“I’m going to draw you a bath,” Maureen says once they’re at her apartment. Maureen has taken a particular direction with her apartment decor—Midwest by midcentury. Furniture blond as Doris Day. Breakfast nook in the kitchen. Rooster-print wallpaper. Cate flatters herself that there’s a subtle but distinct difference in the ways the two of them have taken up themes from the recent past—that she, Cate, is paying homage to the ’40s as a significant period in design while Maureen is just fooling around, being lightly ironic, stylistically winking. Cate knows she can be a terrible snob along these lines.

“You’ve started getting the Times delivered?” Cate notices a copy on the kitchen table, still folded in its blue plastic wrapper.

“Not really. Just I like that Thursday Styles section, so on Thursdays, I pick one up. You know, from someone’s doorstep.”

“Someone was doing that to me once in a while, so I got up really early one day and brought my paper in. I slipped it out of the wrapper, unfolded it, sprinkled a nice layer of cake flour onto the surface, then carefully folded it back up and slid it back into the wrapper. Then put it back on my doorstep. If the culprit picked it up I figured he wouldn’t open it until he was nice and settled in his bus seat.” Cate is trying to head off Maureen’s celebration of her shabbiness by gently implying that someone suffers in a small way from having their paper taken. This has no effect at all. Her reply is, “Oh, you sly devil, you.” And from there she quickly gets back to coddling Cate.

“A proper bath is just the thing when you’re upset. I’ll put in some soaking crystals I got the other day from Merz. Blueberry Blossom.”

“I don’t think blueberries even have blossoms, do they? And I never really take baths. I’m kind of a quick-shower person.” The prospect of getting undressed and into water is not, right now, particularly appealing.

“Come on. Give it a whirl.”