Swinging the car out past the parking kiosk onto the street, Jeff said shyly, "Well, as long as dinner was okay."

"It was great, Jeff. Really."

"Good," he said. "For a minute there, I thought Mrs. Deaken's dogs had sort of outweighed everything else to-night. I want you to really like it here, Fran. . . . You know . . ."

"Yes, sweetie, I do," she said, patting his thigh. "That's what I want, too."

The crazy lady's house was dark when they drove past. Her dogs were quiet. They usually were, at night. Thank God for small mercies: there probably weren't any noise ordinances here, and anyway, who was Fran, a newcomer, to make com-plaints against someone with what she already knew to be the old name of "Deaken" in Greystone Bay?

Jeff opened the car door for her, clearly enjoying the old-fashioned courtesy that she accepted happily only from him. She heard him humming and jingling his keys in his pocket as he followed her up the shallow concrete steps that led up the sloping front lawn.

She turned, under the porch light, and watched him, the gangly height of him, the lively tumble of his auburn hair, his intent young face. How did I get so lucky? she thought. Oh, how did I get so lucky, to have this lovely boy love me?

He had paused on one of the steps, frowning at the lawn.

"Fran?" he said. "How often are you watering the grass? Look. There's a bunch of mushrooms sprouting in the middle of it."

She went back to him to look. Squinting, she could clearly see by the light leaking out through the curtains of the front room a group of pale, striated bubbles clustered on a little rise in the grass. The raised place was a writhe of half-buried root from the thick-trunked shade tree that one of Jeff's fore-bears had planted. Roots had surfaced like gnarled dolphins all over the lawn, making the mowing a chore.

"I water it three times a week," she said. "The handyman said to, because it's been warm for September."

Not tonight, it wasn't. She felt silly saying it.

"But it's been drizzling, nights," Jeffrey pointed out. "All that moisture could be bad. Try cutting down a little."

"Sure," she said.

"That's more like it. Now you sound like your agreeable self," he said.

"I'll agree to anything to get in out of this chill."

"Oh, we can fix that," he said, giving her a kiss on the neck, and she told him to stop that, not out in the street please, and he said well let's find a better place then, and they did.

A perfect end to a perfect day.

The perfection held over to the next morning. She came to the curb with him as he left for work in the Tercel. They giggled and made a minor spectacle of themselves, and then he drove away down the quiet suburban street, back to the SeaHarp for the day.

Take that, neighbors, Fran thought, palming the hair back from her cheeks. She almost regretted her youthful looks, which kept it from being obvious (at any distance, anyway) that she was older than Jeffrey. "Older woman kisses ac-countant lover goodbye." Yum.Never mind, she would show any watching neighbors that she was a worthy householder. She would tend to her lawn.

The smooth slope of grass from the front wall of the house down to the sidewalk really was a source of pleasure.

The sprinkler system itself was a thrill-all that control, at the turn of a handle. All that grass, under the high, dappled can-opy of one large tree. It was a far cry from the little apartment with the tiny brick patio in Boston, where they had started living together.

She picked her way across the wet grass (alert for deposits left by wandering neighborhood dogs) and inspected the little stand of mushrooms.

They must have popped up overnight. How nice if they should prove to be edible: sauteed mushrooms, fresh picked, some rare type stuffed with healthful and exotic vitamins, no doubt. They wouldn't be indulging in meals at the SeaHarp very often. It would be nice to have some really special, delicious dishes that she could make at home.

But the mushrooms didn't look edible. Each mushroom was about as big as a knuckle, round, and of a particularly unattractive greasy pallor that made her wrinkle her nose. They looked-well, fungoid, anything but fresh and whole-some, alien. Alien to the dinner table, anyway, unless it was some French dinner table regularly graced with sauced ani-mal glands.

Well, the daylight would no doubt kill the pallid little knobs. People grew mushroom in cellars, didn't they? Fog or no fog, the lawn was hardly a dark cellar. She was a city girl, not a gardener, but this much she could figure out by logic.

However, there was no more perfection that day.

She typed medical transcripts from her tape machine until the dishwasher made a weird sound and vomited greasy water on the floor. A session with an outrageously expensive plumber, plus his doltish (also expensive) apprentice fol-lowed. She contained her temper with difficulty (who knew when she might need them again, and how many plumbers were there in town?).

