“
She was a woman of punctual life-tides, ate right, had suffered at all the right hands. She had a drafty manner and jewelry that tailed off asymmetrically from her ears in a show of what looked like sugar. She had been grossing all this great, capering beauty for something like twenty-six years. We did the giveaway pharmaceuticals of the season. We went out with her friends, busy-headed kids her own age, to crack up over menu English. I loved her sundrily and all at once.
There was, to start, the givenness of her bare arms, and legs you could pick out of a dress and follow all the way down to the pewtery hue of the toenails.
Her face offered destiny, remedy, decision.
Childhood, teenhood, were still refrigerating inside her. I could make out the timid din of who she had already been, a hum of harm hardly done.
The question put to me by distrusters was: “What is she doing with you?” I was swift to answer: stapling personal papers together, breathing providently in her broad-hearted sleep, bearing junk mail straight from the mailbox to the trash cans in front of her building.
”
