Mrs. Ikeman entered the shop just before it closed. She handed the butcher her list.

“You’re kidding,” he said when he read the list.

“Berlin surrendered…” she began to say, but he waved her words away.

“There’s still a war on. Cross some things off the list,” he said and handed her the pencil stub from behind his ear.

She began to weep. She had not wept in weeks—not since the president had died—and even then, not in public.

“Oh, Jesus,” the butcher said and with no virgin territory left on his apron he wiped his hands on the wrapping paper by the scale.

They made love in his room behind the shop. She noticed immediately afterward that he kept a small statue of a pig holding a scale atop his bureau. “I don’t like that at all,” she mumbled into her armpit.

“You understand,” he said as he hung his apron around his neck again, “this has nothing to do with your list.” She understood, but as Mrs. Ikeman walked the three blocks home to her apartment, forbidden lamb chops danced over the ground chuck in her bag.

 She wanted to tell someone, but who would listen?

She went to a stationary store. For the amount of paper she needed, she could keep her bra on.

 She went to the library and asked the librarian with a little red moustache for the Idaho phone book. She had seen “Idaho” on a bag of potatoes recently. They were delicious. “Is there a particular city in Idaho?” he asked. “Boise?”

She shrugged yes.

You’ll understand, I hope, she wrote later that night, in the last paragraph of a letter about the day’s exchange of sustenance, that my husband is a good man. His family went up the smokestacks in one of those camps in the old country and still he is kind. But he thinks of nothing but vegetables now and spends his passion only on the roof tending to his tomatoes and string beans. Try to see it my way.
        The next morning, she mailed the letter to the address in Boise she’d obtained from the phone book in the library. She did not include a return address. When she imagined the letter’s recipient, she was surprised to find it was herself she saw. There would be no hair dye or stockings without runs in Boise either. A pan of diced potatoes would be singing on the cast iron stove out there as her doppelganger read the letter again and again. “Yes!” she and her imagined reader said together, “no one can blame you.” But for what, exactly, Mrs. Ikeman now asked herself.

 In the days that followed, she helped her husband collect from tenants behind on their rents. She waited with him at the threshold of each door as the delinquent apartment inside went quiet and the doorbell reddened his thumb. “That one,” he said in front of the last door, the apartment of a widow who had lived in the building only a few months. “She has money for new dresses but not rent.” Mrs. Ikeman thought about the statue on the butcher’s bureau.

“I’ve had enough of this,” her husband finally said. “Let’s go to the movies.”

As they lay in bed that night, Mrs. Ikeman said, “You don’t look at me the way Robert Mitchum looked at what’s-her-name.” Her husband turned to breathe in the night air from the window. He did not answer her, or he was asleep already, dreaming of leafy green vegetables.

When she returned to the shop again the next morning, the butcher looked at her as if she were a floor that needed sweeping.

“Ham hocks?” her husband said at dinner and pointed to the Star of David around his neck.

“Maybe you’ve heard there’s a war on,” she answered. “I think God will let this one go.”

“Let us pray,” he said and lifted his knife and fork from the table.

“Christ on a cracker,” she said as she pulled her chair out. “Did you say lettuce?”

When a month had passed and she had not written another letter to Boise, Mrs. Ikeman realized it was because she had nothing left to say. With or without a letter, the woman in Boise would still have to assess her own curvatures and pinch the flesh on her cheeks if she were sick of powdered milk.

It occurred to Mrs. Ikeman for the first time that a man may have read her letter. In the newsreels before movies, she saw what men were doing to each other just to change the colors on a map. What would a man out west do if he discovered a secret economy of wives? Would her letter change the way he ate a pork chop or lifted the spoon from a newly-filled sugar bowl?

In July, the butcher died and was carried from the back room of his shop like so much braunschweiger.  Mrs. Ikeman was surprised at her sadness. She had not thought of him or the Boise letter in weeks, but now when she thought of either the coffee tasted sour and the summer air smelled of grease.

It was now the beginning of August. She had made her mind up about something, but she could not remember what it was. It seemed to her that life had become a series of resolves, followed each time by some collapse of will or dignity or freedom.

There was an envelope peeking through the crack beneath the front door. How long had it been there? Mrs. Ikeman turned the living room fan to low and opened the letter. It was from the widow with her always-late rent and too many dresses. The rent was short by half. I’m sorry to leave without notice, it read. Here’s a portion of what I owe… Please forgive me. She had clipped a twenty-dollar bill to the note. 

Mrs. Ikeman let her memory run its fingers over the widow as she had appeared one day in June. The widow had liked, especially, to wear a yellow dress and to pull casually at its tightest contours with slender hands fitted in white gloves. It was, Mrs. Ikeman admitted to herself, a beautiful dress, revealing the shape of the widow’s breasts and admitting beads of sweat that made admirers imagine the downward journey to darkness.

She took a cool bath and eyed the twenty-dollar bill resting on the washbasin. After she dried herself, she sprinkled rosewater on the nape of her neck and the backs of her knees. She put the bill in her pocketbook and took the Northwest 91 across town where silk ties and pearl necklaces sailed along the sidewalks on the carefree necks of the rich.

A man dressed in a long coat and cap swung open a buttoned leather door for her. “Welcome to The Swan’s Cottage,” said a thin man from behind his podium inside. He was wearing pinstripes and the white carnation in his lapel caught fragments of caramel and blood orange under the low lights of the restaurant’s foyer.

“Do you have a reservation?” he asked.

From her small table near the kitchen, she studied the menu.