“Not anything in particular,” I said. “You know. A lot of stuff. And we rode around.”

The light was spooky, coming through the window as if aiming at Raf; contained around him, and not spread over the depths of the dark room.

He said, “You don’t really need me anymore, do you, Paige?”

“It’s what I remember,” I said.

Raf’s look now was piercing. He said, “You mean you have just a kind of shadow need for me.”

“No no,” I said. “Never mind.”

“You troll,” I said to Schopenhauer.

A blonde and her brunette sister had their punched-in pickup behind the boat in our drive. A sign, stickered to the driver’s door, read: WE NEED BILINGUAL HELP—CALL 629-7071.

I led the two women inside.

They were neighbors from a block down and they were including me in their weekly card game.

“Del will be coming,” the blonde said.

The brunette was an overstuffed woman with a careworn face, deep wrinkles, bristling hair glinting with gray.

The blonde wore black shorts and a black tank top. She looked young enough to be the brunette’s child.

They got seated at the table. The blonde riffled a deck of Bicycle-brand playing cards.

The brunette splashed coins onto the table, shoved them into roughly sorted piles. She put out a few dollar bills as well.

“Watch that and make sure she don’t steal it,” she told each of us about the other.

She wandered out to the truck and brought back Mexican beer, which she pushed into the refrigerator. She served us uncapped bottles and popped open a cellophane bag of peanuts.

“Those salted in the shell?” the blonde asked.

We shucked shells and ate peanuts. I drank my beer from the bottle and scratched at its label just as they were doing.

“That’s right,” the blonde said, eyeing me. “You get that off in one straight tear, it means you’re a virgin.”

“Goddamn Del,” said the brunette. “She ruins every game.”

“Just late,” the blonde said. “She’s always late. Resign yourself.”

An ice-cream truck with a tinkling bell was swerving around in the street.

The brunette said, “I always pictured a Harvard teach with a tight hair bun and a shawl.”

“Yeah, a shawl she knitted herself, ’cause that’s her entertainment,” the blonde said.

“If you want to think that,” I said. “It’s still America.”

“Ain’t it just,” the brunette said.

A redhead arrived—Del. She was thick-haunched and slow-walking. She wore a housedress and had five glass- stone rings on her left hand.

“In a dress yet,” the brunette said.

“I gotta work,” the redhead said. “You all can go around in your bathing suits, that’s fine. But I’m a working girl.”

The redhead’s job, the sisters explained, was as entry guard at the Magnolia City dump.

“What she calls a ‘landfill project,’ ” the brunette said.