Amor and Psycho: Stories Part 4

Sura asked a red-faced woman. She asked a high school track star. She asked a woman who stole three lollipops from the front desk and held them unrepentantly, like cigarettes. She asked a Buddhist monk. She asked a man. Everybody said the same: The Isle of Wigs-go there.

It was on Wils.h.i.+re, not far from DuPar's, and she stopped first and had a pancake to steel herself. She bought one wig the first day and then went back a couple of weeks later and bought another. Two wigs turned out to be a minimum. Should she buy more? Sura couldn't believe insurance wouldn't cover a head of hair. If she lost a finger, wouldn't insurance cover it? If she lost a ring? The faith healer her son Daniel found through the gym wasn't covered, either. Plus, he was a Catholic, which made Sura wonder what her own mother, dead of the same disease for thirty years, would think. Would she be happy or even more furious to see her daughter saved by that kind of faith?

When her son bought her a German alarm clock so she wouldn't be late for all her appointments, Sura took it right back to Longs to exchange it for an American item. But the bright aisles distracted her (she needed a new bath mat, measuring cups, spot remover, a replacement head for her electric toothbrush-they wanted ten dollars, but you could buy two for seventeen). Toys reminded her of the grandchildren she didn't have yet; perfumes reminded her of old, sick women, and cameras and film reminded her of the boxes of unsorted pictures in her garage in the desert that showed the arc of her life so far. Nothing reminded her of her mission until, back in the parking lot, she reached into her purse for her car keys and found the black clock ticking.

TIME! Sura's children said she wasted her time, looking through the paper every day at the sales in stores when, for her own peace of mind, she should be putting her affairs in order. But what was she supposed to do about the bonds and certificates? Should she pay down the mortgage, pay the taxes? It was a terrible mess and n.o.body could help her, n.o.body. Her neighborhood a.s.sociation had called, sorry about her personal setbacks, but it had to cite her for unwatered landscaping. The Rosens had put green rocks in their yard; somebody else had paved theirs all over with Astroturf. It didn't look bad-and compared to the expense of plants! Sura was supposed to find an hour a day to relax and visualize health, then fertilize the orange trees, but who could do so much?

"Every day you're not in chemotherapy is a day wasted," the nurse in Dr. Frank's office told her, adding to the pressure. But you couldn't have chemotherapy every day.

At the infusion center (twenty minutes late), she arranged herself in one of the t.i.tan-size pink Barcaloungers, which reminded Sura of pedicures at the Waxing Manicure-improving forces. All you had to do was lie back. The good nurse, Julie, sunk a needle into the port in her chest, which Dr. Frank said wouldn't hurt after the first time, but it did. Why wouldn't it? It throbbed like a heart, demanded attention like a child. Sura dozed-they put drugs in the chemo to keep you quiet-and found herself beyond the padded chair, in the jungle with a dirt floor and a green smell among wild animals too busy with their own animal lives to hurt her. A black chimpanzee lay on his back while his mate pulled fleas or lice from his ear with her thick human fingers. Sura opened her eyes and closed them again-not dreaming, just thinking. Last summer, she'd studied Ape Language & Culture with her best friend, Sophie, at the Elderhostel in Seattle. The food was to die for. The famous Jewish poet Allen Ginsberg's mother had been there-nice lady, Naomi Ginsberg. ("Allen Ginsberg's mother died in 1956," her son told Sura, always eager to specifically contradict her, although where was he in 1956? Unborn!) Sura had sat next to Naomi the night they watched a film in which monkeys swung from manzanita branches, babies clinging for their lives to the hairy b.r.e.a.s.t.s. But an awful thing happened in Seattle: Sophie died-a heart attack in the dining room.

Sura woke horribly chilled in her chemo chair, cisplatin dripping into the port in her chest, to find that the technician with one eye had given her snack to an older, sicker woman who seemed confused-by America, Sura guessed.

"Why did you give her my snack?" Sura asked.

"You were sleeping so nicely," the technician said meanly.

"I had a nightmare!" Sura told her.