At least the ancient and rusted Volks she had brought with her from Boston started without fuss. But when Fran deliv-ered the transcript pages she had finished, Carmella, her sup-plier, informed her that two of the doctors were going on vacation (at the same time, of course). There would be less work for a while.

Fran cursed all the way home (including the stop at the nearest supermarket). If only Carmella had told her at the outset that this was coming!

What could she have done about it, though? Not bought that little rug for the front hallway at the flea market, that's what.

A package had been left for her with her neighbor on the north, a skinny girl who brought it over and introduced her-self as Betsy. As Jeff had mentioned, she was a nurse with a late shift at Bay Memorial Hospital, though to Fran she seemed awfully young and feather-headed to be a nurse.

Betsy wandered around admiring the rather scanty furni-ture and the posters Fran had hung on the walls while she answered Fran's delicate soundings about the neighborhood here on the lower slopes of North Hill.

The "convenience" store down on Woodbane Street was a rip-off joint, but the shoemaker next door to it was okay, if the work wasn't anything complicated. And it was a good idea to keep your car doors locked when parked in your own yard. They had burglaries, which was why so many people had dogs. Not that they did much good. No, Betsy didn't have dogs herself, and neither did her housemates, one an elementary school teacher, one in social work, all three rent-ers from the older couple (now in Florida) who owned the house.

"Anyway," she said, "those two little monsters of Mrs. Deaken's are more than enough for a whole block of the neighborhood."

Fran put aside the totally inappropriate blouse her sister had sent her for her birthday (a birthday which Fran would have preferred to forget) and offered Betsy tea. "What about that woman?" she said, sitting down across the kitchen table from her. "Mrs. Deaken, I mean."

"Oh, she's weird," Betsy said with enthusiasm. "Nutty as a fruitcake, if you ask me. I hear her screaming in her place all the time, just yelling like-well, like my mother used to yell at me when I was giving her a really hard time. At first I thought there was a kid in there with her, and me and my roommates seriously considered calling the cops, in case theold loon was abusing a child or something. It always sounds so violent."

She sat back, shrugging in the oversize shirt that hung flatteringly on her slim frame. "But I've never seen anybody else but Mrs. Deaken herself go in or out, not in a year and a half. So I guess she's just screaming at the dogs, or the TV. I bet she drinks. Female alkies are thin. They drink instead of eating."

Fran admitted that she hadn't seen the crazy lady yet, only heard her. *

"Oh, she looks okay, sort of, I guess," Betsy said airily. "But boy, is she nuts."

Fran laughed. "Then it's lucky that Jeff didn't wind up with the place right across from her.''

"I'll say," Betsy said vehemently. "She's craziest of all about men, and if that guy I saw leaving this morning was Jeff, she'd be after him in a minute."

"Then she'd have a fight on her hands," Fran retorted. "Jeffrey is mine, as in significant other, or whatever they say these days."

Was it Fran's imagination, or was Betsy surprised at this news? At least she didn't blurt out something like, oh, I thought he was your son.

In the evening before dinner, while the stew simmered, Fran and Jeffrey walked up the block toward the uneven tri-angle of green that was the tiny local park. It was really just a couple of oddly-shaped lots that had been left green, Jeff said, for some reason. Officially they called it North Hill Park, but nobody used that large name because it seemed absurd for such a small patch of land.

Passing the crazy lady's house on the stroll back, Fran looked across the street and saw the bluish glimmer of a TV screen inside the front window. The house itself was pretty, with a shapely front porch framing the doorway within, and two jauntily nautical porthole-shaped windows flanking the doorway as well.

Suddenly a report like a gunshot rang from the porch: the screen door banging. Two little dogs came skittering down the bricked walk, barking wildly, and skidded to a dancing halt at the edge of the crazy lady's lawn.

"Jeez," Jeffrey said, protectively clutching Fran's arm. "What did she do, sic them on us? We're not even on her side of the street!"

"I told you," Fran said. "The woman is bonkers."

"Funny, I don't remember her being like that when I was a kid," Jeff said speculatively. "I barely remember her at all, except she was married then, I think. Must have had a tough life since."

