“Yes,” she snaps, “and you’re just big Mister Muddle.” She begins undoing her buttons in front of him, and closes her door only after he has turned away.

Saturday morning she takes Nelson in her Toronado over to the Fosnachts; Janice has arranged with Mom that she and Peggy will do something all day with the boys. Though it takes twenty minutes to drive from Mt. Judge to West Brewer, Mim is gone all morning and comes back to the house after two. Rabbit asks her, “How was it?”

“What?”

“No, seriously. Is he that great in the sack, or just about average in your experience? My theory for a while was there must be something wrong with him, otherwise why would he latch on to Janice when he can have all these new birds coming up?”

“Maybe Janice has wonderful qualities.”

“Let’s talk about him. Relative to your experience.” He imagines that all men have been welded into one for her, faces and voices and chests and hands welded into one murmuring pink wall, as once for him the audience at those old basketball games became a single screaming witness that was the world. “To your wide experience,” he qualifies.

“Why don’t you tend your own garden instead of hopping around nibbling at other people’s?” Mim asks. When she turns in that clown outfit, her lower half becomes a gate of horizontal denim stripes.

“I have no garden,” he says.

“Because you didn’t tend it at all. Everybody else has a life they try to fence in with some rules. You just do what you feel like and then when it blows up or runs down you sit there and pout.”

“Christ,” he says, “I went to work day after day for ten years.”

Mim tosses this off. “You felt like it. It was the easiest thing to do.”

“You know, you’re beginning to remind me of Janice.”

She turns again; the gate opens. “Charlie told me Janice is fantastic. A real wild woman.”

Sunday Mim stays home all day. They go for a drive in Pop’s old Chevy, out to the quarry, where they used to walk. The fields that used to be dusted white with daisies and then yellow with goldenrod are housing tracts now; of the quarry only the great gray hole in the ground remains. The Oz-like tower of sheds and chutes where the cement was processed is gone, and the mouth of the cave where children used to hide and frighten themselves is sealed shut with bulldozed dirt and rusted sheets of corrugated iron. “Just as well,” Mom pronounces. “Awful things. Used to happen there. Men and boys.” They eat at the aluminum diner out on Warren Street, with a view of the viaduct, and this meal out is less successful than the last. Mom refuses to eat. “No appetite,” she says, yet Rabbit and Mim think it is because the booths are close and the place is bright and she doesn’t want people to see her fumble. They go to a movie. The movie page of the Vat advertises: I Am Curious Yellow, Midnight Cowboy, a double bill of Depraved and The Circus (Girls Never Played Games Like This Before!), a Swedish X-film titled Yes, and Funny Girl. Funny Girl sounds like more of the same but it has Barbra Streisand; there will be music. They make it late to the 6:30 show. Mom falls asleep and Pop gets up and walks around in the back of the theater and talks to the usher in a penetrating whine until one of the scattered audience calls out “Shh.” On the way out, the lights on, a trio of hoods give Mim such an eye Rabbit gives them back the finger. Blinking in the street, Mom says, “That was nice. But really Fanny. Was very ugly. But stylish. And a gangster. She always knew Nick Arnstein was a gangster. Everybody. Knew it.”