The curtains were deep blue against the yellow walls. Dried grasses, seeded stalks, the woody pods of winter I had walked miles out of the town to find, stood up in jugs in the corners of the rooms. On the day Joe was due, all my work seemed equally dry and dead, wasted, and ugly after all. I bathed, dressed in my only soft garment, and waited for hours. There was no money for a welcome-home supper and my grief over that was mild but constant. The waiting then continues in me now, when I have resolved to wait no more for anything. He came at last, the tones of his motor as familiar as his step or voice. I ran out of the house to the door of the car, pulled it open before he could disengage the key.

“I was afraid you would do that, I wanted to sneak up on you!” he said. And he was pleased. He loved the house. He brought wine and told tales. He initiated the bed in its new bordello walls, but he saw no change in me.

A week later Rennel came calling and walked past me without speaking. “Where’s Sally?” he asked Joe. Joe, amazed, pointed silently to where I stood across the room. “Can that be her?” asked Rennel. He stared. “Maybe, if she’s lost a lot of weight.” Then Joe saw, too. But my pleasure was one of shock as well. My awareness of my fatness was so integrated to my sense of self that I felt it still. I had not even considered I would lose it. The chocolate regimen had been one of self-indulgent economy. The blind preoccupation of my solitude had eliminated any awareness of its effects on my physique. On that last day, trying to pretty myself in the old futile ways, I had despaired over the purple bags under my eyes and the scrofulous look of my beaten hands. Nothing else seemed changed. Still, pouches of flesh hung behind my knees and rolled out from under my thighs when I sat down. Rennel’s observation excited me. A beat of light pulsed in my head. Early the next morning, I wheedled Joe into taking a walk to the drugstore. I could not abide leaving him long enough to go by myself. He looked at magazines and I stood surreptitiously on the scale. One hundred and forty pounds, it read. Glad. Wept sweetly. Sashayed hopefully. Since my thirteenth birthday I had weighed one hundred and eighty pounds.