Who Do You Think You Are

might be unwise.
    I N THE MIDDLE of the week she went to the store, not to buy anything, but to get her fortune told. The woman looked in her cup and said, “Oh, you! You’ve met the man who will change everything.”
    “Yes, I think so.”
    “He will change your life. Oh Lord. You won’t stay here. I see fame.
    I see water.”
    “I don’t know about that. I think he wants to insulate my house.” “The change has begun already.”
    “Yes. I know it has. Yes.”
    S HE COULD NOT REMEMBER what they had said about Simon coming again. She thought that he was coming on the weekend. She expected him, and she went out and bought groceries, not at the local store this time but at a supermarket several miles away. She hoped the woman at the store wouldn’t see her carrying the grocery bags into the house. She had wanted fresh vegetables and steak and imported black cherries, and Camembert and pears. She had bought wine, too, and a pair of sheets covered with stylish garlands of blue and yellow flowers. She was thinking her pale haunches would show up well against them.
    On Friday night she put the sheets on the bed and the cherries in a blue bowl. The wine was chilling, the cheese was getting soft. Around nine o’clock came the loud knock, the expected joking knock on the door. She was surprised that she hadn’t heard his car.
    “Felt lonesome,” said the woman from the store. “So I just thought I’d drop in and—oh-oh. You’re expecting your company.”
    “Not really,” Rose said. Her heart had started thumping joyfully when she heard the knock and was thumping still. “I don’t know when he’s arriving here,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow.”
    “Bugger of a rain.”
    The woman’s voice sounded hearty and practical, as if Rose might need distracting or consoling.
    “I just hope he isn’t driving in it, then,” Rose said.
    “No sir, you wouldn’t want him driving in it.”
    The woman ran her fingers through her short gray hair, shaking the rain out, and Rose knew she ought to offer her something. A glass of wine? She might become mellow and talkative, wanting to stay and finish the bottle. Here was a person Rose had talked to, plenty of times, a friend of sorts, somebody she would have claimed to like, and she could hardly be bothered to acknowledge her. It would have been the same at that moment with anyone who was not Simon. Anyone else seemed accidental and irritating.
    Rose could see what was coming. All the ordinary delights, consolations, diversions, of life would be rolled up and packed away; the pleasure found in food, lilacs, music, thunder in the night, would vanish. Nothing would do any more but to lie under Simon, nothing would do but to give way to pangs and convulsions.
    She decided on tea. She thought she might as well put the time to use by having another go at her future.
    “It’s not clear,” the woman said.
    “What’s not?”
    “I’m not able to get anything in focus tonight. That happens. No, to be honest, I can’t locate him.”
    “Can’t locate him?”
    “In your future. I’m beat.”
    Rose thought she was saying this out of ill-will, out of jealousy. “Well, I’m not just concerned about him.”
    “Maybe I could do better if you had any possessions of his, just let me have it to hang on to. Anything he had his hands on, do you have that?”
    “Me,” said Rose. A cheap boast, at which the fortune-teller was obliged to laugh.
    “No, seriously.”
    “I don’t think so. I threw his cigarette butts out.”
    A FTER THE WOMAN had gone Rose sat up waiting. Soon it was midnight. The rain came down hard. The next time she looked it was twenty to two. How could time so empty pass so quickly? She put out the lights because she didn’t want to be caught sitting up. She undressed, but couldn’t lie down on the fresh sheets. She sat on in the kitchen, in the dark. From time to time she made fresh tea. Some light from the street light at the corner came into the room. The village had bright new mercury vapor lights. She could see that light, a bit of the store, the church steps across the road. The church no longer served the discreet and respectable Protestant sect that had built it, but proclaimed itself a Temple of Nazareth, also a Holiness Center, whatever that might be. Things were more askew here than Rose had noticed before. No retired farmers lived in these houses; in fact there were no farms to retire from, just the poor fields covered with juniper. People