ichard would malign her secret sightseeing as a misuse of time, and he’d be right. Her own gasps distract her from her guilt. The linebacker high-rises, mountainous billboards, robot-shaped gas pumps, cheddar-colored streetcars! She feels a knot inside of her fray as if her box cutter is being dragged along it. The bus rushes past signs that stay lit through the daytime drear: WE INSTALL MUFFLERS, $1.00 VARIETY STORE, SPORTING GOODS, JOIN THE AIR FORCE. She rings the bell and gets off at a West 36th shopping district locals call “the Avenue” and lets stores begin jostling for her dollar.

She tries to chime hello to all she passes, especially women. Wouldn’t it be grand to explore the city with a friend who knew its secrets? Who could parry sarcasms about outrageous markups, what the bay-wind does to your hair, all of that? Who could draw from Lainie, and appreciate the special, secret vitality she’d felt during those seventeen months on her own? But Baltimore women are startled by her greetings and barely muster smiles. After an hour, Lainie feels lonely, doomed to outsider status. She gets back on the bus. A man walks the aisle, mistakes her for a tourist, and tries to sell her a visitor’s guide. Her chest reknots. Is it her hairdo? In Florida, beehives were the rage, but not here. She is suddenly, deeply unhappy. She probably needs a visitor’s guide. She buys one.

Baltimore, the guide scolds her, has everything required to satisfy an American family. What exactly, then, is her problem? Tammy would adore the Museum of Art. Timmy would love the Historical Society. West of town is the Enchanted Forest, some kind of storybook attraction. Photos show castles and forests, princesses and witches. The kids could hold their birthday parties there this summer. It’s perfect, except for the park’s so-called Jungle Land. Even the word jungle makes Richard set down the newspaper or turn the channel. They’d just have to be careful where they walked, that’s all.

One of her past strolls took her to the docks at Fells Point. She’s tried to forget this walk, but each morning the Spray ’N Steam sweats the truth out of her; she wonders if the Amazon boiled Richard to his rawest root. It had been a slate afternoon, rhythmed with the whap of ships against docks. She’d toed the edge of the Patapsco River, lifting her collar to her jawline. To get there, she’d gotten off at a bus stop usurped by a rag-clad hobo and walked through the broken bottles of the ugliest neighborhood she’d ever seen. There’d been a movie theater, too, and she’d nearly bought a ticket just to evade the ogling. But the marquee had been missing a few too many bulbs for her comfort, and the movie hadn’t sounded pleasant at all—a circus of souls, something like that.

It was a lonesome spot. No one would hear her if she spoke. So she’d told lies into the cold, lapping water until there were none left to tell: She was happy that her husband had returned. She was fulfilled. She was optimistic about the future. She believed every statistic in the City of Baltimore leaflet Richard had given her. Only twenty percent of Baltimore households, it had boasted, owned a car, and Richard swore to her that one day soon they’d own two. He was sick of his T-bird breaking down, he said, and he wouldn’t have his wife taking public transport while he was off saving the world.

On her way back to the bus stop, in the neighborhood she didn’t like, she’d skirted a city worker spraying off the sidewalk with a hose. How nice, she’d told herself, to see a municipality taking pride in its upkeep. She’d pretended that the washing didn’t dredge up stenches of dog urine, spoiled fish, moldering leaves, congealing sewage, saliferous puddles, scorched oil, bodily excretions. One last lie before heading home, one more wrinkle to iron out.