JANICE HARRISON goes to the front door when the old bell scrapes the silence. Decades of rust have all but destroyed its voice, the thing will die entirely some day, the clapper freezing or the wires shorting out or whatever they do. Whenever she says she wants to call the electrician, Ronnie tells her it's on his list of home improvements, he'll get to it. He likes to do things himself. Harry was all for letting other people do them.
A twinge in her hip slows her progress out from the sunny worn kitchen, through the dining room, whose shades are drawn to keep the Oriental rug from fading and the polished mahogany tabletop from drying out, into the front room, where the reproduction cobbler's bench in front of the gray cut-plush sofa causes a detour that has worn a pale path in the carpet. A big brown Zenith television, its top loaded with her mother's dusty knickknacks, blankly stares where her father's Barcalounger used to be. They don't sit out here and watch on the sofa like they used to. Ronnie likes the little Sony in the kitchen for the evening news, watching while he eats, and Nelson when he's stuck at home after work has the computer upstairs that he says is more fun than television because it's interactive. He wasn't so interactive with his wife that Teresa didn't move back to Ohio with the two children over a year ago. He and Roy, who is fourteen now, do a lot of e-mail, mostly rude jokes (one especially shocking joke this summer went Remember when the Kennedys used to drown only one woman at a time?), as if e-mail was as good as having a real father under the same roof.
Often Janice doesn't hear the bell at all, even when she's in the house or the backyard garden. She finds pinched in the door these notices from deliverymen who had to go away or cards from salesmen who didn't get to make their pitch. She's grateful for that but still it makes her feel isolated; suppose somebody rang she was dying to see? She doesn't know who that would be, though. So many she cared about are dead.
The heavy walnut door with its tall sidelights of frosted glass patterned in floral arabesques, the door that she has been going in and out of most of her life off and on, has been swollen and sticking all summer with a humidity that never produced rain. Now it swings open more easily, with a dry crack, fall crispness being in the air at last. The girl—woman, really, close to Nelson's age—who stands on the front porch looks vaguely familiar. She has a broad white face, her eyes wide-spaced with some milk in their blue and middle-aged crinkles at the corners beginning to develop. Taller than Janice by a bit, she fills her beige summer dress well, the cotton taut across her bosom and lap. She wears a navy-blue sweater draped over her shoulders like the young women at the Pearson and Schrack Realty office do, manning their glowing computers, giving a businesslike air. She asks, "Mrs. Angstrom?"
Janice is taken aback. "I was," she allows. "My husband's name now is Harrison."
The girl blushes. "I'm sorry, I did know that. I wasn't thinking." The girl's milky-blue eyes widen and Janice feels this stranger is actually trembling, her body aquiver in its careful quiet clothes, a creature somehow trapped on the welcome mat, in the rectangular shade of the brick-pillared porch.
Behind her, cars swish by on Joseph Street with a fresh dry sound. A shiny-new, brick-red Lexus stands at the dappled curb, under the still-green maples. A cloud passes overhead and the shadow is almost chilling: that's how you feel the new season, the shadows are sharper and darker, and the crickets sing under everything. With the terrible drought this summer the leaves are turning early, those of the horse chestnuts curling brown at the edges, and the front yards where no one has watered have turned to flattened straw, a look Janice remembers from childhood, when you are closer to the ground and summer is endless.
"My mother died two months ago," the girl begins again, taking a breath to steady her trembling, both her hands holding a small striped purse in front of her belly.
"I'm sorry," Janice says. Nelson deals with crazy people at his work all the time and says they're not to be afraid of. She deals with people trying to buy or sell houses, the most money a lot of them will ever have to think about, and they can get high-strung and irrational, too.
"I've never married, she was all the family I had."
So, despite her respectable clothes, this is a beggar. "I'm sorry," Janice says again, in a harder tone, "but I don't believe I can help." Her hand moves to swing the heavy door shut. Nelson is off at the treatment center and Ronnie playing golf at the club with some other retirees so she is alone in the house. Not that the girl looks violent. But she is bigger than Janice, bigger-boned, with a dangerous fullness to her being there, as if defiantly arrived at the end of a long wavering, like a client taking the plunge of offering thirty thousand more than she can afford. Her eyes are set in squarish sockets showing the puffy look of sleeplessness and her hair, cut raggedly short the way they do it now, is mixed of light-brown and darker-brown and gray strands.
