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choosers.”
    “Beggars should be no choosers,” said Ruth.
    “ Beggars can’t be is the phrase,” said crisp, corrective Frida.
    “Yes, I know.” Ruth laughed at herself. “I was saying the original version, it’s sixteenth century, the phrase our phrase was born from. Imagine that—already a cliché four hundred years ago.”
    Frida’s brows elevated her hairline. “Is that the kind of thing you taught your students?”
    “It is, actually,” said Ruth. She was proud of herself for remembering. She felt she could have lifted her arms and recited the days of the week nine or ten times; or perhaps she would only chant, over and over, Ineligible for public housing .
    Frida, however, was unimpressed; it showed in the delicate angle of her chin. She gave a small sniff. Ruth found it almost sisterly.
    “Well, Mrs. Field,” Frida said.
    Ruth, not for the first time, said, “Oh, call me Ruth, please.”
    “One hour a day isn’t going to be enough, all things considered. I’m going to recommend you’re increased to three. That’s nine until twelve, and if you like, I’ll stay another half an hour to make you lunch. That’s if you can bring yourself to put up with my clichés.”
    Ruth was contrite now. She loved Frida’s clichés; she loved the way Frida believed them; she loved how believable they were. I’m a show-off, she thought, but the lift remained in her lungs.
    “All right,” she said, and that was Ruth agreeing to three hours, and an extra half an hour for lunch.
    “Good,” said Frida. She seemed to have been made shy by something. Then she said, “I like that name. Ruth.”
    Frida relaxed over lunch. She made Ruth a ham sandwich and, at Ruth’s insistence, boiled herself an egg and ate it from a Mickey Mouse eggcup over which Phillip and Jeffrey used to fight. As she ate, she explained the requirements of her strict diet, which was the result of her having been much heavier than she was now.
    “My whole family’s big,” she said. “Big-boned.” She sipped at the spoon with which she scooped the egg. “Mum and Dad are gone, and my sister Shelley, too—all big, though, and when Shell died, I said to myself, ‘Frida, it’s time to make a change.’ That’s when I lived in Perth. I did my training out there, in Perth. And I said, ‘Frida, it’s now or never.’”
    These lunchtime revelations were almost boastful: Frida was like an evangelist describing her conversion from the pulpit of her born-again body. “I wrote a letter to food, telling it all the wrong it’d done me,” she said. “Then I demanded a divorce. I had a certificate made up—a friend of mine, a girl I worked with, did it on the computer. Then I signed it, and that was that.”
    “Goodness,” said Ruth.
    “And look at me now!” said Frida, presenting her sizable self with a flourish of her palms.
    “But you do eat?”
    “Of course. You don’t leave a marriage with nothing, do you? I took some things with me—healthy stuff. Everything else I was divorced from, so I just had to forget about it. There’s that thing when you break up with someone and you hate him like poison but sometimes you just want to touch his shoulder, you know? Or hold his hand.”
    Ruth tried to imagine Frida holding someone’s hand; she could just about manage it.
    “But even if you want to, you can’t. That’s divorce,” said Frida. It’s death, too, thought Ruth. “And then you forget. There are things I couldn’t even tell you how they taste. Ask me how something tastes.”
    “I don’t know. Lettuce,” said Ruth.
    “I’m allowed lettuce. I took lettuce. Ask me something else. Ask me about ice cream.”
    “All right. How does ice cream taste?”
    “I don’t remember!” said Frida. “That’s divorce.”
    Ruth was enchanted by Frida’s divorce; she wanted to telephone everyone she knew and tell them all about it. But who was there to call? Phillip was never home, or she hadn’t calculated the time difference