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few layers of her own accord. On the evenings of her bad days, when Simon came in for supper, he had a habit of reaching across the table and pinching her overall strap to see how many other straps lay beneath it. It was his way of asking how she was doing. If Janie was feeling all right by then she would just giggle at him, and he would laugh. But other days she jumped when he touched her and hunched up hershoulders, and then Simon would say nothing and fix all his attention on supper.
    Out in the parlor now Joan heard the squeaking of leather as Simon rose, and the sound of his shoes across the scatter rug. She stopped in the act of closing the box and waited, silently; his footsteps came closer, and then he appeared in the doorway. “Hey, Joan,” he said. There was something white on his face.
    “Hey.”
    He looked at the cardboard boxes without changing expression, and then he went over to the bed and sat down, picking up the teddy bear in one hand. “Hey, Ernest,” he said. He laid Ernest face down across his lap, circling the bear’s neck with one hand, and leaned forward to watch Joan.
    “I’m packing things away,” she told him.
    “Well, I see you are.”
    She folded the flaps of the box down, one corner over another so as to lock them, and then stood up and pushed the box toward the closet. “Some of your things’re on the shelves there,” she told Simon while she was opening the closet door. The box grated across the hangers on the floor. “You better take out what’s yours, before I pack it away.”
    “None of it is,” said Simon, without looking at the shelves.
    “Some is. That xylophone.”
    “I don’t play that any more. Don’t you know I’ve stopped playing with that kind of thing?”
    “All right,” Joan said.
    “I gave it for keeps.”
    “All right.”
    “Unliving things last much longer than living.”
    “That’s true,” Joan said. She chose an armload ofthings from the shelves—dolls, still shining and unused, a pack of candy Chesterfields, and an unbreakable yellow plastic record ordered off a cereal box. She dumped them helter-skelter into a second box and returned for another armload. “James give you a good lunch?” she asked.
    “No.”
    “What was wrong with it?”
    “Nothing,” said Simon. “There just wasn’t any. Because I didn’t eat it.”
    “Oh.”
    “If I
had
of eaten it, it would have been a pizza.”
    “I see.”
    She dumped another armload in the box. It was half full now, and junky-looking, with the arms of dolls and the wheels of cars tangled together.
    “I better make you a sandwich,” she said finally.
    “Naw.”
    “You want an apple?”
    “Naw.”
    He crossed over to where she was standing and laid the bear gently on top of the other things. “James has got this photograph,” he said, and went back to sit on the bed. “That Ansel, boy.”
    “What about him?”
    “I just hate him. I hate him.”
    When it looked as if he weren’t going to say any more, Joan began removing the last few things from the shelf. Every now and then she looked Simon’s way, but he sat very quiet with his back against the wall and his face expressionless. Finally she said, “Well, Ansel has his days. You know that.” But Simon remained silent.
    The room was bare now; all that remained were the things on the clothesline. She pushed the second boxinto the closet and then said, “I’m going out back a minute. After that I’ll fix you a sandwich.” Simon stood up to follow her. “I’m only going for a minute,” she said, but Simon came with her anyway, and they went down the hall and through the kitchen and out the back screen door.
    It was hot and windy outside, with the acres of grass behind the house rumpling and tangling together. The few things on the line—Simon’s bathing suit and Janie Rose’s crinoline and Sunday blouse—were being whipped about by the wind so that they made little cracking sounds. While Joan unpinned Janie’s things, Simon