"I don't think you can either," she agrees. "But my mother thought you might."
"Did I ever know your mother?"
"No, you never met. You knew each other existed, though."
Janice does wish Nelson were here. He could tell at a glance if this person were over the edge, and give it one of those names he had— bipolar, schizophrenic, paranoid, psychotic. Psychotic, you see and hear things, and can murder without meaning it, and then in court seem so innocent. The varnished grain of the door under her hand calls out as a potential shield and a slammed end to this encounter, but the something pleasant and kind and calm about the girl, who is these as well as troubled and trembling, holds the door open. The dry warm air of this early-fall day in southeastern Pennsylvania—children tucked back into school, the mid-morning streets quiet, the vegetables in the backyard gardens harvested or gone to seed—lies on Janice's face as a breath from the past, her visitor having come from this same terrain.
"I nursed her at the end, she didn't like hospitals, they made her feel penned up," the light, considerate, shaky voice goes on.
"This is your mother," Janice says, in spite of herself entering in.
"Yes, and of course being a nurse I could do that, administer the meds and see that she was kept turned in the bed and all that. Only it was strange, doing it for your mother. Her body had all these meanings for me. She didn't like being touched, as long as she had strength. Though she could come on free and easy with some people, she was really a freak about her privacy, even with me. She didn't like telling me anything, except then when she knew she was dying."
The girl as her nervousness eased has skipped a stage of her story without being aware of it. "What did you say this had to do with me?" Janice asks.
"Oh. I guess—I guess you were married to my father."
A mail truck coasts by, one of those noseless vans they have now, white with a red and blue stripe. They used to be solid green, like military vehicles. Mailmen used to be men; now theirs is a mail-lady, a young woman with long sun-bleached hair and stocky tan legs in shorts who pushes her pouch on a three-wheeled cart ahead of her along the sidewalk. It is not time for her to go by yet, but across Joseph Street, another young woman comes out on the righthand porch of the semi-detached house opposite. For years and years that address was occupied by a couple that had seemed old and changeless to her. Then they went off to assisted living, and a young couple has moved in, with hanging plants on the porch they fuss at, and music that booms out over the neighborhood through the window screens, and two small children who go to pre-school.
"Maybe you should come inside," Janice says, stepping back invitingly, though admitting to her home this piece of a shameful dead past disgusts as well as frightens her.
Inside, the girl, her face and arms as white as if summer had never been, hangs in the dim-lit living-room clutter like one more piece of furniture that time's slow earthquake has jostled out of place. She seems, as Harry used to, a bit out of scale. Janice is used to her house with average-sized people in it, herself and Nelson and Ronnie, though Ronnie's Alex is big, when he visits from Virginia, and Judy and Roy when they lived here took up plenty of space with their music and games and sibling competition. Though with one a girl and the other a boy and over four years between them it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
"Would you like any coffee?" Janice asks. "Or tea—that's what my husband drinks now, for his blood pressure, and now I've got the habit."
"No, honestly—I couldn't take anything on my stomach right now. I've been thinking of what I'd say for so long, and then it came out all backward. My name is Annabelle Byer."
Janice is used to hearing the word as "buyer." For every seller there is a buyer.
"Like I said, I'm single. I'm going to be forty next year. I'm a practical nurse, at St. Joe's for thirteen years, and these last five I've been in home care, those that need an L.P.N., though the number that can afford it is going down, with the tightening up of what Medicare will pay for."
"Do sit down at least," Janice says, to reduce the interloper's radiant, unsettling bulk. The girl sits on the sofa, where like everybody else she sinks down lower than she expects, her bare knees brightly upthrust. A few hasty tugs on her skirt reduce the amount of thigh that shows. Janice takes the green wing chair, with the matching arm doilies, folding her hands palm-up in her lap as her mother used to do, setting herself to listen, if the thudding of her heart lets her. Her heart is caught in a net of calculation as to how this innocently disgusting intrusion will affect her life and disturb her peace. With Ronnie being so steady compared to Harry, she has known peace.
