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to let on.
    At the end was a long passage about getting out and being with her again at “home.”
    Home. Her eyes blurred and the tiny room came into her head.
    It was a dirty little room in an SRO just where Little Italy turned into Chinatown. There was an old Murphy bed that wheezed when it was pulled out, and made a clanging, squealing racket when you lay on it. A cheap rug, so filthy you could barely make out the large tea-rose pattern, was spread out over most of the floor. The rest was an odd floral linoleum, cracked in places where wooden floorboards shone through.
    A half-pint refrigerator that never worked sat in a closet. On top of that was an old Waterman stove and oven which had no controls on it and smelled of leaking gas. You just lit the stove with a match and prayed there’d be no explosion.
    The oven had two settings, burned and raw.
    Mostly she remembered a window with a yellowed pull-down fabric shade that overlooked a rectangle of backyards. The rectangle was divided up into boxes by gray wooden fences, some half-falling down. Streamers of laundry hung across the entirety of it, and from the window, especially during the summer, you could hear the noises from all the buildings. Opera played, women shouted gossip across the buildings, children played and hollered in the dirt below—occasionally there was the sound of a saxophonist practicing.
    In winter, when the window was shut, all was quiet except for the hiss from a radiator that sat beneath the sill. She used to lie across the Murphy bed and stare out that window, for when the bed was opened, there was really no room to walk, and so she liked to imagine that it was a large, luxurious window seat, or a boat. And when she imagined it was a boat, she would roll up a newspaper to use as her telescope, and she would roll back and forth, just enough to hear the springs creak beneath her, and she’d imagine the boat was rocking.
    Had she really been that young? So young that she was still playing childhood make-believe games as she was lying naked, waiting for him?
    She closed her eyes at the memory of the warm feeling of fullness in her hips as she rode the bus home to her parents’ apartment on the afternoons she had made love to Arthur.
    Arthur.
    They had been happy.… Until Dottie spent an afternoon at her younger cousin’s wedding. She had listened to the toasts and talk of babies, and a honeymoon, and suddenly it seemed of the utmost importance, to stand up in front of a church full of people and let everyone know that this was the person for you. It made it important. It made it honest, so you didn’t have to sneak off after work and walk past all the winos and the derelicts, and slink up the stairs of some sleazy SRO, avoiding the manager’s lecherous grins and winks. They deserved better than that, for what they had. It was the first time she let it matter to her, not having a wedding ring on her finger.
    And when she was back in Arthur’s room, she’d ripped the fancy wedding clothes off, crawled into bed, and wept. She had ached to bring Arthur around to have dinner with her family—her parents, her brothers, their wives and children—but she knew what would happen. The first thing they’d ask is what Arthur did for a living. What could he say? I’m locksmith’s assistant? At his age? That was another thing she’d brushed under the rug. How come someone as smart as Arthur was nothing more than a shop assistant?
    She knew her brothers and father would glance back and forth at one another and shake their heads. That would be just the beginning; it would get worse. Then would come the questions about his education.
    She could just see the look on her mother’s face when he told them he’d dropped out of school in the ninth grade. And even though Dottie thought that what Arthur had accomplished was admirable, her family wouldn’t see it that way. All they’d see was