The next day began a frenzy that nipped me, tore me, and drove me through the next thirty-nine days. I began with a glass of water in my gut, to walk about Boston visiting paint and hardware stores. There was a particular color I had in mind, a Victorian mustard tone, and lush velvet flocked paper in gold for the bedroom. I’d seen something similar in an ice cream parlor. I visited a dozen places to compare prices. That night I scrubbed the kitchen walls and ceiling. The revelation of the fine state of its paint, which seemed to have been preserved beneath a layer of grease, made me decide that it didn’t need a new coat. One less can to buy. I slept with the light on and a book open beside me in case I woke and needed rescue from my dreams.

By the end of the week, an inflexible regimen had developed. I walked around each day to check on sales and develop a plan. I carried home my finds and worked until late into the night, steadily, methodically, with an energy totally foreign to me. No argument of health or duty could have pressed me to such labor. I did it to drive out jealousy, idle imaginings, and that febrile revving of my anxieties caused by the emptiness of the bed. I was always nervous.

At the point of pain each night, when my arms would no longer lift without protest, I would put the brush or mop away and climb into a hot bath. I sat in it, staring at my own grimy feet in stupefaction until they were cleaned by the process of erosion and the water was chilled enough to force me out. Then, with the lamp and the book and the single Volcano Bar, I would climb into bed.

There wasn’t really enough time to scrounge for food. I had calculated and come to the conclusion that I could spare four dollars for food for forty days. At ten cents, only one Volcano Bar a day would fit my budget. I bought them one at a time, always at the same drugstore four blocks from the house and in my direct path when returning from my daily ramble.

I put the bar on the pillow the moment I entered the house, and kept it in the back of my mind, a sort of consolation as I painted and papered and scrubbed. Toward the last, when I was sewing covers for some cushions I had stolen from the dormitory lounge of the local college, I would listen to the burr of the coarse thread moving through the cloth and dream of the white filling concealed in its chocolate casing.