A little stick figure-the good nurse, Julie-brought Sura orange juice and a cookie, chatted about her vacation coming up. Her husband wanted to take her to the Panama Ca.n.a.l, even though she'd been there already during a different marriage. Sura frowned and said, "Why don't you go to Israel?"

"Barry doesn't want to go to Israel. He's had two heart attacks already, and he says, 'I want to see the Panama Ca.n.a.l before I die.' What am I going to do? Besides, they're fighting in Israel. It isn't a good time."

"They're always fighting," Sura told her. "It's never a good time. But when you go, you'll see-it's a good time." She hadn't been since 1972. Now who knew when she'd go back?

SURA COULDN'T SHOP after chemo-she went home and went to bed-but the next afternoon she drove to Home Depot and picked out forty dollars' worth of hot-weather blooms, showy things that looked good right now, but tomorrow, who knew? She'd rushed out in a hurry, put a pink bandanna on her head; she was bald as an egg. The woman who rang her up, gorgeous girl, thirty years old, winked at Sura and picked up her hair for a second as if it were a hat.

"Oh my G.o.d," Sura said.

Forty dollars was the least of it. She didn't even have the energy to call the handyman to ask him to come and put in the plants. The chemo brought her platelets down. She tried to eat half a bagel and a little spinach salad and read the newspaper-but it made her sick, looking at the pictures from Israel of the blown-up bus. People talking as if they were used to it, as if they could accept such a dangerous life. No! She would not accept it. The twelve-year-old boy carried off in Gaza by his schoolmates, his eyes rolled up into his head. His friends with their book bags still on their backs! One boy hung behind, maybe scared the same thing could happen to him. When Sophie died, Sura hung behind also, even though she was Sophie's oldest and best friend, the only person who knew her well. One minute Sophie was standing beside Sura in the buffet line, saying, "Look, corn bread!" and the next she was lying unconscious on the floor. Sura would never forget what she saw-a pulmonary embolism. An ambulance took Sophie away and an hour later she was dead. Sura hung behind, not out of meanness, just an instinct.

Dr. Frank's office called, trying to change her next appointment for sooner. "What, he's going out of town?" Sura asked the receptionist.

"No, no."

"So he thinks I'm not going to make it to Thursday?" She s.h.i.+fted her weight on her puffy slippers, but wrote the new date down on her calendar, inked thickly already with appointments with Dr. Frank and the clinic and the periodontist-teeth were important, the only part of her skeleton that showed-and her childrens' birthdays, just a year and a week apart. Both Daniel and Fay were over forty and neither had children yet. Late, late!

In planning mode, still by the phone, Sura called the handyman, Ramiro. When he came a few hours later, Sura explained that she wanted him to dig up all the dirt in front of the house and lay black plastic under the white rock to keep the weeds down. Not too much dirt, she told him in her Spanish. (Actually, she said not too much thing, pointing to the dirt. It was hard to get through.) Si, si, senora, Ramiro told her, and then went away without doing any work at all.

"I don't have much time!" she called after him.

She walked down the hall to her bedroom in her slippers, her hemorrhoids burning and jarring on the concrete slab with the Mexican pavers on top, which had seemed like an attractive idea at the time. She lay down on her bed with her hands at her sides, put earphones in her ears and switched on her relaxation tape. "You are walking on a beautiful beach along the ocean," the reader said. "A fresh breeze is blowing. The breeze smells of fresh air and flowers. Feel the fresh air enter your nose and bring relaxation to your whole head. Feel your eyes relax. Feel your nose relax. Feel your mouth relax...." The port hummed in her chest. Sura hated the beach; the salt made her hair frizz. But now-she had no hair. Sura closed her eyes, folded her hands over her heart and slept.

She woke up with blue-green, mustard-colored nausea floating in front of her eyes. Her daughter, Fay, had told her she should smoke some marijuana.

"Oh my G.o.d," Sura had said, astonished. "You want me to get lung cancer, too?" But did Fay listen? She brought two marijuana brownies in a Baggie, which Sura stowed in the back of the freezer. She'd never eat them, but she didn't want Fay to be tempted, either.

