Beneath the weak yellow light, she made lists of stock, tossed away into the darkness damp boxes covered with mold, and whenever the manager shouted down to her, carried up the articles he demanded, emerging into the store with a pile of boxes in her hands, half blinded by the bright lights. Like a mole, she began to prefer to be underground. She suspected that the manager and his salesladies were afraid to descend the long flight of stairs leading into her dungeon. She felt malicious and triumphant and made a point of telling Miss Gluck about the rats, concealing a mean smile when she saw the woman’s thick throat pulsate with disgust. She went back downstairs, thinking the basement was the only fit place for a nature as cruel as her own.

All day she’d been troubled by a vague physical discomfort; perhaps she was about to menstruate. Uncle Greg had taken her off to a doctor when she was thirteen. He’d shown her a drawing of a naked woman pasted on a piece of thick cardboard. She would see that woman forever—she’d had no face. Numbered arrows pointed to various parts of the woman’s body. The doctor, looking at her sternly, had read aloud the explanatory legends which had matched the numbers. But she’d known all that for years. One of the girls in school had carried around a sanitary napkin in a business envelope with her father’s address printed on the back. Her classmates had all touched it in the girls’ lavatory, giggling and shuddering. She remembered how she’d angered them, saying, “It’s all boring…” But she hadn’t meant to be superior—she didn’t know what she’d meant. When she was very small, her father and Bea had taken her with them to a movie. It had been The Squaw Man. She wondered to this day what there had been in the movie that had made her ask Bea, as they walked out of the movie house, “How are babies made?” Bea had answered in a voice of glacial rage, “Sexual intercourse!” What had James St. Vincent said about Bea? She hated helplessness. Sex made people helpless.

The store was closing for the day; Miss Gluck was gathering up her parcels, her cardigan sweater, her purse; the salesladies went home; the manager smoked a cigarette. Annie saw Jake across the street, waiting for her.

She waved at him timidly. His arms went up in a gesture of welcome. If he knew how she’d used him! She moved nervously out of range as she approached him, fearing he would embrace her. “Wait…” she said. He took her arm and led her into the entrance of an office building. There, he kissed her cheeks, pulled at her braids, and draped his thin arms around her shoulders. “I’ll burn down that place for you,” he said.