"So what?" Fran said. "Everybody's life is tough, but not everybody sics their dogs on innocent passers-by.''

"Well, at least they're not Dobermans," he said, looking back at the two bouncing, shrieking animals.

"Shh," Fran said, "you don't want to give her any ideas."

Secretly, she was relieved to have the little dogs come after her and Jeff instead of the crazy lady herself coming out, after what Betsy had said.

She cut the grass the next day with the old hand-mower they had found in the toolshed at the back of the house.

The mower stuck a bit on the roots that veined the turf, and she gave up with the job half-done (it was a lot harder than she'd imagined).

But she made sure to drag the machine back and forth a couple of times over the bubbly clot of white mushrooms, like greasy blisters, which had expanded rather than drying up and blowing away. Under the blades, the mushrooms dis-integrated with satisfying ease.

The tape she transcribed after lunch was from Doctor Reeves, a plastic surgeon who specialized in burn patients.

His dry, dispassionate notes on two children who had been caught in a burning trailer out on the west edge of town made her feel sick.

She quit (there was no rush, with the volume of work slowed to an impoverishing trickle) and went for a walk, hands jammed in her jeans pockets.This part of lower North Hill was occupied by curving streets of sturdy, solid houses, of modest but comfortable size, in a mixture of styles. Some showed odd and endearing turns of fantasy, like the two with roofs of layered tiling cut like thatched English cottages, and a white house with a min-iature fairy-tale tower for a front hallway.

Out of sheer devilment-and to see what would happen-on the way home she walked up the lane again, toward the park.

The sandy wheel-track was choked with weeds, vines, and branches hanging over from the adjacent yards. The lanes, she knew, had once been used for garbage pickup. Then the city had bought a whole new fleet of garbage trucks that were only afterward discovered to be too wide for the lanes, which now served the purposes of kids, gas men who read your meter with binoculars as they cruised slowly through, the occasional pair of parked lovers, and (to judge by the crazy lady, anyway) burglars.

As Fran swung boldly toward the head of the lane, a sharp rapping sound snapped at her from the back of the crazy lady's house. A lean figure in a flowered housecoat glared murderously at her through the closed kitchen window: the crazy lady herself, presumably, in a beehive hairdo, banging her fist on the glass in a kind of maniac aggression.

Fran smiled and waved as if merely returning a friendly greeting and walked on, managing not to flinch from the incredible racket of the little dogs shrilling at her back. The crazy lady must have let the dogs into the side yard just to bark at Fran.

Jesus, Fran thought, striding quickly around the corner and back down the street toward Jeff's house. I shouldn't have waved at her, I should have tossed a rock through her win-dow! Who the hell does she think she is, the witch?

The lanes are city property, I can walk in them if I like.

What if she has a gun in there? A paranoid like that, she probably does. Hell, she could shoot me and say she thought I was a burglar.

People like that shouldn't be allowed to live on their own. Tough life or no tough life, Mrs. Crazy Deaken should be in an institution.

The mushrooms were back the next morning, but they were different; Fran couldn't help noticing them when she went out on the porch to look for the mail (it hadn't come yet). They were brown and flat, growing in overlapping layers along the shaggy arm of root that seemed to be the seat of the infestation.

She squatted down and stared at them. They were wet from the overnight rain and their frilled edges glistened a pallid pink.

"Yuch," she said aloud. "What evil-looking mush-rooms!" She prodded them gingerly with a twig dropped by the old tree.

"They're your evil thoughts."

It was a hoarse voice from the sidewalk, the voice of the crazy lady.

There she stood, disconcertingly thin and slight in a pastel pants-suit, a cigarette smouldering between two of her sharp-knuckled fingers. She had enough lipstick on for six mouths, and she wasn't smiling.

Fran gaped at her, at a loss for words. The woman looked like a bona fide witch out of a modern fairy tale, and what do you say to a witch who comes calling? With intense plea-sure Fran said to herself, She's older than I am. She's older. Old, like a witch is supposed to be!

The crazy lady said, "Have you seen a little dog? He's about a foot high, with black and white spots."

