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pained expression aggravated her. “I have many friends,” she said, because she pitied him.
    She listened to him describe the end of her life and what she should expect her friends to do for her. Then Ginger had to stop him. She told the secretary that her checkbook was in the car and left the office without paying the bill.
    S HE TRIED TO COME UP WITH A GRAND SCHEME THAT WOULD PAY for her future care, but her thoughts were not so ordered, and each day, she lost something: the word for lemons, the name of her street. Peering out her window at the lamplights that pierced the blue darkness in her apartment complex, she imagined befriending one of her neighbors, but her neighbors were flighty college dropouts, working odd hours, absent, uninterested in her. Ginger did not want to die in a hospital or an institution. Dying in this apartment would mean that she would not be discovered for days; the idea of her body lifeless, and worse, helpless, was intolerable.
    She was watching television one evening when she saw an ad for a Carnival cruise. Many years ago she had sat with a man in an airport bar. He had been left by his wife of thirty-six years and was joking about killing himself on a cruise ship. “Someone finds you,” he said, on his third bourbon, “A maid, another passenger. Quickly. It’s more dignified. You don’t just rot.”
    He was on his way to the Caribbean, desperately festive in his red vacation shirt festooned with figures of tropical birds. “What an interesting idea,” she had said, lightly, deciding that it was time for a game of poker; she got out her rigged cards. When he stumbled off two hours later, she was $150 richer and certain she would never be that hopeless.
    Before she went on her cruise, she wanted to buy a beautiful purse with which to hold the last of her money. Three public buses roaring over the oily freeways led her to the accessories counter at Saks. The red purse sat on the counter like a glowing light. It wassimple, a deep red with a rhinestone clasp; when she saw it, she felt her breath freeze in her throat. The salesgirl told her that it was on hold for someone.
    â€œIt’s mine,” said Ginger, her fingers pressing so hard on the glass counter they turned white.
    Perhaps it was the hoarse pitch of her voice, or the pity of the salesgirl toward the elderly, but the salesgirl let her buy the purse. In it, Ginger put her cash and also two bottles of sleeping pills. The Caribbean was sold out this time of year, so she spent most of her remaining money on a cruise to Alaska.
    S HE WOKE UP EARLY THE FIRST MORNING OF THE CRUISE, RESTLESS , trying to remember everything she had ever known. The facts of her life flurried in her head: names of hotel restaurants, the taste of barbecue in Texas versus Georgia, the aqua chiffon dress she had worn at a cocktail party in 1959. She sat at the table scribbling notes on a pad: Fake furs on Hollywood Blvd., 1966 cloudy, blue fur hats from the rare Blue Hyena from Alaska, lemon meringue pie at the cafeteria on W. 37th St., New York, 1960s, the seagulls flying on the empty Santa Monica beach at dawn, how much money I made a year, $37,000 from Dr. Chamron in 1977—
    Magnolia in Los Angeles , she wrote. She remembered the scent of magnolia as she and Evelyn stepped off the train in Los Angeles when she was fifteen years old. She remembered her sister Evelyn’s walk—Evelyn just seventeen then—her walk her first successful con; stepping hard onto her feet, shoulders lifted, she tricked Ginger into believing that she knew what to do. It was 1936, and they walked off the train into Los Angeles, two girls alone, armed with an address for an aunt they would never meet.
    Finally, Ginger’s hand ached and she put down her pen. Scribbling her room number on a paper, she put it in her purse andwalked to lunch. She went carefully around the naked ice sculptures of David or Venus that rose, melting, out