trickland’s offer of candy only adds a sick sweetness to the revolting scene. Elisa lost her taste for candy at the age when most children would murder for it. Even the sugary pies Giles forces upon her at Dixie Doug’s scrape at her throat. She recalls the origin of her distaste from a cringer’s perspective, gawking up at adult gorgons every bit as inscrutable as Strickland. In the eyes of these early caretakers, Elisa wasn’t handicapped; she was stupid and recalcitrant. The orphanage had the darling name of the Baltimore Home for Wee Wanderers, but those who lived there slashed it to “Home,” ironic given the attributes that storybooks always associated with home. Security. Safety. Comfort. Joy. Swing sets. Sandboxes. Hugs.

The older kids could show you outbuildings where you could find equipment stenciled with Home’s prior title: the Fenzler School for the Feeble-Minded and Idiotic. By the time of Elisa’s arrival, children whose files would have once encumbered them as mongoloids, lunatics, or defectives were gathered under the wings of retarded, slow, or derelict. Unlike the Jewish and Catholic orphanages down the block, Home’s mission was to keep you alive, if barely, so that when you hit the street at eighteen, you could find a menial job serving your superiors.

Home’s children might have united, just as Occam’s janitors might have united. Instead, the paucity of food and affection circulated cruelty like a cough, and each child knew her or his rivals’ pressure points. You were sentenced to Home because your folks landed in the poorhouse? You’re Breadless Betty. Your parents are dead? You’re Graveyard Gilbert. You’re an immigrant? You’re Red Rosa, Harold the Hun. Elisa never knew the real names of some children until the day they were pushed out the door.

Elisa’s own nickname was “Mum,” though housemothers knew her better as “22.” Numbers tidied matters in the untidy world of unwanted children, and each child had one. Every item assigned to you had your number on it, making it easy to ascribe fault when something of yours manifested where it didn’t belong. Ostracized children like Mum were luckless. Adversaries had only to wad her blanket under their coat, toss it outside in the mud, and watch as the “22” on the tag was identified and Mum was assigned her discipline.

Punishment could be delegated to any housemother, but the Matron herself often liked to dole it out. She didn’t own Home, but it was all she had. As early as age three, Elisa intuited that the Matron saw Home’s unruly brood as reflections of her unstable mind, and to keep the children in order was to keep herself sane. It didn’t work. She’d laugh hard enough to make the littlest ones cry, then break into raging sobs that would further alarm them. She carried a sapling switch for the backs of legs and arms, a ruler for knuckles, and a bottle of castor oil for forced swallowing.

Treacherously, the Matron also carried candy. Because she depended so much on the feedback of pleading and sniffling, she smited silent Mum above all others. An incorrigible little monster, she called her. Secretive, up to something. Even worse were the opposite days when the Matron, her gray hair ribboned into obscene pigtails, cornered Elisa to ask if she wanted to play dollies. Elisa would go through the motions, terrified as the Matron asked if any bad little girls were wetting their beds. That’s when the candy came out. It was okay to tell her secrets, the Matron said. Just point out the kids, so I can fix them. It felt to Elisa like a trap. It was a trap. Same as Mr. Strickland, crinkling his cellophane bag. One way or the other, offered sweets, all of them, were poison.

Elisa got older. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. She sat alone at soda fountains, apart from the other girls, and listened to them talk about drinking alcohol; her glass of water tasted like soap. She heard them talk about dance classes; she had to freeze her hands on her ice-cream bowl so she wouldn’t pound her fists. She heard them talk about kissing. One girl said, “He makes me feel like somebody,” and Elisa dwelled upon it for months. What would feeling like somebody feel like? To suddenly exist not only in your world, but someone else’s as well?

One of the places to which she trailed other girls was the Arcade Cinema Marquee. She’d never been inside a theater. She bought a ticket and waited to be asked to leave. She spent five minutes choosing a seat, as if it might determine her whole life’s path. Maybe it did: The movie was The Yearling, and though she and Giles would poke fun at its schmaltz years later on television, it was the religious experience she’d never had inside a pew. Here was a place where fantasy overwhelmed real life, where it was too dark to see scars and silence wasn’t only accepted but enforced by flashlight-armed ushers. For two hours and eight minutes, she was whole.

Her second film was called The Postman Always Rings Twice, and it was a fleshly, fervid froth of sex and violence, a nihilism for which nothing in Home’s library, nothing adults had told her, nothing girls gossiped about had prepared her. World War II was only lately finished, and Baltimore’s streets bustled with clean-cut soldiers, and she looked differently at them on the way home, and they, she thought, looked differently at her. Her interactions, however, were failures. Young men had little patience for flirtations made from fingers.