She studied a yellow-blue hematoma on her arm. The technician with one eye who took her blood had made it; Sura had never trusted that one. Who ever heard of a technician with one eye? The other eye was gla.s.s, always looking away from you. (You expect people with some terrible affliction to be kinder, Sura thought. But why should they be?) And speaking of trust and her children, when they came to visit, they brought gifts she didn't need or want, and her son stole things, as if she were already dead. From the big box in the garage he stole the best picture of her ever, posing with her husband Nat's big pumpkins that year. He also stole the biggest letter she'd ever gotten. It was from Nat when he served in the army, typed on a special big typewriter on special extra-big paper, two feet wide and three feet long. The letter began "Dearest Heart of Mine, I am about to start the largest letter of my career," and went on about how it was too late for her to turn back, plans had been made (his plans!), the tickets bought. It was a young man's letter, filled with so much language of love she had to make x.x.xx.x.xX's over long portions of it even before Daniel and Fay were born (because she always felt she would have children, and she might be too busy then to remember). Nat's letter was a secret for her eyes only, although now even she had forgotten exactly what the secret entailed, what words of love he had used, exactly, and Daniel, who was ambitious and secretive, had rolled up the letter and stolen it, and taken it home, where his children might see.

"Did you take that picture of the pumpkins and my big letter?" she asked him directly when he came to see her.

"They're safe at my place," he said. "You had everything loose in a box in the garage."

"I knew where it all was!" she objected.

"And now you still know where it all is," he told her.

At the store where he picked up his mail, he'd met the secretary of a famous actress who cured her dog of liver cancer with shark cartilage she got from a woman in New Zealand. Daniel had sent away for the stuff-at his own expense, and why not, if it was legal, since he was a lawyer-and twenty brown bottles arrived by UPS with black eyedroppers in them, but no instructions. The bottles looked to Sura like poison. She kept them in a wicker basket in the den, where she kept the unfinished, unfinishable business of taxes and estate plans, things she thought she might do sometime while she watched the stream of death and terror on TV.

AMONG HER PAPERS she found an old train ticket from New York to Los Angeles. When the war was over, Sura's husband-to-be went ahead to California, where his family lived, to work as a machinist. Sura took the train across the country a month later. She ran away from her mother, from home; that was her biggest adventure, at twenty-two years old. She had a suitcase she'd bought in Times Square and hidden under her desk at her office, a couple of sandwiches and apples she'd taken-her mother would say stolen-from home. She had her last paycheck, uncashed, in her purse. She could never go back.

Nat had sent her train ticket together with his extra-large letter. Fortunately, Sura always picked up the mail herself, since her mother worked until six as a seamstress on Fourteenth Street. Sura worked as a secretary for the Christian Record Company-all Christians, but they hired Sura anyway and behaved politely. She felt bad she couldn't give them notice, but her plan had to be top-top secret. The truth was, the largeness of the letter unnerved her. It reminded her of the enormity of the step she was about to take: running away across the country to elope with a man. Her mother would never speak to her again, Sura knew; for the rest of their lives, her evacuation would be a rock at the bottom of both their hearts. Who besides her mother, who had n.o.body else, n.o.body in the world, loved her that much?

For three nights, Sura sat up in her coach seat and felt the train pulling her away. On the last night, a soldier bought her dinner in the dining car-a misunderstanding. Sura hadn't mentioned Nat soon enough. The soldier had ordered pork in a cream sauce for both of them, and two bottles of Schlitz beer. Sura had never eaten meat and milk together, and never pork (she'd drunk beer, once). After dinner, he was a little bit forward, and she became sick on the train all the way to Los Angeles, and when she met Nat at Union Station, the city looked pink and yellow under the palm trees, and even Nat looked different and orange. His parents gave her a tiny room of her own overlooking a wall of blue delphiniums, where she lived until she and Nat were safely married.

SURA'S DAUGHTER, Fay, knew a lady who had cured herself. She took a coffee enema every morning and ate nothing but fresh vegetables she ground up in an expensive juicer. She could never eat another dairy product as long as she lived. Fay arranged for Sura to meet this woman on the sidewalk outside Fay's building.

