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one act of alteration, and examine drawers and closets.
    But there was nothing left of hers except a closet of empty hangers wrapped in yarn, cloth flowers entwining the crooks. And empty bureau drawers; his dingy clothes all in one shallow top drawer. Under pajamas never out of their wrappers, she found a pistol but jerked away from it. The chill on its handle like the cold of all inanimate metal. She recalled the shed, the gloom of all the closed factories lining her route here.
    She drank in everything, you know. Her father wouldn’t have been a bit surprised; her mother, always out of mind, would have been properly scandalized. Her fellow workers remarked on her calm. Someone thought she was pregnant; impossible given the impossibility of such from the small soft penis she only cupped as he told her about the drowned boy at Inchon; the brother who’d stolen his girl when they were teenagers and who lived for thirty years in a VA hospital because he lay down on the outskirts of Metz and refused to advance or retreat, to take any further actions against the enemy.
    Madelaine Woo said, “You look tired,” and they both saw her face left unpampered. The emollients, placentas, balms of tarragon, and avocadoes at home in the empty house.
    She took herself a history. She forgot Ms. Bojangles in the far room living off mice and quickly forgetting about people. The boy at Inchon became her lover. The penis in her hand swelled in her mind and took her so huge it filled her anus too. Sometimes she moaned as Mr. Warrant talked. At puzzletime she brought out yellowed ones she had found and carefully erased. So that the answers were references to men and events thirty years ago. Mr. Warrant was surprised because he thought everyone had forgotten. “My God,” he’d say. “Nancy, look at this. Nancy, see here?”
    She moved more slowly. Sensuous; she’s practicing for something, someone, they’d said at the office. She dropped out of fashion but they all opened their mouths in excitement. She is beautiful, they all agreed. She is magnificent. Her hips are perfect. A delicious soufflé.
    In the mirror she examined her face. She scrubbed away the makeup. She had passed a point somewhere recently, she knew. Once, without it, she was a child, a featureless girl. But now she was almost eyebrowless and a painful plain. I’m this way now. Belonging to this mirror and this unsalable place. I do my work, but I move more slowly. I think, but often I am there waiting for twilight and the absence of his body. I have always had the passion of pursuit, so I’ll pursue this. All of this. This isn’t… she remembered. But now nodded at these eyes in the mirror and said “Yes, it is” out loud.
    She discovered the cat and called it Ms. Bojangles again. She abandoned the plates high in the dark towering cabinets to all the up wafting grease. She cut her hair too short. They were surprised. Her father slammed into the treetops in 1969 and wished her luck, never thought of his wife, cried out a moment before dissolution at his daughter’s terrible purposefulness which could always give pain.
    And here’s the contrast: As limbs whipped the metal to shreds, he only wanted to live. And live everything again at once—to be her age, younger, older, older than anyone he’d ever met. Be an ancient man protected from harm on a screened porch. The very last thought the amorphous face, constantly changing in some movie he’d seen once.
    But not Nancy, not now. Now she came to Mr. Warrant’s and fried foods, worked puzzles, watched TV, lay next to his minute body, her own body more weightless from not soaking in herbed butters and comfit of womb of lamb.
    What is she doing? they began to wonder. Did you notice too? And Madelaine Woo nodded her flat moon face like the affirmation of an Asian goddess. Her clothes aren’t straightened. And no one but the two “gopher”