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the bench. From time to time she turned to keep it in sight. Leaving the bench was for her a foray. The bench was home base. She could venture halfway down the block, keeping the knapsack in sight, before turning back. The knapsack was for saving her place on the bench. Could one “save a place” on a public bench? She couldn’t remember. Soon it was possible for her to observe people as well as clothes. Though she could still not be certain of their ages, she began to notice that there were two kinds of people. There were those who had plans, whose eyes and movements were aimed toward a future, and those who did not. Some youngish people, that is, between twenty and thirty-five, sat on the sidewalk in silence. Though they sat or lay in relaxed positions, time did not seem to pass easily for them. They looked as if they had gone to great lengths to deal with the problem of time and had not succeeded. They were waiting. What were they waiting for?
    Another group of people, older and better dressed, stood at the window of a real estate office looking at photographs of homes for sale, mountain cabins, expensive condominiums. They talked, took notes, compared prices. Their eyes glistened. In their expressions she could see the pleasure of the prospect of moving, of the exhaustion of the possibilities of an old place and the opening of the possibilities of a new place. Perhaps they lived in places like Richmond or Atlanta or Washington. Undoubtedly they had plans to buy a mountain cabin for vacations or a condominium for retirement. They had plans and the plans took up their time.
    It was as if she belonged to both groups. It was not clear which was better off or which she would join if she had the chance. It seemed that she had plans for the immediate future, but she didn’t know what to do with the rest of her life.
    The old tightness came back and clenched under her diaphragm. She turned back to the bench. For her, too, it was a question of time. What would she do with time? Was there something she was supposed to do?
    Her body was sore. Her arms and legs hurt, one side of her jaw was swollen, her ribs felt as if she had taken a beating. But there was also the feeling that she was over the worst of it. Perhaps, she thought, it was like the pain one feels after being in a fight and winning. It was the kind of soreness the sun cures. The bench and her position on the bench had been arranged so that the morning sunlight hit the sore parts of her body. She felt like a snake stretched out on a rock in the sun, shedding its skin after a long hard winter.
    Her hands were open on her knees. She turned them over. There were fingernail marks in both palms, not severe enough to break the skin but deep enough to cause bruising. They were the sort of marks one might make waiting a long time, fists clenched, for something frightening to happen.
    At that moment something inside her relaxed. A muscle, which had been clenched so long she had forgotten it, suddenly unclenched. It let go and she closed her eyes and took a breath of air into a new part of her lungs.
    It became possible, she noticed, to look at things rather than watch out for things. A line of ants crawled past her foot. She picked out one ant which carried a neatly cutout section of a green leaf, holding it vertically aloft like a sail, and followed it as it made its way over the coarse granules of the sidewalk. As the sun warmed her, she studied the clothes of the passersby. Many people, she noticed, seemed to dress as they pleased. Nobody paid much attention. Had this always been the case? Surely it had been different the last time she was in a street, one, two, three years ago.
    What year was it? Nineteen seventy-nine? eighty? eighty what?
    The sidewalk was crowded. When she made her forays, she was afraid of running into someone. Then she realized that she was not accustomed to seeing people going somewhere or doing something. It seemed more natural for people