The sun hung low in a silver, smoky sky. Sura climbed awkwardly down Fay's steep steps, wearing a sweats.h.i.+rt that read I PRIMATES across the front. Fay wore a baby blue peasant blouse that revealed the murky tattoo above her pubic bone. (What would Fay's future children think of that?) Fay said, "Greta, this is my mother, Sura. Mom, this is my friend Greta."

"It is a pleasure to meet you," Greta said.

"Likewise," said Sura.

Greta had two large dogs on leashes-mastiffs, Fay had warned. She unsnapped the leashes while she talked to Sura and let the dogs run all over the neighbors' lawn. Blond, blue-eyed Greta, it turned out, came from Germany. Sura herself had never stood so close to a German person before. She stood a little closer now than was necessary, as if the health of a woman who had saved herself were an airborne thing, a good germ, or like a hair Greta might shed from her perfect bob, a sacred hair.

Greta wore a black-and-white-checked blazer, a white blouse with b.u.t.ton covers striped black and white, and huge, round, black-framed gla.s.ses with rose-tinted lenses. In spite of her playful attire, the impression Greta gave off was serious as death. Sura had flung on a wig for this meeting, thank G.o.d-her pixie. She felt the sun s.h.i.+ning down on her head, and she felt her own new hair growing in underneath the wig, pus.h.i.+ng up against the web of another woman's hair.

"So Dr. Santino is treating you?" Sura asked, meaning, of course, Jesus Santino, the famous doctor Fay had found out about-from Greta, obviously.

"Dr. Santino is not treating you," Greta said. "You take the regimen and treat yourself. You cure yourself. You totally change your life."

"Change my life?" Sura said.

"You eliminate poisons-dairy, salt, meat."

"Eliminate dairy? My doctor says I need calcium."

"Dairy is poison," Greta told her. "And your doctor says you'll be a skeleton in three months. You want to listen to him?"

"I never had to worry about salt. I have the arteries of a thirteen-year-old."

(Here I am, thought Sura, bargaining with a German woman! A book Fay had given her said bargaining was the first stage of death.) "This, too, is what your doctor says?"

"Sure," said Sura.

Greta looked up at the sky through her big black rose-tinted gla.s.ses and made a screaming sound: "AAAAGH!" Then she said, "Listen, you don't want to cure yourself, don't do it. The regimen isn't for everybody, but I wanted to see my grandchildren grow up, you know? So I go to Dr. Santino. My doctor has killed me off already with his chemotherapy. I've lost fifty pounds and I'm supposed to die in two weeks. So I buy myself a juicer. I eat nothing but vegetable juice I make myself. This is five years ago. I go in once in a while and get my platelets counted, I get a marker. And no cancer! I'm not talking you into anything. I'm just telling my experience. You spend four hours a day in the kitchen, juicing it all up. Every morning, you wake up and you take a coffee enema to purge. This is every morning for the rest of your life."

Sura watched the German woman's enormous dogs dig their claws into the neighbors' turf lawn, which covered the front yard like a green rug.

"Oh my G.o.d," she said.

SURA WAS her mother's only child. The way they ate in those days, when food was love! Her mother made latkes and borscht with sour cream, and stewed fruit with more sour cream, not much meat because of the expense, but lots of dairy. Her mother bought cream cheese on a stick (she pulled the money out of her knee-high stockings) and they ate it walking home, just like Popsicles. Her mother poured creamy milk from the bottle into a gla.s.s. The milkman came every day to the door. Sura's mother would walk in from work, tie an ap.r.o.n around her waist and start cooking. Two hours she cooked, just for supper. She set one place at the wobble-legged table and watched Sura eat. She never talked, not really, just stray phrases in Yiddish about food and sleep and fabric and fit, because in addition to working in the dress factory and keeping a kosher kitchen, Sura's mother made all their clothes, and took in extra sewing. But there was no single conversation Sura could remember in which they exchanged thoughts or impressions. What her children wanted from her, she couldn't tell them. Sura didn't even know what shtetl her mother had come from in Poland, just that it was in the Bialystok region, taken by the Russians in 1939 and invaded by the n.a.z.is in 1942, when her mother was already on a boat to America.

