tooth paste in her mouth, was in the Sunnycorner before seven.

She spent the next eight hours living the divided life of a hangover. Drinking last night had stopped time, kept her in the present until last call forced on her the end of a night, the truth of tomorrow; but once in their kitchen counting money, she was in the present again and she stayed there through twice waking, and dressing, and entering the store and relieving Eddie, the all-night clerk, at the register. So, for the first three or four hours while she worked and waited and talked, her body heavily and slowly occupied space in those brightly lit moments in the store; but in her mind were images of Wayne leaving the car and going into the drugstore and running out, and driving home through falling snow, the closed package store and the drinks and people at Timmy's and taking the Quaaludes from Wayne's palm, and counting money and making love for so drunk long; and she felt all of that and none of what she was numbly doing. It was a hangover that demanded food and coffee and cigarettes. She started the day with three aspirins and a Coke. Then she smoked and ate doughnuts and drank coffee. Sometimes from the corner of her eye she saw something move on the counter, small and gray and fast, like the shadow of a darting mouse. Her heart was fast, too, and the customers were fast and loud, while her hands were slow, and her tongue was, for it had to wait while words freed themselves from behind her eyes, where the pain was, where the aspirins had not found it. After four cups of coffee, her heart was faster and hands more shaky, and she drank another Coke. She was careful, and made no mistakes on the register; with eyes trying to close, she looked into the eyes of customers and Kermit the manager, slim and balding, in his 40s; a kind man but one who, today, made her feel both scornful and ashamed, for she was certain he had not had a hangover in 20 years. Around noon, her blood slowed and her hands stopped trembling, and she was tired and lightheaded and afraid; it seemed there was always someone watching her, not only the customers and Kermit but someone above her, outside the window, in the narrow space behind her. Now there were gaps in her memory of last night: she looked at the clock so often that its hands seemed halted, and in her mind she was home after work, in bed with Wayne, shuddering away the terrors that brushed her like a curtain wind-blown against her back.

When she got home, he had just finished showering and shaving, and she took him to bed with lust that was as much part of her hangover as hunger and the need to smoke were; silent and hasty, she moved toward that orgasm that would bring her back to some calm mooring in the long day. Crying out, she burst into languor; slept breathing the scent of his washed flesh. But she woke alone in the twilit room and rose quickly, calling him. He came smiling from the living room and asked if she were ready to go to the mall.

•

The indoor walk of the mall was bright and warm; coats unbuttoned, his arm over her shoulder, hers around his waist, they moved slowly among people and smells of frying meat, stopping at windows to look at shirts and coats and boots; they took egg rolls to a small pool with a fountain in its middle and sat on its low brick wall; they ate pizza alone on a bench that faced a displayed car; they had their photographs taken behind a curtain in a shop and paid the girl and left their address.

"You think she'll mail them to us?" Anna said.

"Sure."

They ate hamburgers standing at the counter, watching the old man work at the grill, then sat on a bench among potted plants to smoke. On the way to the department store, they bought fudge, and the taste of it lingered, sweet and rich in her mouth, and she wanted to go back for another piece, but they were in the store--large, with glaring white light--and as the young clerk wearing glasses and a thin mustache came to them, moving past television sets and record players, she held Wayne's arm. While the clerk and Wayne talked, she was aware of her gapped and jutting teeth, her pea jacket and old boots and jeans. She followed Wayne following the clerk; they stopped at a shelf of record players. She shifted her eyes from one to the other as they spoke; they often looked at her, and she said, "Yes. Sure." The soles of her feet ached and her calves were tired. She wanted to smoke but was afraid the clerk would forbid her. She swallowed the taste of fudge. Then she was sad. She watched Wayne and remembered him running out of the drugstore and, in the car, saying Jesus Christ, and she was ashamed that she was sad, and felt sorry for him because he was not.

Now they were moving. He was hugging her and grinning and his thigh swaggered against her hip, and they were among shelved television sets. Some of them were turned on, but to different channels, and surrounded by those faces and bodies and colliding words, she descended again into her hangover. She needed a drink, a cigarette, a small place, not all this low-ceilinged breadth and depth, where shoppers in the awful light jumped in and out of her vision. Timmy's: the corner of the bar near the door, and a slow-sipped tequila salty dog and then one more to close the spaces in her brain and the corners of her vision, stop the tingling of her gums, and the crawling tingle inside her body as though ants climbed on her veins. In her coat pocket, her hand massaged the box of cigarettes; she opened it with a thumb, stroked filters with a finger.

She wanted to cry. She watched the pictures on one set: a man and a woman in a car, talking; she knew California from television and movies, and they were driving in California: the winding road, the low brown hills, the sea. The man was talking about dope and people's names. The clerk was talking about a guarantee. Wayne told him what he liked to watch, and as she heard hockey and baseball and football and movies, she focused so hard on imagining this set in their apartment and them watching it from the couch that she felt like she had closed her eyes, though she had not. She followed them to the cash register and looked around the room for the cap and shoulders of a policeman to appear in the light that paled skin and cast no shadow. She watched Wayne count the money; she listened to the clerk's pleased voice. Then Wayne was leading her away.

