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together three or four times a week.
    I like to run about five miles. Since that’s beyond Peppy’s range, she stops at the lagoon when we get to the lake. She spends the time nosing out ducks and muskrats, rolling in mud or rotted fish when she can find them, and bounds out at me with her tongue hanging out in a self-satisfied grin when I make my way back west. We do the last mile home at a mild jog and I hand her over to my downstairs neighbor. Mr. Contreras shakes his head, chews us both out for letting her get dirty, then spends a pleasurable half hour grooming her coat back to its gleaming golden-red.
    He was waiting as usual this morning when we got back. “You two have a good run, doll? You keep the dog out of the water, I hope? This cold weather it isn’t good for her to get wet, you know.”
    He hung in the doorway prepared to talk indefinitely. He’s a retired machinist, and the dog, his cooking, and I make up the bulk of his entertainment. I extricated myself as quickly as I could, but it was still close to eleven by the time I’d showered. I ate breakfast in my bedroom while I dressed, knowing if I sat down with coffee and the paper I would keep making excuses for lingering. Leaving the dishes on the dresser, I wrapped a wool scarf around my neck, picked up my bag and car coat from the hall where I’d dumped them the night before, and headed south.
    The wind was whipping up the lake. Ten-foot waves crashed against the rocky barrier and spewed fingers of water onto the road. The display of nature, angry, contemptuous, made me feel small.
    Every detail of decay struck me as the road wound southward. The white paint was peeling and the gates sagging at the old South Shore Country Club, once a symbol of that area’s wealth and exclusivity. As a child I used to imagine I would grow up to ride a horse along its private bridle paths. The memory of such fantasies embarrasses me slightly now —the trappings of caste don’t sit well on my adult conscience. But I would have wished a better fate for the club than to rot slowly under the hands of the Park District, its indifferent current masters.
    South Chicago itself looked moribund, its life frozen somewhere around the time of World War II When I drove past the main business area I saw that most of the stores had Spanish names now. Other than that they looked much as they had when I was a little girl. Their grimy concrete walls still framed tawdry window displays of white nylon communion dresses, vinyl shoes, plastic furniture. Women wrapped in threadbare wool coats still wore cotton babushkas as they bent their heads into the wind. On the corners, near the ubiquitous storefront taverns, stood vacant-eyed, shabbily clad men. They had always been a presence, but the massive unemployment in the mills swelled their numbers now.
    I had forgotten the trick to getting into East Side and had to double back to Ninety-fifth Street, where an old-fashioned drawbridge crosses the Calumet River. If South Chicago hadn’t changed since 1945, East Side stuck itself in formaldehyde when Woodrow Wilson was President. Five bridges form the neighborhood’s only link to the rest of the city. Its members live in a stubborn isolation, trying to recreate the Eastern European villages of their grandparents. They don’t like people from across the river, and anyone north of Seventy-first Street might as well have rolled in on a Soviet tank for the reception they get.
    I drove under the massive concrete legs of the interstate to 106th Street. Louisa’s parents lived south of 106th on Ewing. I thought her mother would be home and hoped her father wouldn’t be. He’d retired some years ago from the little printshop he’d managed, but he was active in the Knights of Columbus and his VFW lodge and he might be out having lunch with the boys.
    The street was crammed with well-kept bungalows set on obsessively tidy lots. Not a scrap of paper lay on the street. Art Jurshak tended this part of