Then Sura ran away to Nat-he arranged everything-and she never saw or spoke to her mother again, though she wrote to her, of course. When Fay and Daniel asked about her life, about their history, she reached into her mind for happy things to tell them. "We ate cream cheese in the street, just like a Popsicle on a stick," she told them. But they, especially Fay, were never satisfied-they wanted other, more terrible stories.

SURA WENT INSIDE and sat down on the couch, which puffed up cold air. She opened up her book on surviving. Fay moved around the kitchen, making smoothies in the blender. Sura appreciated this gesture for her health, only she wished Fay wouldn't use bananas; they had one hundred calories. When the noise of the blender stopped, Sura read out loud to Fay about a toll-free number in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. "I can send my medical record number to the office of the armed forces. They have state-of-the-art cancer equipment. There is no cost," she called into the kitchen.

Fay came out with a juice gla.s.s Sura remembered getting free years ago with a five-dollar purchase at Lucky's. She reached for the gla.s.s carefully. All these articles were family history.

"Is that all you got from that book?" Fay asked. "You've been reading the same paragraph for three days."

"It haunts me," Sura said.

"What haunts you?" Fay asked.

Sura's voice rose. "Let me do it my way, that's all!"

She closed her eyes. She remembered certain stories she'd saved and never told her children. One time, her mother took her on a bus trip to the factory where her father worked. It was in another state-Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, somewhere like that. They stayed overnight in a boardinghouse. In the morning, they walked to the factory where Sura's father worked and her mother asked for him. After a long time, he came out front, smoking, and right away she started yelling at him in Yiddish for him to come back, to send money. He said in English, "You can't come around here," and sent them away. Sura, pulling on her mother's arm, felt glad. He came home sometimes, though, for a week or a month. When he went away again, the women from the neighborhood would take her mother to have a "hot bath"-that was how you got rid of babies. Her mother grew sick and weak from her "hot baths," yet Sura remembered her working all the time, taking in extra sewing she did at night, cooking with two sets of dishes, everything kosher. She was strong as an ox, and before Sura ran away, she depended on her mother completely.

Why hadn't her mother taken a hot bath to get rid of her? Because she, Sura, was her mother's Love, her Hope.

(Years after her mother died, Sura's father turned up in California and took two rooms in a not-bad hotel downtown. He brought with him a few old sewing machines, which Sura saw in his room when she and Nat drove downtown to pick him up. They drove him out to the valley for a family supper so the children could meet their grandfather, but she could hardly bear to look at him or speak to him. "How could you be so rude to your own father?" Fay asked her later. "You embarra.s.sed all of us.") FAY DROVE Sura to Dr. Frank's office in her funny old car.

"Why don't you get an automatic? It's easier," Sura told her. Then she said, "How many earrings have you got in your ears?"

"Nine earrings," Fay said. "Ten holes."

Dr. Frank made them wait. Fay had brought along pictures of the trip she and her boyfriend, Ted, had taken to Mexico with another couple. The other woman had long red hair, beautiful hair, almost too much of it, like a wig. Someone-Fay, Sura guessed-had pasted bubbles over the heads in the photographs, which were supposed to show what everybody was thinking. In one picture, the four of them sat at a table around enormous plates of food and bottles of beer. A bubble over Ted's head read "Are we eating again?" In another photograph, Fay stood in front of a pink shack. A bubble over her head read "You see old-world charm-I see a bathroom down the hall."

Fay rattled on about Mexico. Sura waited, listening for her name. As Fay showed her pictures of hotels, restaurants and pastries, Sura said, "That looks expensive. That looks fattening." Of the countryside, she said, "That looks dirty."

While Fay talked, Sura watched the scrawny woman with baby hair jump up out of her seat and walk to the front desk. She lifted the gla.s.s k.n.o.b of a jar of lollipops, pulled one out, unwrapped it and stuck it into her mouth. Walking past Sura, she winked and, removing the lollipop, held it like a cigarette between two fingers. "What the h.e.l.l, right?" she said.

