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Tonight is crazy as always: lots of drinks, lots of drunks, lots<br />
of smiles, lots of tips, and a pass or two she dodges with familiarity<br />
and grace. Can’t aggravate the money—and she likes people<br />
anyway, for all their foolishness and blather. It’s a good job for<br />
her, exhausting but enjoyable, and the money is enough to keep her<br />
in credit card debt for a long time.<br />
When she gets home, she realizes, groaning, that this is<br />
laundry night—or laundry early morning. She forces herself to<br />
drag out the washer/dryer combo and fill it and turn it on, and<br />
relaxes—or collapses, same thing some nights—on the sofa. She<br />
sorts through the mail—no bills, hurrah—and listens idly to late<br />
night rerun comedy, canned laughs and exaggerated looks. What<br />
life is like, according to somebody who got paid to write this crap.<br />
It passes the time till the laundry is washed and she can set it to<br />
dry, push the button, brush her teeth and melt into bed like butter<br />
on toast. A pre-dawn rain taps softly on the window, washing her<br />
gently into sleep.<br />
Traffic noises jab her awake at ten—she really needs to sleep<br />
until noon, and that may happen some day. The shower is warm<br />
and tries to seduce her back to bed, but Cheri is virtuous, or at least<br />
running late on her term paper, so she resists the impulse and gets<br />
dress and heads out to the library.<br />
Cheri is an art major, and her term paper is on Mary Cassat.<br />
Impressionists have been her love in art for as long as she can<br />
remember, although she can regurgitate the necessary praise for the<br />
modern non-representational which-end-of-the-brush artists on<br />
which most of her grade will depend. The teacher had frowned and<br />
reluctantly agreed to her choice of subject, and she thought she<br />
might have been forced to bring up the reason she knows underlies,<br />
in part, her deep reaction to this artist. In so many Cassat paintings<br />
there is the shimmer of the lost mother, dead with the would-havebeen<br />
younger brother, who seems like she might at some moment,<br />
soon, be willing to look at her left-behind daughter and smile.<br />
(Cheri’s father remarried, a pleasant innocuous woman whom<br />
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