"Aren't we taking them?"

He stopped, looked down at her, puzzled; then he laughed and kissed the top of her head.

"We pick them up out back."

He was leading her again.

"Where are we going now?"

"Records. Remember? Unless you want to spend a fucking fortune on a stereo and just look at it."

Standing beside him, she gazed and blinked at album covers as he flipped them forward, pulled out some, talked about them. She tried to despise his transistor radio at home, tried to feel her old longing for a stereo and records, but as she looked at each album he held in front of her, she was glutted with spending and felt more like a thief than she had last night waiting outside the drugstore, and driving home from it. Again she imagined the apartment, saw where she would put the television, the record player; she would move the chest of drawers to the living room and put them on its top, facing the couch where-- She saw herself cooking. She was cooking macaroni and cheese for them to eat while they watched a movie; but she saw only the apartment now, then herself sweeping it. Wayne swept it, too, but often he either forgot or didn't see what she saw or didn't care about it. Sweeping was not hard, but it was still something to do and sometimes for days it seemed too much to do, and fluffs of dust gathered in corners and under furniture. So now she asked Wayne and he looked surprised and she was afraid he would be angry, but then he smiled and said OK. He took the records to the clerk and she watched the numbers come up on the register and the money go into the clerk's hand. Then Wayne led her past the corners and curves of washers and driers, deeper into the light of the store, where she chose a round blue vacuum cleaner.

•

She carried it, boxed, into the apartment; behind her on the stairs, Wayne carried the stereo in two boxes that hid his face. They went quickly downstairs again. Anna was waiting. She did not know what she was waiting for, but standing on the sidewalk as Wayne's head and shoulders went into the car, she was anxious and mute. She listened to his breathing and the sound of cardboard sliding over the car seat. She wanted to speak into the air between them, the air that had risen from the floor board coming home from the mall as their talk had slowed, repeated itself, then stopped. Whenever that happened, they were about to either fight or enter a time of shy loneliness. Now, grunting, he straightened with the boxed television in his arms; she grasped the free end and walked backward up the icy walk, telling him, "Not so fast," and he slowed and told her when she reached the steps and, feeling each one with her calves, she backed up them and through the door and he asked if she wanted him to go up first and she said, no, he had most of its weight, she was better off. She was breathing too fast to smell the stairway; sometimes she smelled cardboard and the television inside it, like oiled plastic; she belched and tasted hamburger, and when they reached the third floor, she was sweating. In the apartment, she took off her coat and went downstairs with him and they each carried up a boxed speaker. They brought the chest into the living room and set it down against the wall opposite the couch; she dusted its top and they put the stereo and the television on it. For a while, she sat on the couch, watching him connect wires. Then she went to the kitchen and took the vacuum cleaner from its box. She put it against the wall and leaned its pipes in the corner next to it and sat down to read the instructions. She looked at the illustrations and thought she was reading, but she was not. She was listening to Wayne in the living room: not to him, but to speakers sliding on the floor, the tapping touch of a screwdriver, and when she finished the pamphlet, she did not know what she had read. She put it in a drawer. Then, so that raising her voice would keep shyness from it, she called from the kitchen: "Can we go to Timmy's?"

"Don't you want to play with these?"

"No," she said. When he did not answer, she wished she had lied, and she felt again as she had in the department store when sorrow had enveloped her like a sudden cool breath from the television screens. She went into the living room and kneeled beside him, sitting on the floor, a speaker and wires between his legs; she nuzzled his cheek and said, "I'm sorry."

"I don't want to play with them, either. Let's go."

She got their coats and, as they were leaving, she stopped and looked back at the stereo and the television.

"Should we have bought it all in one place?" she said.

"It doesn't matter."

She hurried ahead of him down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, then her feet slipped forward and up and he caught her against his chest. She hooked her arm in his and they crossed the street and the parking lot; she looked to her left into the Sunnycorner, two men and a woman lined at the counter and Sally punching the register. She looked fondly at the warm light in there, the colors of magazine covers on the rack, the red soft-drink refrigerator, the long shelves of bread.

"What a hangover I had. And I didn't make any mistakes."

She walked fast, each step like flight from the apartment. They went through the lot of Chevrolet pickups, walking single file between the trucks, and now if she looked back, she would not be able to see their lawn; then past the broad-windowed showroom of new cars, and she thought of their--his--old Comet. Standing on the curb, waiting for a space in traffic, she tightly gripped his arm. They trotted across the street to Timmy's door and entered the smell of beer and smoke. Faces turned from the bar, some hands lifted in a wave. It was not ten o'clock yet, the dining room was just closing, and the people at the bar stood singly, not two or three deep like last night, and the tables in the rear were empty. McCarthy was working. Anna took her place at the corner and he said, "You make it to work at seven?"

