By the time Dante came downstairs, the air was thick with smoke and Roberta and I had each had two of the beers I'd run across to the superette and bought. I was barefoot and sloshing around on the water bed, smoking the third cigarette I'd bummed.

Roberta and Dante took turns sizing each other up. I watched his eyes dart with alarm from her walker to the red sneakers to the ashtray she'd filled. "I was just tellin' your wife how I got my show at the radio station. I do the Sunday-morning polka hour. So anyways, Dolores, the station manager comes to the phone and I says to him, 'Listen, hon, you got all these happy-go-lucky polkas and, in between 'em, that announcer guy sounds like you dug him up at the cemetery or something.' So this station manager guy's a real smartass over the phone. He says to me, 'Oh, well, why don't you go to broadcast school and then send us an audition tape-show us how it's done.' So that's what I did. Called his bluff, except I didn't send any tape. I brought myself down there live and made that station manager sit and listen. Comes to find out, I gave him a tattoo once, a tiger lily right on his hairy ass-both of us remembered each other. So now I'm the Polka Princess every Sunday morning from ten to eleven. That was my idea to call myself that: the Polka Princess. Just like, what's her name, Lady Diane over there in England. I tell you, hon, put that microphone in front of me and I throw a party!"

When I got back from walking her across the street, Dante was spraying the air with Glade. "I give up," he said. "What was that?"

"Roberta Jaskiewicz. The lady who ran the tattoo parlor."

He held up her lipstick-smeared glass and said he hoped to Christ that whatever she had wasn't contagious.

"Yeah, life's just a big shit sandwich, isn't it, Dante?" I said.

He sighed. "If you're angry because I didn't help you entertain those old women, I'm sorry, but I couldn't help it. I know it's hard for you to understand, but the poetic impulse is fragile."

He went out to the kitchen and came back with the packages of uneaten cold cuts and one of Roberta's and my beers.

"You see," he said, "it started with the feel of my hand inside the gray pallbearer's glove. That was the inspiration, the inception of the whole thing. It's hard to explain. Intellectually, I was trying to make it an elegy-at least that's what I would have predicted it would become. Except it wasn't feeling elegiac. It was feeling... well, sexual. Isn't that odd?"

He tilted his head back and dropped whole slices of boiled ham into his mouth, chewing as he talked.

"Then, sitting up there amidst all your grandmother's Catholic trappings, the most intimate thing happened-the force was undeniable... Any of those pumpernickel rolls left?... You see, I'd been blocked for the first hour or so because I was missing the point. It was the feel of the gloves, not their symbolic quality, that interested me. The sensual aspect So finally I said, 'Okay, fuck it, Davis. Fuck all these plaster saints looking at you.' I let the poem swerve toward the erotic-gave it that permission-and I was freed."

"Freed?"

"Yes! Amidst all those saints and martyrs, with all those dried-up talking vaginas downstairs. The dynamic was incredible. It just overtook me. To the point where, in the middle of the writing, I stood up, pulled down my pants, and masturbated myself to orgasm. It wasn't a choice; it was an act of survival. Hold on a minute. The poem is rough still but I want you to hear it." He ran up the stairs and back down again. "Okay, listen."

The solitary pallbearer shoots his seed, His liquid sex, into the night air A trajectory While icons, saints Bear their blank-eyed Catholic witness...

"You were doing that while I was down here with Grandma's friends?"

He smiled proudly. "It's still very rough, I know, but the components are all there. This house is alive to me! I feel the most incredible psychic energy here. It's radioactive- poetically."

"I have to be back day after tomorrow," I said. "I'm working days at the store through November."

That night I locked the door to Grandma's room and lay back on her bed, rolling the rusty pebble between my thumb and finger. I'd found his stain on the rug near the foot of Grandma's bed, had gotten a washcloth and rubbed the spot clean, harder and longer than was necessary.

"Where are we?" I asked, waking up. Dante had insisted on driving. We were parked at a Burger King off the interstate. "Holyoke, Mass. Could you order? I've got to take a leak."

"What do you want?"

"I don't know-Whopper with cheese, large fries, vanilla shake."

I approached the stainless-steel counter reluctantly. Fast-food cashiers had so little patience with the indecisive.

"Welcome to Burger King. We flame-broil not fry. Can I help you?"

A. freckly, strawberry-blond teenage girl. Like Sheila, who I'd been thinking about before I'd fallen asleep. I repeated Dante's order and she punched her cash register keys. "Is that it?"