"My mother worried that I hadn't married," Annabelle tells her, from her relaxed voice already more at home than Janice thinks is quite seemly. "She wondered if it had been her fault, making me distrust men, or sex or something, out of her own experience. I would tell her, That's silly. Dad, as I called him, was a wonderful man. He died when I was sixteen, but still I grew up with this good masculine image. He would toss me all around, even when I was eleven or so, and taught me to ride the tractor and whatever all else a child can do to help run a farm—pick apples and strawberries and feed the chickens and whack back the bushes and poison ivy. We even did carpentry together and he taught me to shoot his gun. I had two brothers, Scott and Morris, I always got along good with—being country children, we did a lot together. And then I had boyfriends, normal enough, though I guess compared to city boys they were shy, but after high school I got a job as a nurse's aide in a nursing home called Sunnyside, out toward the old fairgrounds—?"
She is checking to see if Janice is listening. Janice nods and says, "I've heard of it. Sunnyside."
"And then I went for a year's degree and passed the boards and after I entered service at St. Joe's the boys weren't so shy, some of them were even married doctors, but some weren't, and it all seemed normal to me except, you know, lightning never struck, the question never got popped. Maybe I didn't want to hear it. I'd tell my mother, It's no big deal, if it happens it happens, you're still a person, but it worried her sick, somehow, that I stayed independent, as if she were preventing something, especially after she sold the farm and I asked her to move in with me, we could manage a larger place together, over on Eisenhower Avenue—"
Janice's heart jumps. She once lived on Eisenhower Avenue, with Charlie Stavros, at number 1204, back in the Sixties, when everybody was going crazy. But it shouldn't surprise her; the stately street, fallen away from its heyday of one-family mansions staffed by black or Irish servants, was where the better, safer rentals were, for misfits like her and Charlie or then this girl and her mother.
"—she would be so afraid of being in the way, she'd tell me she'd stay in her room if I brought back a man, but actually I had lived alone in Brewer enough to be wary of bringing men back, they can get rough, and I was in my thirties by then and the good men were married to somebody else. When she saw she was dying—by the time the tumors were detected, oat-cell carcinoma of the lung, the cancer had spread to the lymph system and the bones—she told me that I had more family than I knew. She told me that Dad hadn't been my real father, that he had loved her enough to take her with somebody else's baby. I wasn't a year old, my grandparents in West Brewer were taking care of me while she worked in this restaurant over toward Stogey's Quarry, where she met my—where she met Frank Byer. He moved fast—I guess his own mother had died not long before and a farm needs a woman.
Not that he wasn't crazy about her—he was. He was in his forties and she in her twenties and I could see when I got to be, you know, observant that they still had a lot going between them. He kidded her about being fat but then he was fat himself."
Janice hates hearing about these very common people. "Didn't you wonder," she asks impatiently, "how you were born before your parents married?" Through the semi-transparent curtain across the front-room picture window—glass curtains they call them, though they're just cloth—she can see that the woman across the street is still out on her porch, fussing idly with a long-nosed watering can, as if she is listening. But at this distance she can't be. The girl's being here seems shameful to Janice. Shameful and shameless.
"Well, they were vague," Annabelle tells her. "You know how it is to be a child, you assume everything around you is just naturally the way it is, you grow into it. Scott was only a year behind me in school; the cut-off date came in February and I was born in January and he in November of the next year. I was always the youngest in my grade, maybe that's one of the reasons I always felt, you know, so innocent. The other kids always seemed to know more than I did, and did things. I was always the good girl who went straight home when the school bus did."
The girl is beginning to talk to Janice as if she's an aunt of sorts, if not her mother. Janice doesn't consider herself a great success as a mother and doesn't want to try it again. She asks, though, "Are you sure you wouldn't like to have any coffee? I must make myself a cup of tea, there are so many questions buzzing around in my head. This is quite some news you're bringing, if it's true."
She stands up, but then so does Annabelle, and follows her into the kitchen, when Janice had hoped to put a little distance between them, to think in. It's like the Jehovah's Witnesses you let past the door, they seem such poor pasty souls, yet get you so entangled, one Bible quote after another, all these headlines that prove something in Revelations, YOU feel you'll never get free of them. She doesn't like being crowded in her own kitchen. She has never been very clever at household tasks, it used to make Harry sarcastic (not that his mother had been any Martha Stewart or that he was Mr. Handy himself, unlike Ronnie or that nice Webb Murkett they used to know), so for Janice it has been a relief to switch with Ronnie, after his doctor advised him, from coffee to tea. She never used to get the amount of grounds right, whereas with tea you put the bag in the mug and the mug in the microwave and that's all there is to it. She uses plain old Lipton, it used to sponsor some radio program she listened to as a girl, the drip-drip song, or was that Maxwell House? Doris Kaufmann and others keep urging her to try herbal tea, or jasmine or green tea that is now supposed to be so good for you, preventing everything from hiccups to colon cancer, but Janice can't see the point of a drink with no kick in it at all.
