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and stunning with perfect long chestnut hair. I knew her a little, through company Christmas parties, and we stopped to say hello. She gave me a good hard look.
    “What is it?” she asked. She peered at me with huge brown eyes, now ugly and accusatory.
    “What’s what?”
    “You. Did you get work done?”
    “Work?”
    “An eye lift or something. Or maybe your teeth. You look different.”
    “Huh.” I looked at myself in a mirror across from us. A mirror behind us was reflected into the first and I saw a fun-house, an infinite number of mirrors, each with a picture of me. I did look different; as if I had had a good night’s sleep, or even a year’s worth of good nights. My skin was bright and my eyes shiny. My whole face was plumped up, all the little lines of thirty-four smooth as satin.
    “I know,” said Bernadette, “you’reregnant!”
    I rubbed my eyes and shook my head and then looked back at the mirror. My own true face, a little haggard, now looked back at me. Bernadette frowned.
    “New haircut?” she ventured, less sure of herself now.
    “Just a trim,” I said. “Must be the weather. This humidity, it’s always good for my skin.”

     
    WHEN I got out of the train station that evening the German shepherd was waiting as usual, sitting quietly as I’d trained him to do. The routine was he wouldn’t stand up to give me a kiss (the one untoward act I allowed him) until I had given him his first biscuit. I went to the corner where he sat waiting. Usually his tail would be wagging by now and there would be a big drooling smile on his face. But he sat, moping, as if I hadn’t shown up at all. He looked away from me and then right through me. I took a biscuit, shaped like a cartoon bone, out of my purse and held it out to him.
    He sniffed at the biscuit and looked up at me with his big watery eyes, but he didn’t take it. Instead he stiffened his back and shoulders and snarled at me, baring a row of yellow plaque-covered teeth. I dropped the biscuit and ran home.
    When Ed got home I told him what had happened.
    “Well,” he said, “I told you not to mess around with strays.”
    Ed didn’t believe that just because something was alive, that meant you had to love it.
     

 
    I didn’t OBSESS ABOUT the incident with the cigarette. I didn’t make much of the book. Ed had forgotten easily enough. So I’d twitched. I’d slipped. I’d spasmed. It was summer and with the sun so bright it was hard to think about demons, hard to think about pain.
    But two weeks later, at the Fitzgerald house, I had a little twitch again.
    I had decided to become an architect when I was twenty. I had moved to the city when I was eighteen, to go to college, and I started with a major in art. I was in love—with my school, with the city, with the snow. I had come from a southern suburb where every star was brightly visible at night and the thermometer never dropped below fifty. I had spent eighteen years in continual boredom. Then when I was twenty my father and Noreen had died and left me nothing. Everything that could have and should have been mine had been eaten up by Noreen’s fur coats and facial treatments. I went through the labyrinthine process of applying for financial aid and as part of the deal, got a job in the Department of Architecture office. One thing I noticed about the architects was that they dressed a hell of a lot better than the art professors. And they drove better cars. And they seemed a lot more likely to have spouses and even children, too. So I switched to the architecture program. After graduation I worked for one of my professors for a year, then moved to a big firm for a few years where I never even met three of the four partners, and then on to Fields & Carmine, where I had been for the past three years.
    The Fitzgerald house was my largest project to date. I had high hopes; if all went according to plan I had a chance at an A.I.A. award and maybe a spread in Design Monthly, plus