"How did you know?"

"Oh, my God, I've got to be at work at seven; another tequila, Johnny."

She raised a hand to her laughter, and covered it.

"I made it. I made it and tomorrow I don't work till three, and I'm going to have two tequila salty dogs and that's all; then I'm going to bed."

Wayne ordered a shot of brandy and a draft, and when McCarthy went to the middle of the bar for the beer, she asked Wayne how much was left, though she already knew, or nearly did, and when he said about 220, she was ahead of his answer, nodding but paying no attention to the words, the numbers, seeing those strange visitors in their home, staring from the top of the chest, sitting on the kitchen floor; then McCarthy brought their drinks and went away, and she found on the bar the heart enclosing their initials that she and Wayne had carved, drinking one crowded night when McCarthy either did not see them or pretended not to.

"I don't want to feel bad," she said.

"Neither me."

"Let's don't. Can we get bicycles?"

"All of one and most of the other."

"Do you want one?"

"Sure. I need to get back in shape."

"Where can we go?"

"The Schwinn place."

"I mean riding."

"All over. When it thaws. There's nice roads everywhere. I know some trails in the woods and one of them goes to a pond. A big pond."

"We can go swimming."

"Sure."

"We should have bought a canoe."

"Instead of what?"

She was watching McCarthy make a torn collins and a gimlet.

"I don't know," she said.

"I guess we bought winter sports."

"Maybe we should have got a freezer and a lot of food. You know what's in the refrigerator?"

"You said you didn't want to feel bad."

"I don't."

"So don't."

"What about you?"

"I don't want to, either. Let's have another round and hang it up."

•

In the morning, she woke at six, not to an alarm but out of habit: her flesh alert, poised to dress and go to work, and she got up and went naked and shivering to the bathroom, then to the kitchen, where, gazing at the vacuum cleaner, she drank one of the glasses of milk. In the living room, she stood on the cold floor in front of the television and the stereo, hugging herself. She was suddenly tired, her first and false energy of the day gone, and she crept into bed, telling herself she could sleep now, she did not have to work till three, she could sleep: coaxing, as though her flesh were a small child wakened in the night. She stopped shivering, felt sleep coming upward from her legs; she breathed slowly with it, and escaped into it, away from memory of last night's striving flesh: she and Wayne, winter-pallid yet sweating in their long quiet coupled work at coming until they gave up and their fast dry breaths slowed and the Emmylou Harris album ended, the stereo clicked into the silence, a record dropped and Willie Nelson sang Stardust.

"I should have got some 'Ludes and Percs, too," he said.

Her hand found his on the sheet and covered it.

"I was too scared. It was bad enough waiting for the money. I kept waiting for somebody to come in and blow me away. Even him. If he'd had a gun, he could have. But I should have got some drugs."

"It wouldn't have mattered."

"We could have sold it."

"It wouldn't matter."

"Why?"

"There's too much to get. There's no way we could ever get it all."

"A lot of it, though. Some of it."

She rubbed the back of his hand, his knuckles, his nails. She did not know when he fell asleep. She slept two albums later, while Waylon Jennings sang. And slept now, deeply, in the morning, and woke when she heard him turning, rising, walking heavily out of the room.

She got up and made coffee and did not see him until he came into the kitchen wearing his one white shirt and one pair of blue slacks and the black shoes; he had bought them all in one store in 20 minutes of quiet anger, with money she gave him the day Wendy's hired him; he returned the money on his first payday. The toes of the shoes were scuffed now. She kept the shirt clean, some nights washing it in the sink when he came home and hanging it on a chair back near the radiator so he could wear it next day; he would not buy another one, because, he said, he hated spending money on something he didn't want.

When he left, carrying the boxes out to the dumpster, she turned last night's records over. She read the vacuum-cleaner pamphlet, joined the dull silver pipes and white hose to the squat and round blue tank and stepped on its switch. The cord was long and she did not have to change it to an outlet in another room; she wanted to remember to tell Wayne it was funny that the cord was longer than their place. She finished quickly and turned it off and could hear the records again.

She lay on the couch until the last record ended, then got the laundry bag from the bedroom and soap from the kitchen, and left. On the sidewalk, she turned around and looked up at the front of the building, old and green in the snow and against the blue glare of the sky. She scraped the car's glass and drove to the laundry: two facing rows of machines, moist warm air, gurgling rumble and whining spin of washers, resonant clicks and loud hiss of driers, and put in clothes and soap and coins. At a long table, women smoked and read magazines, and two of them talked as they shook crackling electricity from clothes they folded. Anna took a small wooden chair from the table and sat watching the round window of the machine, watched her clothes and Wayne's tossing past it, like children waving from a Ferris wheel.

"A Buck hunting knife was under Wayne's leather jacket, unsheathed and held against his body."

"He went around the counter and took out the knife and held it at the druggist's stomach."