A fetish for me, sunglasses, so I was glad that you said you liked the green ones. “Show me what else you’ve got in there”—when I put the glasses back in my bag, how nicely you cued me up. Show me what else you’ve got in there. Because the last time someone said that to me, it was a gorilla that said it, the one who talks in sign language with her hands. She said the same thing to me—I sat as close to her, a famous gorilla, as I sat to you—after she, too, admired my green-rimmed glasses. I think you could see that, had you let me, I would have talked about that gorilla till brooms were thrust under our feet. The situation is this: if you stopped people on the street and asked how they felt about gorillas, I would be among the ones who lighted right up.

And she said with her hands, “Show me what else you’ve got in there.” For her, I took out everything I had and held it up so she could say to me with her hands, “Pretty”—the green-rimmed glasses, and “Put on”—a tube of lipstick! And when I held up an invitation to an opening (not one of yours) at a gallery, held it up so she could see the side of the card that showed the artist’s work, “Lousy painting” is what she signed! Because she paints, too. I wish I could tell people here that you said to that, “They all do.”

I would have told you about how, when it was time for me to leave, she asked me with her hands to stay, but it was enough that you said, “I envy you your gorilla.”

I warn you: Don’t get me started on dogs! Volunteers from the shelter arrive with orphaned dogs to walk. Karen has become loquacious, but only when a dog is present. On the days the dogs come, Karen sings the same song, only changing the words to fit each newcomer: “Sad-eyed Mongrel (Mastiff, Shepherd) of the Lowlands.”

Since the dogs began to visit, Karen has been going to chapel. There, although she does not have religion, she lights a candle—“for Saint Bernard,” she says, her only joke.

The dogs from the shelter take a great deal of pleasure in pissing on pine needles and lapping at mud puddles when you volunteer to walk them in the woods behind the pound. We can do this sometimes. Karen has become enamored of the shelter’s mascot, a dog who, because of his age, is unlikely to be adopted. Banker came to visit once, but frightened another guest, so every day that she is allowed, Karen drags a vinyl chair across the concrete floor and positions it in front of Banker’s cage when the weather is too bad for her to take him outside.

In the first flush of companionship, Karen and Banker had rolled in the woods, and Karen, careless in a sleeveless blouse, had found patches of rash from poison ivy crusting into epaulettes on her shoulders.