"Uh... and a cup of tea, I guess."

"Cream and sugar, ma'am?"

"Well, whatever. Okay. Yes, please."

"Five eighty-five, ma'am."

It was mid-afternoon, an off hour. There were empty booths all around us. As Dante approached, I saw the path our life was making: one continuous Etch-a-Sketch line, looping back and forth through gray.

He took his hamburger out of the box, bit a large crescent shape out of it, and chewed. I looked away. "I've been thinking," he said. "Our apartment lease is up in less than three months. What do you say we move down to your grandmother's house."

"I've been thinking, too," I said. "In a way, you raped her."

"What?"

"Your high-school girlfriend. Sheila. You raped her." He looked around to see if anyone was listening. Then he put down his Whopper. "How do you figure that?"

"You took advantage of her."

"Oh, right," he laughed. "When she orchestrated the whole thing? Calling me three or four times a day? Walking right into the apartment without even knocking?"

"You're thirty and she's, what, seventeen? You raped her by being almost twice her age."

He took a sip of his shake, staring at me. "I hope you know you've got it all wrong," he said. "I tried to tell you before. Kids today aren't innocent. If anything, the little cunt raped us. My career. You and me. Not that this is the appropriate place to go into any of this."

I dangled and dangled my tea bag. "You know what's funny?" I said. "That I stayed a vegetarian and you didn't."

"What the fuck does that have to do with anything?"

"At first, I didn't eat meat just to please you. I thought it was what you wanted, so I did it. Now it makes me- sick to even think about eating it. As a matter of fact, I'm getting this little pukey feeling just watching you with that hamburger. It's like the feeling I used to get at the mental hospital, when I imagined mold growing all over my food. I used to weigh over two hundred and fifty pounds."

He let go a nervous, bewildered laugh. "Is this just some random kind of mind rucking or am I supposed to be following your train of thought?"

"The abortion is what made me a true vegetarian, 1 sam.

"Oh, Jesus."

"Every bite you take, it's like you're eating her up. Which is what we did, in a way, Dante. First we made her, then we ate her up."

"All right, that's enough," he said. "Shut up."

"Here's something else I never told you: I got raped when I was thirteen," I said. "By my grandmother's tenant. He lived upstairs."

A worker pushed a broom past us. The silence lasted so long that I began to wonder if I'd said it out loud or just thought I had.

"I never painted any watercolors, either. It was Etch-a-Sketch pictures I did-copies of masterpieces. I was pretty good at it, actually. But I saw through your eyes that it was tacky, so I shut up about it. Oh, and my father isn't dead. He lives in New Jersey, I think, same as your parents. You just assumed he was dead, so I let you. You and he are a lot alike in some ways. That never even really occurred to me until that New Year's Day you slapped me and then-wham!-it was like, 'Dolores, how could you have missed it,' you know? But anyway, I used to do the Etch-a-Sketches when I lived at this halfway house after I got out of Gracewood. That was the mental hospital. I was there for years."

He swallowed hard; he wouldn't look at me.

"When I went into the hospital, I weighed two hundred and sixty-three pounds-a real mess. This is how unhappy I was back then: just before my breakdown, I took this taxi from Pennsylvania to Cape Cod? Tp be honest with you, I was trying to kill myself. See, I was all confused-I had just had sex with this woman who-well, that's a whole other story. Anyway, on the way there, we stopped at this doughnut place? I sat there in the backseat of that cab and ate eight or nine lemon-filled doughnuts in a row. Crying all the way, but still eating them. That's how bad I was."

He looked at me, a quick, scared glimpse. "Stop it!" he said. I couldn't stop. I felt wonderful-as free as Ma's flying leg. "You see, Dante, people don't fall so neatly into the categories you put them in-heroes and villains, unfettered and-what?-fettered? In some ways, Dante, you're the one who's uncomplicated."

"Look, if this is some sort of sick joke you're-"

"My roommate at college was Kippy Strednicki."

"What?"

"Kippy. Your old girlfriend from high school. I used to steal the letters you sent her, then lock myself in the bathroom and read them."

He sat there, staring and blinking, dumb-faced as Gomer Pyle.

