I try to get dressed but my waist is ruined and I say that to him and he goes out and comes back a moment later and he throws a finished waist down to me on the floor where I am, and he says, Take that one, so I put it on, and it’s a little too big, but I just button it up as fast as I can go, and that’s when I see I have a piece of his hair in my hand, I am still holding it tight, and it’s bloody where I pulled it out of his head, and I am glad. I try to make myself look all right in the mirror over the sink, and he is impatient with that, so he turns off the light so I am in the darkness to make me hurry up.

I take myself home to Essex Street in the dark and I wash myself as good as I can with six kettles of water heated on the burner but nothing can make me feel clean like I want to feel, and when my sister comes in, I act like I am already asleep in my bed because I am ashamed of what has happened, even though I know he did wrong and I didn’t do anything wrong. I tell myself I will forget this and act like it never happened.

After that night, Jacobs acts like he is a little bit afraid of me and he leaves me alone, so that is something. I try to forget about it, even though at night when I am sleeping in the dark I wake up and think about it, and the tears come, but I stay quiet and I hide my feelings from my sister because now, she and Sam, they are engaged to be married and I don’t want to spoil her happiness, but then comes the time when I am feeling sick in the mornings and I sick up into my handkerchief from the smell of a frying egg my sister makes in the morning. I go in the hallway, and the coffee Mr. Gompertz downstairs is always making, a smell I find in the past always delicious and tempting, now it makes me feel the water pouring into my mouth like a river, and I am sick in the hallway all at once. And I have a fear hanging over me in these days that there is a baby, because I know from talking with girls during lunch that when a baby is coming the woman feels sickness like this and I am otherwise healthy, I have no fever, my courses don’t come when the time is right, there is nothing wrong with me except in the morning, and now I got a big appetite, too, I am suddenly hungry all the time. So I know, even before I admit to myself, I know.