By her own estimate, she sneaked into the Arcade roughly one hundred and fifty times over her last three years at Home. This was before the theater’s downturn; before plaster began dropping from the ceiling; before Mr. Arzounian started running films 24-7 in desperation. It was her education—her real education. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman gasping for air inside each other in Notorious. Olivia de Havilland writhing away from the madwomen of The Snake Pit. Montgomery Clift wandering through curtains of dust in Red River. Elisa was finally nabbed by an usher while slinking into Sorry, Wrong Number, but by then it didn’t matter. She was a fortnight from what Home had deemed as her eighteenth birthday. She’d be booted out and forced to find a place, and a way, to live. Terrifying but also sensational: She could buy her own tickets, look for people to gasp against, or writhe from, or just wander among.

The Matron conducted Elisa’s exit interview while smoking and pacing the length of her office, infuriated at Elisa’s survival. A local women’s group supplied Home’s graduates with a month’s worth of rent money and a suitcase full of thrift-store outfits, and Elisa was wearing her favorite, a bottle-green wool dress with a pocketed skirt. All she needed was a scarf to hide her scars. She added it to her crowded mental checklist: Buy scarf.

“You’ll be a whore by Christmas,” the Matron vowed.

Elisa shivered, thrilled that the threat didn’t scare her. Why would it? She’d seen enough Hollywood films to know all hookers had hearts of gold, and sooner or later, Clark Gable or Clive Brook or Leslie Howard noticed the glow. This musing might have been what led her, later that day, not to a women’s home but her favorite place in the world, the Arcade Cinema Marquee. She couldn’t afford to see Joan of Arc with Ingrid Bergman, yet wanted nothing more than to lose herself among what the poster promised was “a cast of thousands”—just like the wider Baltimore of which she was now a part, except safely constrained to the screen.

She felt so irresponsible fishing forty cents from her purse that she hung her head, and that’s how she noticed the poorly placed sign: ROOM FOR RENT—INQUIRE WITHIN. There was never any doubt. Weeks later and one rent check from losing the place, she saw an ad for a janitorial position at Occam Aerospace Research Center. She composed her letter, achieved an appointment, and spent the morning of her interview ironing her bottle-green dress and studying a bus schedule. One hour before her planned departure, disaster: great silver scythes of rain, and she owned no umbrella. She panicked, tried not to cry, and became aware of rumblings from the Arcade’s other apartment. She hadn’t met the man who lived there, though he was always around, some sort of shut-in. She’d lost the luxury of guardedness. She knocked on his door.

She expected squat, hirsute, unshaven, and leering, but the fellow who answered had an aristocratic air, tucked like an envelope inside jacket, sweater, vest, and shirt, pushing fifty but with eyes sparkling behind spectacles. He blinked and absently touched his bald head as if he’d forgotten to put on a hat. Then he registered her distress and smiled gently.

“Why, hello, there. To whom do I owe the pleasure?”

Elisa touched her neck in apology, then made the sign for “umbrella,” an intuitive one. The man’s surprise at her muteness lasted only a few seconds.

“An umbrella! Of course! Come in, my dear, and I’ll pull it from the pile like Excalibur from the stone.”

He dove into the apartment. Elisa hesitated. She’d never been inside a home that wasn’t Home; she leaned rightward and saw baroque, shadowy shapes rippling with skulking felines.

“Of course you’re the new tenant. How inhospitable of me not to visit sooner with the ritual plate of cookies. I’m afraid the only excuse I have is a deadline which has had me nailed to the desk.”

The desk in question didn’t look like a desk. It was a tabletop hinged at an adjustable angle. This man was an artist of some sort, and Elisa felt a windblown tingle. The table had at its center a half-painted image of a woman from over her shoulder, the curls of her hair as the chief focus. Beneath her was painted the legend: NO MORE DULL DRAB HAIR.

“My neglectfulness notwithstanding, please let me know if you need anything at all, although I do recommend that you pick up your own umbrella. I notice you have a bus schedule there, and the station is a longer walk from here than is ideal. Many things, as you have no doubt noticed, are less than ideal about the Arcade Apartments. But carpe diem, and all that fine stuff. I trust you’re getting along all right?”

He paused in his canvas rifling and looked to Elisa for a response. She expected this; once people started talking, they tended to forget the disability over which they’d chosen to discourse. This man, however, smiled, his slender brown mustache broadening like open arms.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to learn sign language. What a wonderful opportunity for me.”

The worried tears Elisa had been tamping for weeks should have fallen in a grateful gush, but she forced them back; there was no time to redo makeup. It only got harder over the subsequent minutes, as the man, Giles Gunderson per his magniloquent introduction, located the umbrella, decided to drive her himself, and refused to accept her signed protests. Along the way, Giles distracted her with how the word janitor came from Janus, the god of entrances and exits, only stopping the lesson when an Occam guard established that Giles’s name wasn’t on a list. The guard motioned Elisa to climb out of the van and into the slashing rain.

“And wheresoe’er thou move, good luck / Shall fling her old shoe after,” Giles had called out after her. “Alfred Lord Tennyson!”

Shoe, she’d repeated to herself, keeping eyes on her ugly, inherited heels as they splatted along a rain-run sidewalk. If I get this job, I’ll buy myself a nice pair of shoes.