"That was when you were going to be a Lutheran minister. Remember? I was so surprised that first night we met in the driveway at Mrs. Wing's. Well, not surprised we met; I planned out that whole part. I mean I was surprised when you said you didn't believe in God anymore. You seemed so religious in those letters-the way you used to torture over whether or not you and Kippy should do it before you got married. Excuse me, I'm sorry. I don't mean to smile. But do you see what I mean? About Sheila? People don't know anything when they're seventeen or eighteen years old. Back then you thought God was in heaven getting ready to hurl a thunderbolt at you if you and Kippy had sex. It's funny, in a way, isn't it? Funny peculiar, I mean. How you were so uptight and moral back then-the boy who promised his mother he wouldn't be a womanizer. Remember that? You just shouldn't make promises you don't intend to keep, Dante. Love, honor, and cherish. Ha!"

He wouldn't stop blinking up at the ceiling. "We've been married almost four years and in all that time... ? You knew Kippy?"

"Remember the time you sent her those Polaroid pictures you took of yourself, naked? On your bed in your dorm room out there in Minnesota?"

He curled his fist around his uneaten order of french fries &nd squeezed. His face turned a kind of purple color.

"What... what was she doing? Passing them around so everyone could have a good laugh?"

"It wasn't like that. She never even got them. I didn't think she deserved you, so I kept them from Her. i nougni i was protecting you."

I looked around us. The restaurant was starting to fill up.

"I used to steal your letters before she got back from her twelve o'clock class. See, they put the mail out at lunchtime and I always got it first because I never went to my classes. I only lasted one semester. Well, less than that. The funny thing was, whenever I looked at those pictures-all the time I was at the hospital and everything-all I could ever see was this poor, sensitive, vulnerable boy. That's who I thought I was marrying down at the Lobster Pot-someone vulnerable like me. That's who I kept waiting for to show up. I just had this incredible blind spot. I was like Helen Keller when it came to you."

He slammed his uneaten food into the bag and twisted the neck. "Shut the fuck up," he said. "Don't say one more fucking word."

"It wasn't until last night that I put the whole thing together. That foolish whatever-it-is, that epic thing you're writing-that's what finally helped me figure it out. Freed me, like you put it."

"Freed you to do what? Crack up in the middle of Burger King?"

"To see what I should have seen before. I kept waiting for you to turn back into the person you were in your letters and in those pictures. I guess you were right-I was pretty stupid, at least in that way. I mean, letting all those high school girls stroke your ego and calling it teaching. Wanting us to move to Rhode Island so you could stay in the house all day and jerk off in front of my grandmother's holy statues. Even way back then. Even posing yourself for those Polaroid pictures. It's all just been masturbating, hasn't it,Dante?"

"I can't believe... those pictures... You violated me!"

"Oh, I know I did. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I'm proud I stole your letters. I've always felt awful about doing that. See, that's what you don't get about Sheila: how you violated her with your 'pleasant muscle spasm' business. I mean, what it amounted to was you just jerking off into her. And me, too. Which is why you didn't even want to consider having a baby. Right? You're like that guy in the myth-the one who fell in love with his own reflection? What's his name, Dante? You know all that kind of stuff. But anyway, this is what it feels like to get violated. What you're feeling now. It's awful, isn't it? I mean, it makes you feel so powerless."

For a second I thought he was going to hit me. But I couldn't stop. I'd propelled myself in some way that felt both scary and right.

"Those pictures of you are back at our apartment in a shoe box marked 'Important Papers' or something. In the bedroom closet, top shelf. You can have them back now if you want. I'm through with them. Oh, but I do want something else in there. A painting. Well, part of a painting, actually. This little zigzaggy square of canvas. It's something my mother-"

His fist sent our food and packaging flying. "Why are you fucking with my head like this?" he shouted. The couple next to us looked over, openmouthed.

"I'm not rucking with your head," I said. "I've been doing it all these years, but now I'm not anymore. You see, I thought keeping secrets was the only way I could get you. Keep you. All these years, I kept wanting to tell you the truth. It just wouldn't come out. It was just like Dr. Shaw warned me. He was my shrink at Gracewood. He told me when I quit that I still had issues left to-"

"You cunt!" he screamed.

"Hey," someone yelled over. "You want to watch your language?"

"You want your jaw wired?" Dante shot back.

The manager scurried over to our booth, a paunchy man with wide sideburns and a paper hat In my nervousness, he struck me funny. "Hi, folks," he said.

I smiled. "Hello."

"Anything I can help you with here? Anything I can get you?"

Dante turned to him. "Yeah, you can get out ot my way, ass-wipe." He stood up and shoved the manager back against a booth.

Out in the parking lot, he opened and slammed the car door shut five or six times, then got in and sped away. We all watched him through the plate glass.