Sura shrank back, horrified by this series of gestures, by the way the woman picked her out, winked at her. After Sura's first round of chemo, Fay had told her how beautiful she looked without her wig, how her face looked wise and sculpted. But Fay had also said Sura looked great the year she separated from Nat, those years before he died, when Sura was so independent and went back to school for her A.A. degree.

"You're crazy!" she told Fay. "I didn't sleep for a year! I got those shadows under my eyes that never went away!" She hated it when Fay or Daniel brought up that rough patch. Every marriage had one.

"Why do you bring that up?" Sura had demanded. "Now he's gone, who cares?"

Looking back, it was the years of marriage that counted. Then, ten years ago, Nat had died. He never got to the stage of bargaining. He stayed angry. Fay brought him CDs of the operas he used to like, but he couldn't stand them anymore.

The woman with the lollipop struck up a conversation with the people waiting near her. They all leaned forward, talking at once. Sura felt proud to have her daughter with her in this place; it reflected well to have your adult children care what happened to you. But she found herself tuning out Fay's talk about Chiclets and Incas, actually leaning across Fay's lap a little bit, her ear drawn to these others, even though they weren't talking about selenium and Taxol.

"In kindergarten, I felt I was a special soul," said a man who was very bad off, missing one leg. "My father dragged me in a sled to school. My brother and I shared a pair of mittens to keep our hands warm. I remember warm tears on my cheeks on a snowy day, I loved that girl so much, what was her name, five years old."

"I still think I'm special," the tiny woman with the lollipop said. "You know, G.o.d used to talk to me, sit down inside me and say, 'Well, Lila, how are we doing?' That went on until I had my children. I don't blame Him for giving me a little trouble, He knows I can handle it. Or else there's some other reason."

The man in the wheelchair said, "I used to think I was solid all the way through. No organs, no bones. Same on the inside as on the outside. Skin all through. Not so far off-now I got no bones," he said, and they all laughed.

Fay put away her photographs and picked up a magazine. Sura took a pen and a pad from her purse and made a list of things she needed: a new pink bath mat, a bag of spinach, a salad spinner with a cord you pulled, photograph alb.u.ms for the day she finally got around to putting her pictures in books, which would be harder for her children to steal without her noticing. When the good nurse, Julie, came to the door with her clipboard, Sura stood up automatically, as if, somewhere, a b.u.t.ton had been pushed. Fay said, "Why don't you complain, Mom? You let Dr. Frank walk all over you, keeping you here for two hours. You're the client." But Sura didn't think of herself as a client; she thought of herself as a patient, and anyway, she didn't mind waiting. She waited for Dr. Frank with a kind of attention she couldn't gather at any other time, as if waiting well might bring a reward.

She followed Julie down the narrow hall, past the chemo patients sitting under their bags of cisplatin and Adriamycin, and felt a strange longing to be among them, having chemotherapy together while Dr. Frank worked in his office nearby. Sura had hated chemo, the depression, the anxiety and the sickness, finding herself at Longs as if waking up from a dream with a shoe tree in her cart. After the first time, the count of platelets in her blood fell so low that she needed three transfusions, and she worried to Dr. Frank that she might get AIDS. Dr. Frank said, "Don't worry about AIDS. You've just got cancer, Sura." And now she wanted it; she felt a hunger for the wire in her Broviac, and the antidote and the hydration and the nausea. She wanted to be there, with the other cancer patients doing their protocols together, in the hall.

Dr. Frank told her how well she'd taken the chemo, how determined and strong she'd been. But her white blood count neared zero. Red, too. Shots would bring the counts up, but he knew she wanted the truth. They'd tried everything. The idea had been to give her some time.

"Right!" she a.s.sured him. "Time's what I want."

FAY DROVE her home. Sura tried to remember which of her children had had scarlet fever, which one would eat only tuna fish. It was so long ago she was a young mother with a child hanging from her hip, the legs wrapped around her waist. The years she herself had been a child still felt more real than the years she had been a mother. She thought of her mother brus.h.i.+ng out her hair at night by the warm stove, and then, more dimly, of herself, brus.h.i.+ng Fay's hair. She remembered how, last summer at the Elderhostel, the female ape had leaned into the male, plucking at his hairy shoulders, and how Sophie, the night before she died, had painted her toenails in their dormitory room in Seattle after dinner.

