“Like when you see men in pink sweaters,” Chatty said.

I turned the counter mirror, put the earrings on, hooked my hair behind my ears.

“What would I wear them with?” I asked Chatty. “They don’t go with anything I own.”

“Then you’ll have to start life anew,” Chatty said.

I think you would like Chatty, though she can be a strong cup of tea. She has hit the change of life, and told me about a niece’s wedding where she had to step back from the carved-ice swan—she thought she was going to melt it. She is given to asking leading questions (“How many feet do you use when you drive?”) and making pronouncements with which you cannot argue: “I would rather buy a lot of presents for ten dollars each than a few for a hundred dollars that look like they cost ten.”

I am the only one who seems to like her jokes. She tells them wrong, and I think her way is better. The one about Christa McAuliffe and Donna Rice both going down on the Challenger? Chatty told it this way: They both had sex all over Florida.

Chatty is surprised I like her. She says women who have only met her in line at a movie don’t like her. She says she had always acted as if she were God’s Gift, and then it had turned out—she was God’s Gift.

Chatty seems content here. She says what is there to rush home to except threatening stacks of third-class mail.

Chatty believes in poltergeists, and I am the only person here who does, too. I believe in it all. Can I tell you about London?—how outside of London, in a manor house run by the National Trust, I saw the ghost of a girl throw the ghost of a ball in an orchard for her little ghost dog? The girl was skipping soundlessly; the dog’s jaws worked but there was no bark to hear. I saw them through an upstairs window, on the pane of which was scratched the date the mistress of the house had jumped. The date was the 1600s, and I knew to look for it from the guidebook to the house. The book said nothing about a ghost girl and dog.

The hair did not rise on my arms beneath my coat. The ghosts were a bonus and a comfort on the third and final stop of the tour I was on. I had lagged behind the group that had gone on ahead to look at ebonized, gilded armchairs in a dead duke’s bedchamber.

We had stopped first at a cathedral whose famous spire was hidden under a tower of scaffold. The cathedral’s famous choir was in concert in another country, so I bought tapes of their anthems and an evensong service, and breathed musty incense as the hour was marked by carillon. Grazing nearby were sheep descended from those whose wool, the sale of it, had built the cathedral. There were cows in the fields, too. I had just learned what the ancients used for shovels, that the trenches surrounding the site were dug from chalk with the shoulder blades of cattle.