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is now, when the town goes home for supper, to kitchens that smell of vegetables and grease.
    At a construction site, workmen are busy dropping canvas sheets over slabs of fresh cement, and one of them is whistling. He doesn’t look at her. She hesitates where the two towns meet, near the hospital she has never been inside, hesitates between the road that follows the lake and the main street, at this unsettled hour when the street is emptying before its new activity begins, between the movie houses and the hotels. In this unaccustomed light of day the store fronts look greenish, and she feels unable to move, as in those dreams in which you’re paralysed and objects are cast far away. Between the beauty parlour and Sally’s Fashion, a distorting mirror makes her head longer, languid. She shakes herself, she’s not one of those women who will push a baby carriage from street to street, from sale to sale, from season to season.
    Of that she is certain. The bus-truck arrives from the north, by chance, and she is about to board it when she sees a woman come out the constantly swinging door of the Radio Grill, then knee her way into the restaurant next door. Under a red plastic raincoat the shoulders are square, it is she. And it’s like listening to her talk. Marie tries for a closer look through the grease-streaked window that hides her now, but the bus driver, impatient, has started up.
    She turns her back, sits on the long seat in front with two old women who will get off soon, at the old folks’ home — it is already late — and she pulls her collar tighter. She is as cold as these old women probably are, who go from shelter to shelter. She has chosen to go home and that reminds her of the past when she would retch on her way home from Mass, moving from incense to the smell of roasting meat, having had nothing to drink but a long gulp of sun. Her nail polish is flaking onto her paper bag; the old ladies clutch their purses. Marie will disembark after they do, three stops later.

Seven
    T HE TREMOY ROAD IS FULL OF CARS draped with garlands, and on the only steps that cross the low wall a bride descends into the middle of the park. She is thin and glaucous, the hem of her gown droops around her ankles, stops at white stockings in low-cut ivory shoes. Rayon over nylon over satin, thinks Marie, an inventory of poverty; she looks for the bridegroom and finds behind the crinolines a little man squeezed into a powder-blue suit, with pleated lapels. She wishes them naked, against the ash tree where they’ll be photographed, the girl lying on the mangy midsummer grass, her belly offered to the pigeons seeking company, the boy adding cigarette butts to those already lying around her satin shoes. The bodies of both would remain cold.
    The dog salivates in his sleep, and grinds his teeth. Marie knows why she has brought him back here, why she sits in the same place, knows what she has been waiting for since the sun passed noon. The same warmth, the same understanding of things. The bridal couple will leave again, after exchanging fish-kisses, and it will be three o’clock, the hour when the day begins to wane.
    In her black slacks again, and a flowered blouse with a halter neckline, Corrine has come along the Tremoy Road, too, and she is laughing. She bends over the drinking fountain, which is stained like a latrine, source of disease and forbidden to children, and the water that gushes up is almost silver. “Want some?” She presses the lever and it’s an order. Marie hardly dares to hold back her hair as she slips beneath the other woman’s shadow. Her throat is still dry, she has barely drunk, she all but trembles. Corrine laughs. “I’ve got something to tell you.” As if she knew her. The dog follows. It’s their first date.
    They cross the park, leave its few patches of shadow, and go to sit on one of the sharp-edged rocks by the side of the lake, rippled today