Try as she might, she could not know what the marriage meant. She decided to ask her mother about it over a game of cards.

But the mother dragged out the discussion for hours with strange circumlocutions about birds interspersed with sighs of unhappiness: she was not attentive to Frances’ concerns. That night, Martin told Frances that he would rather have a heart attack than live with her. She responded, “Could that be because of my face? Or yours?” For it seemed that Martin’s face had changed too, and was now beginning to hang lower, like Frances’, if only slightly.

“It is not because of anyone’s damned face,” he yelled.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” she said, and then Martin French tied his robe and left the apartment, never coming back, though at times he called from phone booths.

During this period, Frances sat on the sofa of her old apartment with the westward-facing picture window that took the full brunt of the sun each day and cried to herself. She tried to write down her feelings with a pen, but the pen wobbled too much.

Her mother urged Frances to apply for a job at a small local laboratory to take her mind off the situation. They stood on Frances’ porch one night. “Your life is strange,” the mother said with distaste, leaning against a beam, cuddling her desiccated fur stole, not minding the heat. “I wonder if you’ll always be alone now?”

Frances did not know. In the meantime, keeping busy was a good idea. There were so few jobs in Munson that Frances took the laboratory position, performing the dissection of frozen caterpillars and slicing their tissue with a hand-cranked, circular steel blade.

It was then that her face slowly changed. As she worked long hours in the school lab, the face’s sagginess actually began to lift. At moments, she even looked lovely, as an orderly once remarked in the empty cafeteria. At first, the face-shift was imperceptible, though undeniable, and then it became an outstanding fact, though no one mentioned it to Frances once the change was complete.

She considered that the happy, inverted sensation she felt upon first meeting Martin French might merely have been a counterweight to her fear of dying. The ongoing, sickish feelings caused by their onetime alliance compelled her, and she loathed letting this go.

“Why analyze it, Frances?” her sister, Valencia, had said one night, leaning over a steel bowl filled with skinned pears. “Freeze that bastard out of your life, then go down to Ming’s for a drink.”

Ming was the local tavern proprietor who lived alone at the far edge of Little-Munson, where he tended a family of doves.

“I can’t exactly forget Martin. I wonder about him,” Frances said.