"I want to take that clock I told you about back to Longs, if you've got time," she told Fay.

"I've got time," Fay said-but then she took the clock into the store herself and left Sura in the car. "I know you, you'll lose yourself for an hour," she said.

"Get me one made in America or China, I don't care," Sura told her.

Once Fay had disappeared through the electronic doors, Sura climbed out of the car and walked along the ell of the minimall. The Isle of Wigs was kitty-corner from the Waxing-Manicure. The Vietnamese women did the best waxing. They had a private room in back where you lay down on a table that was covered with a clean white sheet. One of the women leaned over you and brushed out your eyebrows with a tiny black brush. She put one hand on your ankle, very calm and steady-she had to be. But Sura didn't need those women anymore.

She tugged at the kerchief on her head and released it, stuffed it into her purse. Her leg buzzed beneath her. She felt the sun beating down on her head. It felt good, the hot sun beaming down from the indifferent blue sky.

She opened the door and went inside. The woman behind the counter had on the same baseball cap she'd worn the last time Sura saw her-and the time before that. Across the bill of the cap Sura read the words: I'M OUT OF ESTROGEN-AND I'VE GOT A GUN.

"I know you. You bought the bob," the woman said.

"And the pixie!" Sura told her, hearing the shrillness in her voice. She walked quickly to the rows of Styrofoam heads and stood before them, looking at the chiseled faces, the empty eyes, the white lips, the human hair.

"And now you want something a little more-"

Sura fastened her eyes on the heads. "I don't want anything," she said. "Just looking."

SHE BITES.

This man-Froyd-is constructing a postmodern doghouse designed by an architect in Brazil. Froyd doesn't yet own a dog. His role: patronal, advisory. The hired carpenter works in the yard below, laying joists for an outbuilding ten feet wide, twelve feet long and ten feet tall (just small enough not to require a building permit). Plans call for a pine frame sheathed in low-grade plywood and metal siding. The structure will sit thirty feet from the house where Froyd lives with his wife and daughter and a neglected betta fish.

The structure's windows all point west, not to the southeast, where a more energy-aware person would put them. This irritable thought bleeds from the brain of the carpenter, who spent the morning sawing galvanized metal for the doggy door. That job brought small irritations to the surface. The carpenter considers the aesthetic pains the Brazilian architect has taken with the design of this outbuilding/doghouse a kind of insult against craftsmans.h.i.+p. The doghouse irritates the carpenter on at least two fronts, being both a cheaply built outbuilding and an extravagant doghouse-a willful marriage of bad ideas. The carpenter has long tried to liberate his career from inefficient traditional construction (tarted up in galvanized metal and Plexi) and start his own hay-bale construction business. Working with the noisy, awkward metal sheathing and flas.h.i.+ng reminds him that he still lives with his dazzlingly gorgeous blond wife and two blond boys in a thirty-year-old trailer and has been living this way for the past six years.

Froyd, on the other hand, finds the structure beautiful and modest. Two of the front-facing walls, composed almost entirely of wide sheets of Plexi, offer vistas of the redwoods, which contribute to his property's aesthetic and resale value.

Every half hour or so, Froyd checks the progress of the building by making a pot of coffee for the carpenter and chatting with him for a few minutes-or by looking out the window from his upstairs office. (He has to stand, lean a hand on his desk and crane his neck.) Earlier this morning, Froyd positioned himself for one such look, spilled a jar of pens and cried out in frustration. The carpenter, caught in the act of lighting one of his hand-rolled cigarettes, met Froyd's eye and smiled aggressively.

This tiny shame has not abated yet. It p.r.i.c.ks at Froyd. Why should a man apologize for looking at his own doghouse? Even the carpenter (who tried to guilt-trip him into a lugubrious hay-bale "alternative") stands back, looking at the house, judging it. From the tilt of the carpenter's head and from the cigarette smoke billowing around his face, Froyd discerns that the carpenter might be contemptuous, or envious.