It takes two minutes and twenty seconds to heat. Annabelle watches the electronic countdown for a while and then moves to the back windows, looking through the sunporch. "What a nice sunny back yard," she says. "The front of the house is so dark."
"The maples. They keep growing. We've lost some trees over the years. There was a beautiful big copper beech shading the side that I miss. Are you sure you wouldn't like a drink of something?" Janice can't bring herself to use the girl's pretentious, storybook name. She is thinking that what she herself really wants, to cushion this shock, and get her through this strangeness, is a glass of dry sherry.
"A glass of water would be lovely.""Just water? With ice?""Oh no, not ice. You'd be amazed at the amount of microbes that live in ice."
Harry had always made her feel impure, even when he was in the wrong. She hands the girl her tumbler of clear liquid. Fingerprints on fingerprints. Now they use DNA—not that O.J. didn't go free anyway. That long-legged prosecutor outsmarted herself, and that black lawyer was slick. The girl seems minded from the way she faces to go out the back door and sit on the sunporch with its view of the vegetable garden and the old swing set, but Janice firmly heads back to the living room, gloomy and little used. It's on the way out. She has the girl go first and lags behind her enough to snatch the Taylor sherry bottle from inside the dining-room sideboard and unscrew the cap and tip a little into her tea. The hearty, tawny tang of the liquor arises and erases the antiseptic scent the girl trails, a kind of cool mouthwash, from the back of her neck and her bare arms. "So I expect you've told me about all there is to know," she says when they have settled again, on the same furniture.
Annabelle does not concede this. She resumes, "I was saying about my parents, as a child I never knew when they got married, and when I grew old enough to be curious, my mother allowed that maybe I had come before the wedding, since Dad's mother was still alive but ailing and a marriage might have hastened her death. This seemed to figure, it being back in 1960, before things got liberal."
What got liberal?Janice asks herself. Abortion, she supposes. And young couples living together. Rut these things happened then too, only deeper in the dark. The year 1959 seems very close, as close as the beating of her heart, which beat then too, back in the tunnel of time, that same faithful muscle, in its darkness and blood. She doesn't want to prolong the discussion, though; she doesn't want to get involved, though there is a tug, back into the past's sad damp pit.
The girl seems to read her mind. "Yes, my mother described it," she says, "the, whatever you could call it, affair. She and my—she and your husband, Mr. Angstrom, lived together I guess on Summer Street for three months. He never knew if she had gone ahead and had me or not. I knew him, you know. I met him a few times, without knowing who he was. I mean, his relation to me. He was once a patient when I was still at St. Joe's. An angioplasty, I think it was. He was a charmer. Full of jokes."
"He died in Florida," Janice says accusingly, "not six months later. Of a heart attack. He was only fifty-six." As if these hard facts, so hard to her at the time, might force Harry and this girl apart.
"He should have had a bypass, it sounds like. They weren't quite as standard then."
"He didn't want it. He didn't want to have his body meddled with. He was afraid of it." Janice's voice startles her by cracking, and her eyes by burning near tears, as if accusing herself of not making Harry's life worth living. She hadn't called him down in Florida, when he had wanted her to. He had been begging for her forgiveness, and she hadn't given it.
"And then before that," this girl insensitively is going on, "when I was still an aide at Sunnyside, a boy I knew back in Galilee called Jamie and I—we were living together, actually, in a little apartment on Youngquist Boulevard, the building went condo and that broke us up, but that's I guess another story—went to look at Toyotas over on Route 111. We bought one, eventually, though not that day, when Mr. Angstrom was there. He seemed so nice, I was struck. He paid attention to me, he didn't just talk to the man, or try to pressure us the way car salesmen like to."
"It wasn't exactly his calling, selling," Janice volunteers. "He didn't really have a calling, after high school."
