“You are too early,” I said, and this was in keeping with my plan. “I have not yet done what I set out to do. The pawnshop was only for practice. It would have been silly to lug this heavy sign all the way up to the DoNut Shop only to find that the glass was too thick for it.” He listened. Someone approached with a blanket and threw it over my shoulders. I tugged it around me and held it close. The comfort of the warm blanket was so overwhelming that my eyes began to water. A police officer gently extracted my hands from the blanket and clipped the metal cuffs around my wrists. I giggled. Everyone was acting like we were caught in a low-budget film. Nobody else seemed to share my sense of humor. They persisted in their busy seriousness. Finally, I thought I might be spoiling the take with all my giggling, so I stopped.

Then began a time of exquisite luxury. Warm car, warm office, though too large. A green dress was found for me to wear. It was nearly large enough. I sat with one leg hooked over the other and didn’t care that they, all those men, could see my immense hairy calves. I leaned back and breathed in and had a moment to imagine the tidy, clean life of the lovely creature who had left me just the day before. He would be moving easily in some street, crossing a room with economy, or lying back with his eyes closed, taking up no more space in any direction than Phidias would have dictated. He had always despised me, seen through to my crude interior. He might, if he had ever troubled to project a future for me, have foreseen precisely this. Even I had had a suspicion, although I had envisioned myself bulging out of a black dress and wearing too much makeup at the end of a neighborhood bar. My broken voice would croak along with the jukebox and the bartender would call me “Sal” as he ushered me out at closing time. But this starched green cotton was close enough, considering that I had no taste for liquor. Whenever one of the men asked a question, I talked until they turned their backs and walked away.

Then came a bunk in a cell. Clean. I slept. Woke to use the toilet and then crawled back in and slept more. Then another ride in the back of a car and a new, large room full of white beds.

The observation ward. Whenever a painful idea came into my head I embraced it, rubbed against it until the tears came. That was part of the plan also—crying. Nurses in white jackets said “All right” to me whenever they wanted me to move, and each time I began to laugh.