Frances reached for the whisk broom and dustpan in her bedside table and began to sweep, eyeing the black telephone, a hot, serpentine anger climbing at the back of her throat because of Ray’s remark. At times he was maddeningly superior, she felt, in a way that made her want to shout.

She looked through the living-room window, facing the yellowish light, glimpsing outside the refuse blown by the eruption and what appeared to be a large dog lying in the street. She turned away, shivering. All the nice things about life, she mused, are they nice because we compare them to all the ugly, awful things, like threatening winds, crashing stones, and the sun—the sun? And fury, she finished to herself. She spoke aloud, “Is fury such a terrible thing?”

“What, Frances?” Ray answered, sitting, jiggling his sock right-side out.

She leaned at the window. The anger had abated, and Frances looked toward town, past quiet Ann Street with its homes blanched in stillness. Without thinking, she turned to the bed and kissed Ray’s cheek, then kissed it again and again, an activity that made so little sense to her that she could not stop, for each kiss was both the beginning of a chance to understand the thing and a way to avoid it.

Ray waited, looking at his shoes. “What will you do today?” she asked finally.

“Don’t know, Frances. Maybe I’ll call Kenny. I’ll work. I think I’ll take a little walk! And I’ll make an appointment with Palmer, too—for myself. I think, Frances, that you might do the same.”

Frances scowled.

Ray left.

She reached for the telephone, not sure whom to call.

She began dialing her mother’s number, and heard a mechanical screeching in the phone, then the sound of folks laughing. Frances sighed and hung up. The phones often malfunctioned in Munson. Lifting, then dropping her arms with sudden fatigue, she recalled, as if from long ago, the deep pleasure of sleep.

As Ray had suggested, Munson was often frustrating. Yet the world beyond it, and beyond Little-Munson, was too complicated to imagine. Considering this idea as a schoolgirl, Frances often had stared at classroom maps.

Her vivacious teacher, Mrs. Cover, had frequently whirled past the students’ desks, laughing, hips swinging, dress swishing and suspended from the tension of its crooked seams. Once, reaching out to adjust Frances’ undershirt, the teacher chimed gently, “The earth spins round and round, making us nearly sick! The earth knows how to trick us, too, so watch out.” Most townsfolk felt similarly, Frances realized, and turned away from the larger goings-on of the world. It—the world—was not for her, nor for anyone in Munson, Frances knew; yet at once, the outer world seemed glamorous and delicious, at least in magazines.