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come in, so everyone has to shift their positions and recalculate their vectors of conversation.
    Outside the sky continues to darken, and the leaves on the ground get panicky in the gusting wind. From some of the classrooms the girls looking out the windows can see the sugar maple in the courtyard bending over and the gray light coming through its branches. The girls closest to the windows can actually lean over and look up into the sky to where the shadows are forming—and these are the girls who first suspect that something is coming.

chapter 5
    L ater that afternoon, when the clouds come down hard with rain and the gutters in the street begin to fill, the people on the sidewalks hunch themselves beneath umbrellas and look down at their own feet. Everything now is destination: What is the shortest way to get where I have to go? What corners can I cut? What is the quickest way for me to be inside and out of this wetness that gets into my cuffs?
    There are no voices in the rain—just footsteps and car horns, and the sounds of the downpour off building ledges and store awnings and aluminum gutters, the slippery squeak of rubber soles on subway grates. The water gets underneath your clothes, like ants in your collar or crawling up your legs. The moisture like insects on your skin. If this is what guilt felt like, Binhammer thinks, the constant awareness of your own itching skin, then ours would be a sinless society.
    The store windows along Madison Avenue are lit, dull yellow candles running the length of the street, stubborn little sanctuaries against the harshness outside. In one of these windows three mannequin women stand in postures of haughty defiance, leaning back with their loins pushed forward aggressively, their heads turned lazily to the side so that even if those eyes had pupils they would still be empty, their hands at their hips or, in one case, raised in a careless shrug, as though she were turned to stone at the very moment she was shooing away the fawning kindness of a man infinitely inferior to her. She makes men shrivel up with that white skin, with those white eyes, and those white lips that never smile.
    Binhammer stands underneath the awning of the store, staring through the glass at the three women as though they were weaving, measuring, and cutting the paltry string of his fate. He has forgotten to bring an umbrella, and now, about five minutes into his walk home, he’s trapped in this tiny shelter while the rain comes down in ferocious sidelong bursts. He jams his hands deeper into the pockets of his coat and, because it will be impossible to catch a cab now, decides to wait it out.
    He stares at the pale gorgons in the window. They are women of machinelike beauty and deadly precision. When he was a boy, shopping in the department stores with his mother, he would fantasize about taking one of the mannequins home with him and setting her up in the corner of his room. She would come to life and tell him what to do, stiff-armed and barking orders with military efficiency. She would do this without any clothes on. And now, even as a grown man, he finds himself spellbound by these three snow-pale women with their smart outfits of brown and cream.
    These women. These goddamn women. There is always something else behind those blank white non-eyes—another fiber of weakness like a golden thread you will carry for them in your pocket. And when you are carrying it all, all these bushels and bushels of weakness, it’s then you discover that it was your weakness all along. That what you’re carrying is only the unraveled heap of your own clothing.
    Didn’t you know? they say, as you stand there naked. I thought you knew. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
    Repeated three times. Like a curse. Or an incantation.
    They are women of chalk, these mannequin women. They are like the chalk that gets all over your fingers at school. The chalk that gets into your fingerprints.
    Earlier that day he went looking