It was in the cheap ray ban wayfarer of cosmetology schools, restaurants, unemployment agencies, off-price stores, that her fingers offered herself and others a fugitive and unimproving satisfaction of a kind, though she otherwise lacked the reach that life would require.

She did not like to fake ray bans, she suffered motion sickness on trains, planes were much too aerial for her taste, and on buses she would always get stuck next to the perspirational, the heartsore. The founding fathers, she thought, could have done a better job of laying out the republic so that everything would be within a stone’s throw.

She audited an replica ray bans   class at the township college. But despite all that dreamy speech-course certitude about “messages” and their “senders” and awaiting “receivers” (those textbook diagrams with the perkily curving arrows always made her sad), wasn’t most communication of any sort a one-way street anyway? Shouldn’t she have been content with the inner sentences of hers going on for miles and miles—an entire continent’s worth, for that matter—without anyone in any oncoming traffic taking any notice whatsoever?