But how beautiful he had been, Janice remembers, in those high-school halls—the height of him, the fine Viking hair slicked back in a ducktail but trailing off in lank sexy strands like Alan Ladd's across his forehead, the way he would flick it back with his big graceful white hands while kidding with the other seniors, like that tall girlfriend of his called Mary Ann, his lids at cocky sleepy half-mast, the world of those halls his, him paying no attention of course to her, a ninth-grader, a runt. They didn't begin with each other until they both worked at Kroll's in Brewer, she behind the nut and candy cases and he back from his two years in the Army, having been in Texas and never sent to die in Korea after all. He often mentioned Korea as if he had missed out on something by not going there to fight and coming back home to a peaceful life instead. Nobody wants war but men don't want only peace either.
"Yes," Annabelle hisses, too eager to agree, not really understanding how simple we all were back then, "he was a wonderful athlete, I remember the clippings up in the showroom, and then my mother said. She had gone to another high school, that used to play his. She talked a lot about him, once she got started, before she...went. I know about you, and Nelson, and the time your house burnt down, my mother kept track of all that in the papers, I guess. She was interested. The way she spoke, at the end, she didn't have any grudge. It was the times, she said. He was caught, what else could he do? Anyway, I was no prize, she would tell me."
Ruth and her views, beneath consideration these many years, have invaded the living room. "My goodness" is all Janice can think to say, as the sherry moves into her veins and begins to tint this nightmare a more agreeable color. What harm could what happened forty years ago do her now?
"He visited her, you know," this young woman goes on, her gestures growing freer, her body bigger as she crosses and recrosses her white legs on the sofa, the beige cotton dress riding higher on her thighs. Her hair, too, seems too short, and bounces a bit too much as her head comes forward. There is some vanity, some push, in that hair—its many-colored thickness, its trendy trampy cut, long and short mixed up together. "The year he died, I guess. Somehow he had found our farm."
"He did?" This is horrible. Harry's affair with Thelma she and Ronnie have together buried, never mentioning it once they were past the courtship stage of confessing everything. They had triumphed, they were the survivors, Harry and Thelma were shades, corpses, sinking deeper into bloodlessness in their buried coffins, their skins crumbling, drawing tight like that little sacrificed Peruvian girl they found on the mountaintop, unbearable to think about. But to hear now that at the same time he was seeing Thelma he was chasing that fat old slut all over Diamond County is as if Harry from beyond the grave is denying her peace just as he did when alive. He couldn't just be ordinary, respectable, dependable. He thought he was beyond that. This girl, both shy and sassy, pleasant yet with something not quite right about her, is his emissary from the grave. Janice wants nothing to do with it, with her. She asks, "Why would he do that?"
The girl puts her knees together to lean forward for emphasis but her dress is so short the triangle of her panties shows anyway. "To find out about me, my mother said. She wouldn't tell him. She wanted to keep me pure from him. Then I guess when she saw she would be, you know, leaving me, she had second thoughts and wanted me to know." The girl's eyes are less milky now, here in the muted living-room light, and flash with importance, the importance her story gives her.
"Why?" Janice cries, fighting back a pressure. "Why not let the past lie? Why stir up what can't be helped? Excuse me," she says. "I must refresh my tea." She doesn't even pretend to go into the kitchen, she pours some more dry sherry into the cup right there at the sideboard, where the girl could see if she turned sideways to look. But back in the front room Annabelle sits staring across at the heavy green glass egg, with a bubble inside, on top of the dead television with the other knickknacks Bessie Springer had collected as a sign of her prosperity as Daddy's car business took hold. Mother and her fur coat, Mother and her blue Chrysler—it was a simpler world back then, when your pride was satisfied with such things. The girl, with all that leg bared by sitting low on the sofa and her navy sweater fallen off her naked arms, has a sluttish way of putting forth her body that must be her own mother living in her. And there is a blandness, a fatherless blankness, her face in profile taking the light as mutely as the egg of green glass.
She senses Janice's eye on her and turns her face and says, "It's so embarrassing, isn't it? My turning up like this. Embarrassing to me, embarrassing to you." She has a plump upper lip that gives her smile a childish, questioning quality. She looks easy to bruise.
