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synchronization. Not one of them late for work. Not one complaining about the long hours, demanding higher wages, or calling in sick. No on-the-job chatting to undercut production. I fill my fork with beef and gravy and transfer it to my mouth. Down to the plate for more, up to my mouth. I imagine a factory in my stomach, hundreds of tiny robots wielding files, mashers, and power sprayers, pulverizing the food, pushing it along. This is a cartoon picture from a film I once showed a class of fourth graders: Your Digestive System .
    The night I first ate meat loaf with Rachel and Patrick, when I came for my ten-day trial visit, Patrick said a blessing over the food. He placed his hands on the table, one on each side of his plate, and as he prayed, in his loud managerial voice, I studied his hands, which were not much larger than mine but surely stronger. His nails were bitten to the quick. We formed a V at the table, Patrick at the end, one hand extended toward Rachel and one toward me. I looked at Rachel’s face when Patrick pronounced the amen, but her eyes were on the bowl of buttered potatoes, which she picked up and passed to me with a face as placid as a nun’s.
    I eat less than half of the beef and noodles Rachel has put on my plate tonight. I take a final bite of muffin, then a sip of water, and push the plate away. I know she will bring a dish of dessert with her when she returns. This is the routine. Whether she waits to prepare it after she has brought the tray or simply waits to deliver it, not trusting an old woman to eat her vegetables when dessert is at hand, I don’t know.
    Upon getting out of bed each morning, I find myself wondering what Rachel’s offering of dessert will be at suppertime. It is a paltry existence when this is one’s first thought upon waking. Sometimes the dessert is store-bought—a little round yellow sponge cake with canned peaches on top or a cake doughnut with a small dish of applesauce. Sometimes it is a scoop of ice cream with two vanilla wafers propped up on either side. Other times it is something I have smelled baking in her oven throughout the afternoon—a cherry pie or chocolate cake, once a small and beautiful strawberry tart.
    As I sit at the table now, waiting for dessert to be brought, I hear Patrick and Rachel on the other side of my door. They are eating their supper in the kitchen, a menu which I assume to be the same as mine. Often I can catch the gist of Patrick’s supper monologue. Tonight he is discussing something he read in the newspaper today about the mayor’s wife and her work with black adults in a literacy program held in the evenings at St. Joseph High School. Patrick believes this is a fine project. He imagines the mayor’s wife, along with himself, to be a paragon of fair-mindedness, a kind and generous soul to whom racial discrimination is a foreign concept. Certainly a literacy program for blacks speaks for the magnanimous heart of the white mayor’s wife.
    One evening last week Patrick arrived home late for supper due to a flat tire. I heard him tell Rachel that “the nicest black man” had stopped to assist him. He makes frequent mention of black doctors, black businessmen, and black politicians, the subtext of such references being “Just imagine—black people can make something of themselves!” When the newspaper ran a picture recently of a local boy who achieved a perfect score on the SAT, Patrick said to Rachel, “Did you see this black boy in the paper? Why, we might have us a black valedictorian at Greenville High come spring.” He spoke with great awe of the contestant on Jeopardy who won over $65,000 one week—“a black woman stock analyst!” he said to Rachel. A smart black woman—triple marvel! I imagined him drawing his chair up to the television, gaping wide-mouthed at the spectacle of a black woman rattling off correct answers. Patrick is not a stupid man; he simply cannot see or hear himself.
    I sit at my table a few