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as a strong breeze buffets the house. Her mother sits cross-legged on a throw pillow on the floor, a blanket on her lap, papers spread out before her. “Look at me!” her mother says loudly. “I’m doing bills!”
    Across the room, Mira sits in a chair and does her homework in the glow of a glass table lamp with a bordello shade. Mira’s posture is unusually straight, as if she sits with her back to a wall. Only her head is tilted downward toward the ruled page of her notebook.
    Her mother puts the bill in front of her to the side and looks at the one beneath it. It is from The Little Kirov, typed in heavy ink on onionskin paper. She holds it up.
    â€œAgh,” says her mother, shaking the paper. “What do you like so much about ballet?”
    Mira does not look up. “It’s beautiful?”
    Her mother writes some numbers in her bank book. “It’s 1977. Beauty? Where has it gotten us?”
    Mira looks up. Her mother’s red kimono, now wrinkled and dull; it hangs on her like a too-big sheet. Her mother looks small and pale. Dwarfed by the things in the room. The junk, her father would say. Her mother laughs her skittish laugh and covers her face with her hands. “Where has it gotten me ?” She drops her hands and in a louder voice says, “Let it go down in flames!”
    â€œWhy don’t you sit on the floor? You don’t look comfortable,” says her mother.
    â€œI like this chair,” says Mira.
    â€œI am thinking of taking all the chairs out.”
    â€œNo!” Mira says. When she sees her mother’s expression, she wants to look back down. But she doesn’t. Mother and daughter stare at each other for several moments; there is something between them, then nothing.

THE WOMAN
      WHO BLED
IN HER SHOES
CHAPTER 7
PRESENT
    It’s time. The letter. I hadn’t forgotten, not exactly. The rage toward Bill had to be dealt with first, but now I go get the letter from my bag. In my ochre reading chair, under a gray-white Ohio sky, I spread the letter out on my lap.
    I have gone away to a place where the dead go—no, not Hades, a city that befits me. No ballet here, only early bird specials and other sad people who have been banished to a city with no reason for existing.
    My mind treads water, eddies pull. That voice. It’s his. How can it be? Can he still be alive? How old would he be now? I quickly do the math—eighty. Possible. But why now ? Why contact me after so long?
    I close my eyes. To leave the body. To abandon the body. I know this trick. It doesn’t work. The body goes on. So I call myself back. To the Dutch Colonial that I fell in love with on my tour of the town late last spring. Its blue slate roof on the cupola (with pewter detailing)like ancient armor, and inside the hardwood floors and clean white walls, all of which felt vast after my last two small, linoleum-tiled (and ammonia-stink) faculty accommodations.
    I open my eyes. Everything looks altered. The red ceramic vase my mother gave me for my doctoral ceremony, for which I have both an abiding revulsion and love. I’ve carried it with me from college town to college town over the past four years. I look over at my black office chair, my spindle-necked desk lamp, my modular desk to which I had attached an ergonomic keyboard. It’s like peering through glass—everything looks altered, too big or too small in this space. Objects tossed together with no coherency. I remember only the compulsion, the desire and guilt in each item’s acquisition. Only the rug under my feet feels familiar and recognizable, with its bold geometry of circles and triangles, a faux Mondrian pattern. These things—my chair, my rug, my desk—I’d chosen to create a workspace, now pulling apart.
    I force myself to keep reading:
    You killed me and I must thank you. I am one of the dead. I do not deserve to have commerce with the living. I