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bus driver in Albany. The command became part of her childhood litany. ‘Drop me off, drop me off, drop me off at the river,’ she sang, standing on their veranda. Maud watched her mother come toward the house, her face a puffy canvas of weariness, the white strip of her uniform showing from the bottom of her coat. She took her fingers out of her mouth to wait for the sound of the key in the door. The house atmosphere felt less cosy once her mother was home. The air grew crisp and taut, strung tight by the knowledge Maud had that she was not part of her mother’s duty. In a rush Maud put on her union suit and then tried to press over its stiffened legs the cotton stockings that were still damp and yellow from yesterday. Still wearing her heavy coat and the crocheted hat that covered her ears and tied under her chin, her mother came upstairs. ‘Hi there, little Beastie,’ she said, and helped her on with her middy blouse and black tie, two sweaters and the leggings that buttoned up the sides of her legs, covering the instep of her shoes. Always her mother asked her if she had washed, and often Maud lied and said, ‘Yes, I did.’
    They went downstairs together to a breakfast of rolled oats left in the double boiler by Spencer and the remains of the dinner biscuits spread with colorless margarine. Maud tried to swallow some of the icy, almost crystallized milk her mother kept in a cold box on the back porch. She loved to watch her mother undress in the kitchen, standing over the floor outlet to the gas furnace. Florence hung her uniform behind the dining room curtains above her white shoes, putting wooden sticks, like small curved arrows, into them.
    â€˜Now I need my sleep,’ Florence told Maud as she pulled and pushed her galoshes on for her, locking the metal fasteners all the way up over the leggings and clipping her mittens to her coat sleeves. For years Maud could feel the nasty pinch under her chin of the elastic band on her felt hat. Maud took her sled from the back porch, where Florence waited for her, loaded on it her tin pail and shovel, a set of assorted chipped dishes, burned pots and old baking pans. From the snow piles she made pies and cakes, ice soup and granular alabaster roasts with potatoes. She listened for her mother to snap the door lock behind her, trying hard not to cry; she hated to be put out every morning in this way. Outside, the air turned hostile and inhospitable. She played alone out there, with only the elusive Flo to talk to until Spencer came home for lunch and pounded on the back door to wake their mother.
    Often, before he came, Maud wanted to be let in, to show her mother the culinary snow marvels she had concocted, or to go to the bathroom. She grew hungry and wanted some biscuits, even a drink of frosty milk. But there was no way to be let in, she understood that. Upstairs, until noon, her mother slept heavily, her rest after the duty guaranteed by the locked door. Maud stayed on the porch, her snow cuisine finished, pestering Flo when she could catch her, sometimes crying to herself, watching for Spencer’s plaid coat. Every day, as rescue from the opened door drew close, she breathed in the spiced fumes of pee that rose up from her woolen underwear. She felt its warmth in the soles of her galoshes, and watched small dollops of it soak into the bare porch boards.
    Maud’s father, Joseph Noon, was a middle-aged noncommissioned officer in the supply corps of the United States Army. Proudly sewn to his left sleeve were seven slanted gold dashes representing his many years of service. Maud liked the name for this embroidery, ‘hash marks.’ She made a poem: ‘Hash marks on the sleeve/Khaki cloth and yellow weave/Father’s time is called a leave.’
    Sergeant Noon came home on holidays and one weekend every month. When Maud was older he took his annual leave in September to give his wife time off for her vacation. Most of his pay was