It was right after sunrise and Lorraine had just finished cleaning a clerk’s office. “I won’t go to bed with you,” she said. “I told you why.” After a night pushing a mop, her face glistened and her eyes waltzed to a silent song. “All I asked is if you wanted to go to the ocean some time before it gets cold,” I said. “Who mentioned bed?” She chewed. She didn’t talk when she chewed and she ate all the time so our friendship, and that’s all it was at that moment, was punctuated by long silences. She took another bite into her bread. Down by the river, an old man fished. He must have been near ninety. Slumped and pained, the man had been born before Andrew Jackson was President. He’d been a boy when Robert E. Lee was at West Point. He’d been too old to fight in the Civil War. Back then, I ordered the world like that. Lorraine said it was a sickness needing curing, because if I wasn’t in America, I was no longer American.
