“This place is bargain city,” he assured her, opening the orange cave of his mouth, then closing it quickly. He came here often after work, he said, taking advantage of the two-for-one happy hour policy. Not that he was tight with his money, just the opposite, but he was setting aside a few dollars a week for his dental work in the summer. The work was mostly cosmetic, caps and spacers, and therefore not covered by Kitchen Kult’s insurance scheme. The way he saw it, though, was as an investment in the future. If you were going to go to the top, you had to be able to open your mouth and project. “Like this brooch, Hazel, it’s a way of projecting. Wearing the company logo means you’re one of the family and that you don’t mind shouting it out.”

That night, when she whitened her shoes, she felt a sort of love for them. And she loved, too, suddenly, her other small tasks, rinsing out her smock, setting her alarm, settling into bed with her book, resting her head against Brian’s little fiber-filled pillow with its stitched remnant of erotic privilege and reading herself out of her own life, leaving behind her cut-out shape, so bulky, rounded and unimaginably mute, a woman who swallowed her tongue, got it jammed down her throat and couldn’t make a sound.

Marilyn gave a shout of derision on seeing the company brooch pinned to her mother’s raincoat. “The old butter-up trick. A stroke here, a stroke there, just enough to keep you going and keep you grateful. But at least they had the decency to get you off straight commission, for that I have to give them some credit.”

“Dear Mother,” Rosie wrote from British Columbia. “Many thanks for the waterless veg cooker which is surprisingly well made and really very attractive too, and Robin feels that it fulfills a real need, nutritionally speaking, and also aesthetically.”

“You’re looking better,” Maxine said. “You look as though you’ve dropped a few pounds, have you? All those grated carrots. But do you ever get a minute to yourself? Eight hours on the job plus commuting. I don’t suppose they even pay for your gas, which adds up, and your parking. You want to think about a holiday, people can’t be buying pots and pans three hundred and sixty-five days a year. JoAnn and Francine and I are thinking seriously of getting a cottage in Nova Scotia for two weeks. Let me know if you’re interested, just tell those Kitchen Kult moguls you owe yourself a little peace and quiet by the seaside, ha ! Though you do look more relaxed than the last time I saw you, you looked wrung out, completely.”