Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

around your bum?” She laughed, and I said, “Was it ever hot on the train. I’m sweating like a pig.”
    I could hear how my voice sounded, as twangy and hearty as my stepmother Bet’s.
    Sweating like a pig.
    Now on the streetcar going to Queenie’s place I couldn’t stop sounding stupid. I said, “Are we still downtown?” The high buildings had been quickly left behind, but I didn’t think you could call this area residential. The same sort of shops and buildings went on over and over again—a dry cleaner, a florist, a grocery store, a restaurant. Boxes of fruit and vegetables out on the sidewalk, signs for dentists and dressmakers and plumbing suppliers in the second-story windows. Hardly a building higher than that, hardly a tree.
    “It’s not the real downtown,” said Queenie. “Remember I showed you where Simpson’s was? Where we got on the streetcar? That’s the real.”
    “So are we nearly there?” I said.
    She said, “We got a ways to go yet.”
    Then she said, “‘Way.’ Stan doesn’t like me saying ‘ways’ either.”
    The repetition of things, or maybe the heat, was making me feel anxious and rather sick. We were holding my suitcase on our knees and only a couple of inches ahead of my fingers was a man’s fat neck and bald head. A few black, sweaty long hairs clung to his scalp. For some reason I had to think of Mr. Vorguilla’s teeth in the medicine cabinet, which Queenie showed me when she worked for the Vorguillas next door. That was long before Mr. Vorguilla could ever be thought of as Stan.
    Two joined teeth sitting beside his razor and shaving brush and the wooden bowl holding his hairy and disgusting shaving soap.
    “That’s his bridge,” Queenie had said.
    Bridge?
    “Bridge of teeth.”
    “Yuck,” I said.
    “These are his extras,” she said. “He’s wearing his others.”
    “Yuck. Aren’t they yellow?”
    Queenie put her hand over my mouth. She didn’t want Mrs. Vorguilla to hear us. Mrs. Vorguilla was lying downstairs on the dining-room couch. Her eyes were closed most of the time, but she might not be sleeping.

    When we got off the streetcar at last we had to walk up a steep hill, trying awkwardly to share the weight of the suitcase. The houses were not quite all the same, though at first they looked like it. Some of the roofs came down over the walls like caps, or else the whole second story was like a roof, and covered in shingles. The shingles were dark green or maroon or brown. The porches came to within a few feet of the sidewalk, and the spaces between the houses seemed narrow enough for people to reach out the side windows and shake hands. Children were playing on the sidewalk, but Queenie took no more notice of them than if they were birds pecking in the cracks. A very fat man, naked from the waist up, sat on his front steps staring at us in such a fixed and gloomy way that I was sure he had something to say. Queenie marched on past him.
    She turned in partway up the hill, following a gravel path between some garbage tins. Out of an upstairs window a woman called something that I found unintelligible. Queenie called back, “It’s just my sister, she’s visiting.”
    “Our landlady,” she said. “They live in the front and upstairs. They’re Greeks. She doesn’t speak hardly any English.”
    It turned out that Queenie and Mr. Vorguilla shared a bathroom with the Greeks. You took your roll of toilet paper with you—if you forgot, there wasn’t any. I had to go in there at once, because I was menstruating heavily and had to change my pad. For years afterwards, the sight of certain city streets on hot days, certain shades of brown brick and dark-painted shingles, and the noise of streetcars, would bring back to me the memory of cramps low in the belly, waves of flushing, bodily leaks, hot confusion.
    There was one bedroom where Queenie slept with Mr. Vorguilla, and another bedroom turned into a small living room, and a narrow kitchen, and a sunporch. The cot on the sunporch was where I was to sleep. Close outside the windows the landlord and another man were fixing a motorcycle. The smell of oil, of metal and machinery mixed with the smell of ripe tomatoes in the sun. There was a radio blaring music out an upstairs window.
    “One thing Stan can’t stand,” said Queenie. “That radio.” She pulled the flowered curtains closed, but the noise and sun still came through. “I wish I could’ve afforded lining,” she said.
    I had the bloody