I don’t have a husband anymore and my kids don’t give a damn about me,” said the elderly black lady. She regarded Justine with what appeared to be irritation as Justine moved about her, preparing her for an EKG.

“What about friends? Can’t they help you out?”

“Yeah, but I’m not the kind of person who likes to always be going to other people with my problems. They’ve got plenty of their own you know.” Mrs. Dubois regarded her censoriously.

The problem under discussion was Mrs. Dubois’s partial blindness due to severe cataracts in both eyes. She had begun to find it difficult to shop and to read bills; she had almost fallen down a flight of stairs, a potential disaster for someone her age. She was reluctant, however, to have the cataracts removed; Justice thought it was because she was afraid of having her eyes operated on. “I’m sure your friends wouldn’t mind helping you,” said Justine, “they’d be pretty mean if they did.”

Mrs. Dubois answered her with a look that said, “If you think that’s ‘mean,’ you don’t know what mean is, you young fool.”

Well, thought Justine, it’s not any of my business. Still, she had always liked Mrs. Dubois, a stiff-backed, ill-tempered, good-mannered, ferociously proper little woman who always pulled on her threadbare kid gloves with a wonderful arrogant smartness before she left the office. She hated to think of her alone at home in a small dark apartment, hungry and afraid to go out because she couldn’t see. She wondered if her pride prevented her from getting help from her neighbors and children, or if they really were indifferent to her. She applied the clamps to the delicate sepia ankles and thought of herself, alone in her apartment at night, trying to soothe herself to sleep with a fantasy of Bryan holding her in his arms and cupping her head against his chest, which he never did and probably never would do. Her concern for Mrs. Dubois united with her desperation and self-pity and became magnified abnormally. She thought of Mrs. Dubois as a young woman, a romantic and finicky young woman who liked matching jewelry combinations and wanted everything to be just so. She imagined her traveling through the barbed wire and land mines of a racist society which refused to respect or even acknowledge the delicacy of any black woman and insisted on seeing only the coarseness and dullness that it had decreed to be the character of African-Americans, regardless of how it had to distort its vision in the process. Since the neat garden of Angeline Dubois’s nature was denied the sun and warmth of acknowledgment, she was forced to turn inward to keep her internal garden alive, to draw nurture from an underground well so deep she couldn’t allow her attention to waver from the thread of concentration on which she lowered the bucket, lest the thread break and she be bereft forever. Thus she drew herself in, stiffening the rules, regulations, and visiting hours of the garden, tightening its borders, becoming fanatical over the patterns in which it was allowed to grow until her natural delicacy had assumed the martial uniform of primness, the bitter primness with which she pulled on her battered, once-elegant gloves.

Justine desolately considered the level of insult this woman had had to bear simply in maintaining her true self in a world that denied its existence, and the vicarious pain fell like a piece of granite against her own pain. “Maybe you should get the operation, Mrs. Dubois,” she said.

The filmy, half-blinded eyes filled with expressions that rose and were succeeded by different shades of feeling; she saw Justine’s kindness which she despised and rejected, she saw also that the kindness was connected to something else, felt curious as to what this other thing might be, then rejected it as well, then felt curious again. Justine could see she felt invaded and oppressed by her concern, and strove to hold it away from her. Then the eyes softened, perhaps because she saw that Justine was essentially harmless and well-meaning, perhaps because she was too old to expend the energy required to reject her; she accepted Justine’s kindness and then let it fall away from her with the uselessness of a broken ornament. “Well maybe I will,” she said.

Mrs. Dubois says her children don’t give a damn about her,” said Justine to Glenda.

“Ah! That is nonsense. She is probably just depressed.”

“How do you know?”

“Because her daughter has come to pick her up here before and she seems to be a fine young person. She wouldn’t come pick her up if she didn’t care about her.”

Justine didn’t see that that was necessarily true but she didn’t want to argue. Glenda oscillated the radio dial to escape the news for more classical music and was interrupted by a phone call. The dial was caught for a moment on a pop song undercut with the processed mutter of the news broadcast. The song told about love and then the news voice gained ascendancy long enough to mention the latest in a series of incidents in which gangs of young girls surrounded lone women and jabbed them in the butt with needles. So far, the jabbing girls had been black and the jabbed women had been white, and the media was solemnly speculating that the attacks might be racial; one commentator said she thought that perhaps they were making a statement about the spread of AIDS in the black community via hypodermics. The love song swelled forth again, smothering the news with one and only true love. Justine was stung by the sweet, calculated young voice, its high pitch like a tiny knife cutting a valentine heart out of the coarse flesh of love.

Mrs. Dubois emerged from the office, her little hat askew on her head. For the first time Justine saw her composure become undone in embarrassment as she reacted to the sight of Justine’s face, which was crying spare, almost dry tears as she filled out Mrs. Dubois’s appointment card, talking as if nothing unusual was taking place even as the tears ran over her lips.

Justine was glad when they let her leave work early because that way she would have more time to work on her Anna Granite piece. But it had probably made a bad impression to cry at work, even though she had done it discreetly, even though Mrs. Dubois had been nice about it.

She bought a bag of cookies in lieu of dinner and ate them as she sat on the floor with her legs extended before her, thinking about the article. She justified going without dinner by telling herself that preparing and eating it would take away too much of her writing time. The eating of meals had somehow become burdensome to her; she was losing weight and becoming anxious about her health, yet she couldn’t make herself eat nutritionally sound food. Well, she’d worry about it later. She wadded up the empty cookie bag and left it on the floor. She put her notebook on her lap, picked up her pen, and began: “The national swing to the right, in progress for the last five years, has developed the skewed, triple exclamation point character of a bad novel.”

The phone rang, and she picked it up. “Hi,” he said. “Feel like getting your ass whipped?”

“I’m busy,” she snapped and hung up.

The phone rang again, four times before she answered it.

“God, what’re you so testy about?” he asked. “At least you could say hello.”

“It didn’t seem necessary.”

“You know my nutty sense of humor.”

“Okay, hello. I’m working on my article and I can’t see you tonight if that’s what you were asking about.”

“I understand. You’re writing really important stuff and you can’t be interrupted.”

“Fuck off.” She hung up again.

The phone rang again. Again she picked it up.

“Is this behavior modification or what?”

“You’re acting like an asshole.”

“So what else is new? Justine, I don’t want to make you mad. I know you have to do your work. It’ll probably be great. I just wanted to see you. I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

“I’ve been thinking about you too,” she lied.

“That’s nice.”

“I’d love to see you, it’s just I can’t now. If I get this done tonight, maybe tomorrow.”

They hung up civilly. She continued writing. “This cultural utopia of greed, expressed in gentrification and the slashing of social programs, has had its spokesperson and prophet for the last fifty years, a novelist whose books are American fantasies that mirror, in all its neurotic excess, the frantic twist to the right we are now experiencing. Anna Granite, who coined the term ‘the Truth of Selfishness,’ has been advocating the yuppie raison d’être since the early forties; it is only now that her ideas are being lived out, in mass culture and in government.”

The phone rang again.

“How about if I just come over and whip you and then leave so you can keep working?”

She hung up, cursed, unplugged the phone, and kept writing.