I helped the manager back onto his feet, straightened his hat for him. "As a matter of fact," I said, "you can get me something."

"What's that, ma'am?"

"A ride to Rhode Island?"

OUR LAWYERS HANDLED THE DIVISION OF PROPERTY IN A single long-distance phone call. "Yup," I kept saying. "Whatever." Dante got the Vega, the La-Z-Boy, our air conditioner, and the TV; I got a shipping carton addressed in Dante's handwriting to "Dolores Davis, Certified Lunatic." Inside were my wadded-up clothes, Ma and Daddy's candlestick holder, my Grand Union Employee of the Month plaque, and that box marked "Insurance Papers." He'd taken his Polaroids out but sent back the swatch of Ma's painting: green wingtip against blue sky. I got that back. That was home.

He'd put all my shoes in a plastic garbage bag, mistakenly including a pair of his own: brown wingtips coated with dust. With fanfare and satisfaction, I chucked them in the trash. Then, early next morning, listening to the rumble of the garbage truck on the other end of Pierce Street, I panicked and got out of bed-retrieved Dante's shoes from the can, in my bare feet.

Roberta said divorcing Dante was the right thing to do-that life was too short-but that I was stupid not to have held out for the Vega.

"That car was just a piece of junk," 1 said. " i nere were rust holes you could put your hand through. The engine sounded like it had emphysema."

"That ain't the point," she said, rapping the legs of her walker against the kitchen floor. "The point is wheels. It moved, didn't it?"

She hated the thought of the Parkinson's disease grounding her and fought against it. She'd probably made the owner of Easterly Taxi a millionaire in the two years since the disease had gotten bad, she joked. She told me I needed to get out more, too. "Engage outwardly," Dr. Shaw was always telling me. Sometimes Roberta's and Dr. Shaw's advice were remarkably similar.

That first Friday night I got back to Easterly, Roberta and I took a cab to China Paradise for supper to celebrate my independence-she and I in the backseat and her aluminum walker riding up front with the driver. "Here you go, Teddy, you goddamned robber," she laughed as she handed up her money. "Listen to my show on Sunday and I'll dedicatecha a polka. Now get my boyfriend out of the front seat for me, will ya?"

After we ate, we crossed the street to a Mel Brooks film festival at the Wayfarer Movie Cafe. Roberta had never heard of Mel Brooks before, but her big laugh was full-out and contagious; between her and Mel Brooks, the whole room was whooping it up. Here I am, I thought, sitting in the dark with strangers, laughing out loud at cowboys farting around a campfire. My whole life has flopped and I can still do this. Roberta's eyeglasses and walker glinted in the movie-screen light. I reached over and touched her arm. In those days after I moved back, I raked and bagged leaves, washed storm windows, shampooed rugs, took five-mile afternoon walks. I had the remains of Ma's painting framed at a fancy art shop for $45 and hung it on the stairway wall where my and Dante's wedding picture had been. A nice place: in late afternoon, the sun coming through the front door window cast a ray, a kind of spotlight, right on it. In November, I got a part-time job at Buchbinder's Gift and Novelty Shop. Mr. and Mrs. Buchbinder were Holocaust survivors, a scowling, gray-haired couple with thick accents that required me to make them repeat whatever they'd just asked. All day long, they heckled-and-jeckled each other and pointed out nitpicky little places I'd missed while dusting. That was my job: dusting and watching out for shoplifters and "stupit-heads" that might break something. They'd hired me for the holiday season, the day after Ronald Reagan was elected president.

"Did you vote for the peanut man or the ecduh?" Mr. Buchbinder asked me during my job interview.

"I'm sorry? The what?"

"The ecduh. The ecduh: thet schmuck from Hollywood."

"Oh. Well, actually, I didn't get a chance to vote."

"Smut thinkin'," he said. "You're hired."

Joe Wisniewski over at the Pulaski Hall says to remindjas there's a meetin' this Tuesday night at seven. They're electin' officers, so getcha dupkas over there, fellas, if you know what's good for ya. Now here's Walt Skiba and the Vice Versa Band with "Perk-Up Polka."

During the week, Roberta wore her jogging suit, but she liked to dress up for our Friday-night China Paradise-and-a-movie outings. "Deck out" she called it. She wore a shiny rayon pantsuit and made her face up with orangy lipstick and iridescent eye shadow. Her twitching hand sometimes gave her a crooked, clownish line or a lavender-dusted eyebrow. I was forever wanting to reach over my vegetarian lo mein and straighten that awful wig.