“Oh, no. Not nothing. Absolutely not. I wish you could have heard what he said, I only wish you could. He starts in with me about how I’ll just shut them again. He starts yelling about ‘Too much darkness! Too many curtains all over the house!’ Now I ask you, what are curtains for? What are curtains for? You close them for your privacy! And then he starts screaming at the top of his lungs, he says we got too many things. All over the house, too many things. Too many scatter rugs, too many knick-knacks—and you know and I know that that is what makes a house a home—but he is yelling and carrying on that he feels like a prisoner in a junk store, that he can’t move. I swear to you, Mary, every person in the building must have heard him. Think of how it felt for me to face my neighbors the next time I saw them—my dignity in shreds, you can just imagine.

“And that’s not all. Next he starts in on my doll collection, which I can tell you means a lot more to me than he does. It is not in his way, there is no way he can say it is in his way, you know how I have my darlings all together in that locked case in the dining room—but he is yelling about that, about what kind of person am I, a grown woman who has sixty-five dolls. Well, I had an answer for him there. I said, ‘Listen, you know Demi Moore, that actress you’re so crazy for?’—like she’d bother to look at him if he was handing her a million-dollar bill. But anyway, I said to him, I said, ‘Demi happens to be a very serious doll collector! She is crazy for the Gene Marshall doll, which I was one of the very first to get!’” She settles back on her rump, hikes up a slipping bra strap. “So then what do you think he says?”

I sneak a look at my watch.

“All right,” she says. “Okay. I can take a hint. I know you’re too busy to listen to me.”

Now I feel bad. She’s just an old lady who used to have dreams, whose life has disappointed her. I know she picks out one of her baby dolls to rock every night, Murray told me once when he was complaining about her.

“No, Ethel,” I say. “I was just thinking it must be frustrating for you when—”