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had no profile; it had been punched flat. From close contact with these women, Carmen herself had acquired a bleaker gaze, a twitchy pulse at the hinge of her jaw.
    Her presence at marches and demos worried Alice a little, but there was really nothing she could say. Getting in the way of what was wrong or wicked or unjust in the world was pretty much Carmen’s main point. She was in firm solidarity with the oppressed and downtrodden. She still hoped America was on its way to becoming a socialist state with homes and health care and higher education for everyone. She saw Communism as a flawed but fascinating social experiment. In college she went on cultural visas to Cuba and Russia. She made a game try at learning Russian out of an old textbook that primarily gave her a stockpile of useless phrases like “I love to smoke cigarettes at the factory.”
    Carmen was Clark Kent, traveling incognito as a social worker and middle-class mother, but always with cheese crackers and a bail card in her purse, ready to spring into action. Because of all this, Carmen was the most important person Alice knew.
    A riptide of guilt tugged Alice down. She should take one of the buttons and go along with Carmen and Jean. Although Carmen wasn’t pressing (she wouldn’t), Alice knew her presence would be appreciated to fill out the ranks. But she also knew from a flickering look Maude gave her a few minutes earlier, and a quick glance of knuckles acrossnipple (Maude’s knuckles, Alice’s nipple) in the kitchen earlier when they were getting the Cokes, that if she backgrounded the issue of women’s safety, and stayed here after Carmen and Gabe left, she could spend the stretched end of this Saturday naked with Maude. And the thing was, she didn’t know how many of these Saturdays they had left.
    That night Maude pushed Alice home in a grocery cart full of still-warm, clean clothes. Although Alice lived in a former laundry, she nonetheless had to take her clothes to a laundromat. Maude would bring her stuff over and they’d make a night of it. They found the cart in their alley months ago. One would push the other on the way over to the laundromat, the other pushed on the way home. There was a terrible bar next door. A windowless den sour with old beer, sweet with urine and disinfectant, its clientele mainly retirees with hospital hair, pressed flat to the backs of their heads from lying down through the hours they weren’t in the bar. Alice and Maude grabbed a booth near the front in case a stumbly fight broke out, which happened often enough. They had a couple of beers interrupted by runs to add fabric softener and throw the clothes in the dryer. They talked about everything and nothing, questioned each other with a casual invasiveness, assassins trying to learn everything essential about their victim before the kill.
    And then they headed home. This particular night, sunk in clean clothes that smelled like synthetic flowers, the night air whooshing lightly over her face, a low buzz inside her head from the beers, Alice understood that what they had—this amalgam of passion and chatter and tearing their way inside each other—was defined by its transience. This was the thing that wouldn’t last. Losing Maude would be Alice’s punishment. All of her present with Maude was made excruciatingly valuable in this way, for being tinted with the sure sorrow held by the future. The pure, acidic penance she had earned.
    As they passed the old guy bar, the pay phone in its doorway began to ring, and Alice had a brief, illogical moment of certainty that the call was for her.

general relativity
    The phone had been ringing for maybe five minutes. No one but Nick appeared to hear it. No one made a move to answer. Incoming calls were tricky for the Lisowskis. Most likely the caller was a dunning bill collector. Olivia’s family was an epicenter of credit card frivolity. They were also, at the moment, distracted by a Packers game on the TV in the