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had to manage. Now you manage. Rub your nose in it good."
But from those years she had had to manage, old humiliations and terrors rose up, lived again, and forced her to relive them. The children's needings; that grocer's face or this merchant's wife she had had to beg credit from when credit was a disgrace; the scenery of the long blocks walked around when she could not pay; school coming, and the desperate going over the old to see what could yet be remade; the soups of meat bones begged "for-the-dog" one winter....
Enough. Now they had no children. Let him wrack his head for how they would live. She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.
For in this solitude she had won to a reconciled peace.
Tranquillity from having the empty house no longer an enemy, for it stayed cleannot as in the days when it was her family, the life in it, that had seemed

 

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the enemy: tracking, smudging, littering, dirtying, engaging her in endless defeating battleand on whom her endless defeat had been spewed.
The few old books, memorized from rereading; the pictures to ponder (the magnifying glass superimposed on her heavy eyeglasses). Or if she wishes, when he is gone, the phonograph, that if she turns up very loud and strains, she can hear: the ordered sounds and the struggling.
Out in the garden, growing things to nurture. Birds to be kept out of the pear tree, and when the pears are heavy and ripe, the old fury of work, for all must be canned, nothing wasted.
And her once social duty (for she will not go to luncheons or meetings) the boxes of old clothes left with her, as with a life-practised eye for finding what is still wearable within the worn (again the magnifying glass superimposed on the heavy glasses) she scans and sortsthis for rag or rummage, that for mending and cleaning, and this for sending away.
Being able at last to live within, and not move to the rhythms of others, as life had forced her to: denying; removing; isolating; taking the children one by one; then deafening, half-blindingand at last, presenting her solitude.
And in it she had won to a reconciled peace.
Now he was violating it with his constant campaigning: Sell the house and move to the Haven. (You sit, you sitthere too you could sit like a stone.) He was making of her a battleground where old grievances tore. (Turn on your ear buttonI am talking.) And stubbornly she resistedso that from wheedling, reasoning, manipulation, it was bitterness he now started with.

 

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And it came to where every happening lashed up a quarrel.
''I will sell the house anyway," he flung at her one night. "I am putting it up for sale. There will be a way to make you sign."
The television blared, as always it did on the evenings he stayed home, and as always it reached her only as noise. She did not know if the tumult was in her or outside. Snap! she turned the sound off. "Shadows," she whispered to him, pointing to the screen, "look, it is only shadows." And in a scream: "Did you say that you will sell the house? Look at me, not at that. I am no shadow. You cannot sell without me."
"Leave on the television. I am watching."
"Like Paulie, like Jenny, a four-year-old. Staring at shadows. You cannot sell the house."
"I will. We are going to the Haven. There you would not hear the television when you do not want it. I could sit in the social room and watch. You could lock yourself up to smell your unpleasantness in a room by yourselffor who would want to come near you?"
"No, no selling." A whisper now.
"The television is shadows. Mrs. Enlightened! Mrs. Cultured! A world comes into your houseand it is shadows. People you would never meet in a thousand lifetimes. Wonders. When you were four years old, yes, like Paulie, like Jenny, did you know of Indian dances, alligators, how they use bamboo in Malaya? No, you scratched in your dirt with the chickens and thought Olshana * was the world. Yes, Mrs. Unpleasant, I