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end to the friendship forever after—while to him the world was calibrated more incrementally and more fuzzily.
    Pauline believed that marriage was an interweaving of souls, while Michael viewed it as two people traveling side by side but separately. “What are you thinking about?” she liked to say, and “Tell me what you honestly feel.” She customarily opened his mail. She never failed to ask whom he’d been talking to on the phone. Even her eternal guess-whats (“Guess what, Michael . . . No, seriously, guess . . . Come on. Just take a guess . . . Wrong. Guess again . . . Come on!”) seemed to him a form of intrusion.
    How could two people so unlike ever hope to interweave? Which only proved, Michael felt, that his view of marriage was the right one.
    “Well, that’s Michael for you,” he imagined her saying. “Never been wrong in his life, if you ask Michael. ”
    He set the sugar carefully upright on the counter. “Anything else?” Mrs. Golka asked him.
    He said, “Pardon?”
    “‘Anything else I can get for you, Mrs. Golka?’”
    “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”
    She smiled, shaking her head, and handed him her ration book.
    A grocery store’s business comes in waves: the early rush for staples depleted overnight; the late-morning rush for the children’s lunches before they walked home from school; the afternoon rush for supper supplies. By five o’clock, things had slowed to a trickle and only Wanda Bryk stood at the counter. Wanda Lipska, she was now. She had finished all her shopping but she lingered to gossip with Michael. Had he heard that Ernie Moskowicz had been drafted? “Ernie Moskowicz!” Michael said. “He’s just a kid!” And Nick the Greek’s café had caught fire, and Anna Grant had married a colonel and moved to Arizona. “You remember Anna, the girl who played the piano at your wedding,” Wanda said. Michael said, “Sure,” for of course he remembered Anna—her archless, level eyebrows and smooth brown turned-under hair. He was surprised by a twinge of wistfulness. Why couldn’t he have fallen for a woman like Anna Grant? he wondered. His life would have been so simple and serene!
    Or Wanda, even. He used to find Wanda irritating, but here she stood, six months pregnant and rosily, bloomingly healthy, hugging her sack of groceries. Her tan cloth coat, which was slightly too short and didn’t quite meet across her stomach, had the well-worn, comfortable look of the clothes that his mother and her friends wore, and her broad Polish face shone with contentment.
    “Tell Pauline I asked about her,” she said as she turned to leave. “Tell her I hope she’s feeling—oh, there you are! Hi!”
    It was Pauline herself, toting Lindy, entering through the street door with a string shopping bag on one shoulder. She wore her red coat and the hat Michael called her Robin Hood hat—a matching red felt that she normally saved for Sundays, with a narrow, asymmetrical brim and a dashing black feather. He used to look for that shade of red on the street when they were first courting. A flash of it glimpsed in a crowd could make his heart race.
    “Hello, Wanda! Hello, Michael!” she said. “I thought I’d come in this way and see if you’re closing up yet.”
    “Is she a little sweetheart,” Wanda told Lindy. “Is she a little angel child,” and she made a series of kissing sounds. Lindy was all decked out as well, in a pink wool coat and bonnet. She studied Wanda soberly and then looked toward Michael as if to ask “What’s happening here?” He gazed back at her, not smiling.
    “We went to the butcher’s,” Pauline was saying. “I thought I’d buy pork chops for Michael’s supper. Isn’t pork expensive these days! And seven points a pound. But Michael works so hard, I want to be sure he gets enough protein.”
    “You don’t know the half of it,” Wanda told her, “married to a grocer. I’d love to be in your shoes, with all the coffee and sugar I