jumping rope and singsonging out her rhyme: ‘Betty and Henry up in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G! First
comes love, then comes marriage, here comes Henry with a baby carriage!’ Two women stood outside
a washateria, smoking and comparing pregnancies. A group of men were looking in a hardware-store
window at a gigantic colour TV with a four-figure price tag – a baseball game was on, and all the
players’ faces looked green. The playing field was a vague strawberry colour, and the New York Mets
were leading the Phillies by a score of six to one in the top of the ninth.
He walked on, carrying the flowers, unaware that the two women outside the washateria had stopped
talking for a moment and had watched him wistfully as he walked by with his paper of tea roses; their
days of receiving flowers were long over. He was unaware of a young traffic cop who stopped the cars
at the intersection of Third and Sixty-ninth with a blast on his whistle to let him cross; the cop was
engaged himself and recognized the dreamy expression on the young man’s face from his own shaving
mirror, where he had often seen it lately. He was unaware of the two teen-aged girls who passed him
going the other way and then clutched themselves and giggled.
At Seventy-third Street he stopped and turned right. This street was a little darker, lined with
brownstones and walk-down restaurants with Italian names. Three blocks down, a stickball game was
going on in the fading light. The young man did not go that far; half a block down he turned into a
narrow lane.
Now the stars were out, gleaming softly, and the lane was dark and shadowy, lined with vague shape of
garbage cans. The young man was alone now – no, not quite. A wavering yowl rose in the purple gloom,
and the young man frowned. It was some tomcat’s love song, and there was nothing pretty about that.
He walked more slowly, and glanced at his watch. It was quarter of eight and Norma should be just –
Then he saw her, coming towards him from the courtyard, wearing dark blue slacks and a sailor blouse
that made his heart ache. It was always a surprise seeing her for the first time, it was always a sweet
shock – she looked so young.
Now his smile shone out – radiated out, and he walked faster.
‘Norma!’ he said.
She looked up and smiled. . . but as they drew together, the smile faded.
His own smile trembled a little, and he felt a moment’s disquiet. Her face over the sailor blouse
suddenly seemed blurred. It was getting darker now. . . could he have been mistaken? Surely not. It was
Norma.
‘I brought you flowers,’ he said in a happy relief, and handed the paper spill to her.
She looked at them for a moment, smiled – and handed them back.
‘Thank you, but you’re mistaken,’ she said. ‘My name is -‘Norma,’ he whispered, and pulled the short-
handled hammer out of his coat pocket where it had been all along. ‘They’re for you, Norma. . . it was
always for you. . . all for you.’
She backed away, her face a round white blur, her mouth an opening black 0 of terror, and she wasn’t
Norma, Norma was dead, she had been dead for ten years, and it didn’t matter because she was going to
scream and he swung the hammer to stop the scream, to kill the scream, and he swung the hammer the
spill of flowers fell out of his hand, the spill spilled and broke open, spilling red, white, and yellow tea
roses beside the dented trash cans where the cats made alien love in the dark, screaming in love,
screaming, screaming.
He swung the hammer and she didn’t scream, but she might scream because she wasn’t Norma, none of
them were Norma, and he swung the hammer, swung the hammer, swung the hammer. She wasn’t
Norma and so he swung the hammer, as he had done five other times.
Some unknown time later he slipped the hammer back into his inner coat pocket and backed away from