HOW CAN YOU FORGET THAT FEELING, IT COMES LIKE A BLOW, WHEN life flees from you, and happiness, and love, thought a woman, Olga, watching as her husband plunked himself down and practically inserted himself next to, essentially, a child — everyone here a grown-up and suddenly out of nowhere this girl-child. And then he stood up with her and went over to dance, addressing Olga gleefully on the way, “Look at this little treasure! I knew her when she was in the sixth grade.” And laughed happily. It was the hosts’ daughter — of course. She lives here. How’d she forget that, Olga thought as they rode the subway home, her partly drunk husband, a hearing aid in his ear under cover of his eyeglasses, taking a folded-up newspaper, self-importantly, from his pocket, then squinting morosely under the harsh subway light. They rode, they came home. He settled down with that same paper on the toilet and then fell asleep, apparently, because Olga had to wake him up with a loud knock at the door, and everything was so petty, so embarrassing, though of course everything is always embarrassing in one’s own home, thought Olga. Her husband snored in bed, as he always did when he’d been drinking. “My God,” thought Olga to herself. “Life is over. I’m an old woman. I’m over forty and no one needs me. It’s all over, my life is gone.”

In the morning Olga fixed breakfast for her family. She needed to go somewhere. Anywhere — to the movies, to an exhibit, maybe even the theater. But who’d go with her? It’s a little odd, going alone. Olga called all her friends: one was sitting with a warm wrap — she had a condition she called “a movable feast,” her kidneys were bad. They chatted. Another friend didn’t answer, maybe they’d shut off the phone, another was just about to go out, she was at the door practically, yet another one of her elderly relatives had fallen ill. That one was a lonely spinster but was always cheerful, energetic, a saint almost. Not like us.