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the moment forget her burdens and put the job behind her. Oved himself had told her when she began in the case-unit, only two weeks at the training institute behind her, “You can’t take this thing home with you. You have to leave it here and forget it. Otherwise it will tear you to pieces. Look at me: I haven’t missed a night’s sleep in five years because I learned. But a young girl like you, right out of college, sometimes has to learn the hard way. Don’t learn the hard way. How would you like to go out for dinner tonight?” and so on, some of it good, some of it bad, but all of it to be considered.
    The Oveds have their purposes too, their reasons, their motives. Because he is her supervisor and she does not like him is no reason to totally disregard everything he is saying. “Yes,” Elizabeth mutters, adjusting a shelf of prayer books which, seemingly responsively, fall luminously over one another, sifting aisles of dust into the room, “yes, I will rest. I will relax, I will put all of this away from me,” and slightly comforted walks out of the apartment, leaving the door open behind her, into the midday streets of Williamsburgh and this one time home … on voluntary sick-leave.

VI
    In the early evening Oved calls her to check on her condition and she says she is fine, fine, feeling much better and he says that he is glad to hear this because she sounded a little upset, calling in from the field. The point is that if she feels better perhaps she would go out to dinner with him or at least he could come over to her apartment with some food and keep her company. When she says no, this is impossible; she has already told him what their situation must be and in any case she needs rest, Oved’s tone again changes and his conversation becomes slightly incoherent.
    “You just think I’m some kind of a fool, Miss Moore,” he says, “always coming in and barking around and getting turned off by you and coming in again. Well, maybe I have my reasons. Maybe you ought to have more respect for James Oved than you do, maybe you ought to take me a little more seriously.”
    “I don’t want to hurt you,” she says, “I just think that we should — ”
    “Maybe you don’t want to hurt me but you are hurting yourself, Miss Moore. Now, as long as I’m your supervisor and whatever you make of James Oved, you are going to do a job. You are going to meet the policies and procedures of this department and you are going to show some self-discipline. Now, you coming up for permanent status, Miss Moore, soon. I check over my workers’ records because that’s my responsibility. When you come up for certification you going to need your supervisor’s approval, are you aware of that?”
    “Well, yes — ”
    “And you aren’t going to
get
my approval if you don’t show a more professional attitude. Now this has nothing to do with your not going out with me; far as James Oved is concerned you can drop dead if that’s the way it has to be, on the social level. But on the business level you will remain one of my workers and will be handled in a professional way and I am not pleased with your performance.”
    “All right,” Elizabeth says, switching sides on the bed, trying to push the phone away from her although this is immature thinking. Trying to relax alone at home might have been the wrong idea, “I’m trying to do a job. I take my work very seriously.”
    “You may take it seriously,” Oved says in a high bleat, “but that seriousness don’t manifest itself in your case records and your performance. Your dictation is very weak, very skimpy and you letting those cats take you over the coals with a lot of lies and old bullshit. You be in the office tomorrow? I hope you be in the office tomorrow and we take a fresh start, look at this thing all over again. I am not happy, Miss Moore. This has nothing to do with sex. I am just not happy,” Oved says and before she can say anything, point out, perhaps, that