Strangers

three-quarters of her two-year residency without a hitch.
        Then, on a Tuesday morning in November, she went into Bernstein's Deli to buy a few items, and terrible things began happening. The incident of the black gloves. That was the start of it.
        
        Tuesday was her day off, and unless one of her patients had a life-threatening crisis, she was neither needed nor expected at the hospital. During her first two months at Memorial, with her usual enthusiasm and tireless drive, she had gone to work on most of her days off, for there was nothing else that she would rather do. But George Hannaby put an end to that habit as soon as he learned of it. George said that the practice of medicine was high-pressure work, and that every physician needed time off, even Ginger Weiss.
        "If you drive yourself too hard, too fast, too relentlessly," he said, "it's not only you that suffers, but the patient as well."
        So every Tuesday she slept an extra hour, showered, and had two cups of coffee while she read the morning paper at the kitchen table by the window that looked out on Mount Vernon Street. At ten o'clock she dressed, walked several blocks to Bernstein's on Charles Street, and bought pastrami, corned beef, homemade rolls or sweet pumpernickel, potato salad, blintzes, maybe some lox, maybe some smoked sturgeon, sometimes cottage cheese vareniki to be reheated at home. Then she walked home with her bag of goodies and ate shamelessly all day while she read Agatha Christie, Dick Francis, John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, sometimes a Heinlein. While she had not yet begun to like relaxation half as much as she liked work, she gradually began to enjoy her time off, and Tuesday ceased to be the dreaded day it had been when she first began her reluctant observance of the six-day week.
        That bad Tuesday in November started out fine - cold with a gray winter sky, brisk and invigorating rather than frigidand her routine brought her to Bernstein's (crowded, as usual) at ten-twenty-one. Ginger drifted from one end of the long counter to the other, peering into cabinets full of baked goods, looking through the cold glass of the refrigerated display cases, choosing from the array of delicacies with gluttonous pleasure. The room was a stewpot of wonderful smells and happy sounds: hot dough, cinnamon; laughter; garlic, cloves; rapid conversations in which the English was spiced with everything from Yiddish to Boston accents to current rock-and-roll slang; roasted hazelnuts, sauerkraut; pickles, coffee; the clink-clank of silverware. When Ginger had everything she wanted, she paid for it, pulled on her blue knit gloves, and hefted the bag, going past the small tables at which a dozen people were having a late breakfast, then headed for the door.
        She held the grocery bag in her left arm, and with her free hand she tried to put her wallet back in the purse that was slung over her right shoulder. She was looking down at the purse as she reached the door, and a man in a gray tweed topcoat and a black Russian hat entered the deli at that moment, his attention as distracted as hers; they collided. As cold air swept in from outside, she stumbled backward a step. He grabbed at her bag of groceries to keep it from falling, then steadied her with one hand on her arm.
        "Sorry," he said. "That was stupid of me."
        "My fault," she said.
        "Daydreaming," he said.
        "I wasn't looking where I was going," she said.
        "You all right?"
        "Fine. Really."
        He held the bag of groceries toward her.
        She thanked him, took the bag - and noticed his black gloves. They were obviously expensive, of high-grade genuine leather, so neatly and tightly stitched that the seams were hardly visible, but there was nothing about those gloves that could explain her instant and powerful reaction to them, nothing unusual, nothing strange, nothing threatening. Yet she did feel threatened. Not by the man. He was ordinary, pale, doughy-faced, with kind eyes behind thick tortoiseshell glasses. Inexplicably, unreasonably, the gloves themselves were what abruptly terrified her. Her breath caught in her throat, and her heart hammered.
        The most bizarre thing was the way every object and all the people in the deli began to fade as if they were not real but merely figments of a dream that was dissolving as the dreamer woke. The customers having breakfast at the small tables,