"Well," Janice pronounces, back in her wing chair with a fortified mug whose healing tang settles her more broadly in the pose of authority. She vowed years ago never to let herself run to fat like her mother did but she did admire the way in her last years, her husband gone, her generation dying off, Mother took charge of things, keeping a grip on the family pocketbook, standing up for her notions of decency and propriety. Living here in this house, Janice feels still surrounded by her—Bessie Springer's adamant unchanging furniture, her fixed sense of her own worth. Koerner mulishness, Mother would call it when being funny at her own expense. "Maybe that was your mother's idea, to embarrass everybody," Janice tells the girl. "What earthly good did she think telling you all this would do, at your age? Make mischief, is the sum of it. And who's to say it's true, any of it?" Though she feels it is—a whiff of Harry, a pale glow, an unsettling drift comes off this girl, this thirty-nine-year-old piece of evidence.
"Oh, she wouldn't have made it up, it poured out of her. It wasn't her nature, to make things up. She used to say of these detective novels she was always reading, 'How do they make all this up? They must have a screw loose.' And she showed me my birth certificate, at a hospital in Pottstown. 'Father unknown,' it said."
"Well, that's it, unknown," Janice presses on, like a lawyer urging a case she knows is bad.
"You asked why," Annabelle says. "I think she thought"— suddenly tears reflect light in her eyes, the plump upper lip quivers out of control—"you people could help me, somehow." She laughs at her own tears, quickly swipes at her face with expert hands, hands used to giving—rubbing, holding, patting, seizing— a nurse's care. "I was so alone, she must have thought. I haven't had a serious relationship for years. And my brothers, Scott went to Seattle and Morris to Delaware—he was the angriest when she sold the farm and moved in with me in Brewer. He had thought he could work the place and live on it but it wouldn't have been fair for her to have left it all to him. Not that a farm that size could support anybody any more. Even my dad—even Frank—had to run the township school buses to make ends meet."
"Is this about money, then?" Janice asks, alert now, the muddle showing its nub. Money is something she has a feel for; it's in her Springer veins. She acted as accountant for her father, and then for Nelson as best she could, until he had so much to hide. Ronnie has his own savings and pension but she handles her inheritance still, when the CDs come due and at what interest and how to keep capital-gains taxes from biting into the mutual funds: the managers of some run up gains just to make their annual reports look good. This girl won't get a penny from her. Janice sips from her mug and looks at the interloper levelly.
Annabelle considers the question, rolling her eyes upward. "No-o, I don't think so. I clear twenty an hour from the agency and often work twelve-hour shifts. My mother left us a fair amount, even divided by three. The farm had only a tiny mortgage on it, in terms of today's money. And she held down a respectable job, the last fifteen years, with this investments advisory firm in the new glass building downtown. She used to laugh at herself, putting on heels and pantyhose every morning, after being such a country slob. She got her weight down to one fifty-five."
"It's wonderful to work," Janice concedes. "Women of our generation came late to it." It disquiets her to link herself with Ruth, Ruth the unspeakable, holding her husband captive on the other side of Mt. Judge, Ruth the treacherous mucky underside of everything respectable.
"No, it's not about money," Annabelle says, edging herself forward on the sofa preparatory to getting to her feet, readjusting the sweater about her shoulders, and regripping her little purse, striped yellow, black, and red. "It was about family, I guess. But never mind, Mrs. Harrison. I can see you'd rather not get involved, and that's no surprise, to be honest. It was my mother's idea, and she was half out of her head with the medications. Dying people aren't the most sensible, often, though you'd think they should be. I did this for her and not for me, because she asked me to." She stands, looking down on Janice.
"Well now, wait."
"You've been patient, actually. I know what a shock it must be." Those deft, solid hands fiddle with her hair, its artful tousle, as if it were she who had felt the shock.
Janice says in her own defense, "You can't just show up and drop a thing like this on a body."
"I didn't know how else to do it. It didn't seem the sort of thing to put in a letter or over the phone." Trained to move fast, she takes the few steps it needs to the door, and puts her hand on the doorknob, an old-fashioned one with a raised design worn shiny with the years, like brass lace. She tugs the sticky door open with a snap that leaves a little reverberation in the air, a cry that dies away.
There is a poignance in this strong female body, the way it moves almost like a man's, like those women soccer players who beat China this summer. Janice keeps losing daughters: Becky, and then Teresa leaving Nelson after nearly twenty years, and Judy at nineteen secretive and surly, living entirely within her whispering Walkman headset, shutting............