She stared at the sidewalk, seeing it again. Rennel grunted as he shoved the shopping cart farther into the trunk of the Rambler. Sam encouraged him. Carlotta pulled idly at the hem of the red dress.

“I was wearing this all the time. We just took the clothes we were wearing. Aram’s mother went out and bought me this thing. A real thing. She wanted me to wear it to the wedding. It had a little white collar and pale little bears all over it. When I came down in this instead, she burst out crying. And the rabbi came in on his way to a funeral and rushed through it and kept staring at my belly with his nose in the air. Afterward Aram’s mother spent all her time in the kitchen and would only talk to some black guy there. She wouldn’t even look at me. She’d get suddenly very busy and say, ‘That’s nice, dear,’ if I said something to her. And then Laura came in with a lot of people none of us had even seen before. And all Aram’s friends from high school were sitting around making stupid jokes.”

She twisted at a thin gold ring on her left hand. She watched them fooling with the cart.

“Did you get to see much of the city?”

“We didn’t go in at all. We sat in Aram’s room the entire time we were there, or went to see his old friends and sat in their bedrooms in their parents’ houses. This place was just the suburbs, just houses and shopping centers. I never got within twenty miles of New York City. Once they took us out to dinner, Aram’s folks, and we went to a restaurant in a motel up on the highway. I ordered pork chops.”

“You want to go?” Rennel hollered from the car. Carlotta pulled the shawl close and stood.

“Did Laura come back with you?”

“She went to Athens. She wanted to go to a party there, or something.” She descended the stairs slowly. Sam’s grinning face flattened briefly against the car window. I waved. The shopping cart shone in the open trunk as the car disappeared down the street.

At the other end of the block a fire engine tinkled discreetly beneath a tree. The little lesbian who lived a few doors down stood with her legs spread and her arms crossed over her breasts. A square man with huge bare forearms talked to her while another lifted a ladder against the tree. An empty birdcage was on the sidewalk. In the shifting greenery of the tree, a tiny speck of blue and yellow appeared and disappeared with the lift of the wind.