Necessity Read Online Free PDF

her habits.
    She is squirting lemon into the glass when a man stops beside her table. “Hi there. What’s your name?”
    Her breath catches. It is a moment before she can look up. She tries to make it steely. “I’m sorry. You’ve got the wrong table.”
    â€œI just thought maybe you’d let me buy you a drink or something.” He is losing his pale hair on top and he wears flesh-colored glasses. Probably about her age. Slender, almost reedy. Type-casting him, she thinks of electronics—he looks as if he programs computers. An apologetic half smile shapes his mouth as if engraved there.
    She says: “Thank you. No.”
    â€œYou’re very attractive, you know, and if you’re by yourself—”
    â€œI want to be by myself.”
    â€œI just thought—”
    She says, “They have legal prostitution here. If you’re horny—look, just pick up a newspaper over there and read the ads and find something you like and make a phone call.”
    The man says, “It just doesn’t work for me if I have to pay for it.” He turns his palms up in a gesture of abandonment. “But then I suppose we all end up paying for it one way or another.” He wanders off. She ventures a guess that the ink probably hasn’t dried on his divorce.
    She feels compassion for the bewildered fool. There was a time when she’d have been happy to invite him to sit down and have a cup of coffee and tell her the story of his life. She’s always liked people; she’s always curious about them.
    She wonders why her rebuff seemed to take him so utterly by surprise. Perhaps everybody assumes that an attractive woman who’s alone must have a transparent reason to come to a place like this.
    She doesn’t want to take any others by surprise; it might make them remember her. When the next man arrives at her table and says, “Hi. You alone?”—it isn’t more than five minutes later—she gives him a grim look and says, “I’m waiting for my husband. He’s a police officer.”
    â€œLucky for him. Too bad for me.” The man goes away, good-natured, taking it in stride, searching with bright eyes for his next opportunity.
    That one too, she thinks. Nice guy. For all you know all he wants is a friendly smile and a few minutes’ conversation.
    Dear God. I’ve always been such a nice person. I’ve always loved stray puppies—I’ve always been kind to my friends and generous to my enemies and trusting to strangers.
    Is it possible to wake up one morning and make a snap decision that’s going to change the rest of your life—and truly become a different person: someone you’d have hated?
    There’s got to be room for humanity. You can’t just let yourself shrivel up into a suspicious crone.
    And yet.…
    You’ve got to think about Ellen. For her sake you can’t trust anyone at all.
    Let the poor sons of bitches find other girls to talk to. Right now you just can’t afford the exposure.
    Alone at the coffee shop table she fills in the Social Security application—the second one: Dorothy Holder’s. Yesterday she stopped in an instant-printing shop and had Dorothy’s birth certificate photocopied. She encloses the copy with the application and lists her mailing address as that of the mail-forwarding service.
    She tries to make Dorothy’s signature different from Jennifer’s: bigger, rounder, heavier. She’s practiced signing Jennifer C. Hartman night after night in a crabbed hand that is not at all like her usual flowing script.
    She drops the application into a mail slot and a quarter into the one-armed bandit. It doesn’t pay off and she goes back to her motel. It is six o’clock: a bit early for dinner and she isn’t hungry anyway. She lies down on the bed, just to relax for a few minutes; maybe she’ll go in the swimming pool in a little