"Uh, no, sorry." Fran said with forced amiability. "I spend most of my time at the back of my house, at my type-writer. ''

"He got out this morning," the crazy lady said, looking around with a frown. Did she think the dog might pop up at any moment from under Fran's lawn?

Fran said, "If I do see him, I'll be sure and let you know."

"Thank you," the crazy lady said, as if she had never banged on the window or screamed at Fran- maybe she didn't recognize her? She walked away, holding her cigarette hand out from her side at an elegant angle that she must have picked up from Bette Davis in an old black-and-white movie.Fran stared at the mushrooms. "Those are your evil thoughts?" What kind of a thing was that to say to her?

The woman was a total crackpot, one step short of being a bag-lady. She must be living on an inheritance or the pen-sion left by a dead husband, so she didn't have to wander the streets.

But the mushrooms really did look evil, old and wrinkled and evil. They looked like-Fran sat back on her heels, blushing. What an idea! They looked like an exaggerated parody of the folds of her vagina, that was what they looked like. No, not hers, some old hag's swollen and discolored sex.

She scrambled up muttering, "Don't be an idiot, you id-iot," and with the back of the straight rake she whacked the new crop of fungus to flying fragments.

Over pizza that night with a few of Jeffrey's friends from the hotel office, she didn't mention the conversation with the crazy lady. She didn't feel altogether comfortable with Jef-frey's friends, except for a woman a little older than herself who was working at the SeaHarp after a divorce.

On her way the next day to pick up some tapes from a back-up source who sometimes gave her work, Fran saw the crazy lady's dog, or anyway it might have been the crazy lady's dog, jittering back and forth on the far side of Wood-bane Street. It made one mad dash to cross, was honked at by an approaching car, and dodged back again to the far side where it hopped on its stiff little legs and barked at the traffic.

She considered driving back to tell the crazy lady, but she had lost time over the pizza and beer last night and was in a hurry. And when she got back, Mrs. Deaken was occupied.

She was having an altercation with a jogger, from the safety of her porch. Fran parked and sat in the Volks and watched.

The jogger marked time at the curb, his head turned toward the house with its two round windows flanking the porch. "I'm not doing anything in your yard, lady. I didn't touch your yard."

On the porch the crazy lady stood with her hips shot to one side in an aggressive slouch and shouted furiously, "I saw you on my grass! You ran over my grass!"

"I don't run on grass," he said. "It's slippery, and you can't see your footing." He was middle-aged and a bit flabby around the middle, but he held his ground, running in place while he argued.

"I saw you!" the crazy lady yelled. Her remaining dog shot past her, barking. It made mad little dashes in the di-rection of the jogger, none of which carried it more than halfway across the lawn. "This is private property! You stay off it!"

"Gladly," the jogger retorted. "Lady, you're nuts, you know that?" He went on toward the park, shaking his head, elbows pumping, pursued by the barking of the dog. The crazy lady began screaming at the dog, which finally gave up barking and sulked back into the house, whereupon the screen door gave another mighty bang and all grew quiet.

Oh the hell with it, Fran thought, I'm not going to say a thing about the damn other dog. Someone like that shouldn't even have pets. The little beast is probably better off in the traffic.

She padded up onto her own patch of grass, where she automatically checked the mushroom site. A new crop, and a different type again, seemed to have sprouted overnight.

There were six of them, tallish, on spindly stalks, and they had elongated, domed caps with dark, spidery markings along their lower sides. Like odd, tiny lampshades trimmed with black lace, or six otherworldly missiles waiting to be launched.

Evil thoughts. .

Oh bull, Fran thought, looking up the street at the crazy lady's house. What about her evil thoughts, where are they displayed?

She didn't touch the new crop. She was tired of beating them to bits and then having them show up again. It was too much like losing some kind of struggle, which was ridicu-lous, because there was no struggle. You don't have a strug-gle with a bunch of mushrooms.

She blew up at Jeffrey about the records he brought home that night. She hated salsa, and there was the expense, and it didn't help when he showed her that they were second-hand, very cheap, from the used bookstore down nearthe harbor.

Of course they made up. They made love. But Fran couldn't sleep right away afterward. She lay on her back and amused herself wondering which of her evil thoughts of the day those slender, silvery mushrooms represented.