"My daughter doesn't talk either," said Mrs. Prokop, delighted, "so you'll get along. Mina, say hello to the man."
"Ma, he said not to talk to him."
"Mina Prokop, I raised you better than that." Her mother said the name as she always did, cheerfully, effortlessly, with both hard P's popping like corks; she had never had a stone in her mouth in her life. "She had a stammer when she was little, you know. Terrible. Couldn't get her own name out. Took her till high school. Now she types for a living, two hundred and sixty words a minute, and she still doesn't say ten in a row if she can help it. Thirty-two on Tuesday, and I ask you, is that a girl who gets out of the house?"
Mina closed her eyes.
When she opened them, they were at the top of Nob Hill, at California Street, where the Powell line crosses the California line in a great clattering crossroads of cables, and the gripman has to let go of one cable and coast over the other, and for a moment the car rolls free under nobody's power at all. Remy let go. The car glided. He stood with his hands off the lever, at the crest of the hill, and for the first time all day he turned his head and looked down at her, right at her, for one second, with his face open and grave and unbearably kind. It was not a word. It was not a note. It was not quite, she thought afterward, a nod.
Then he took hold of the cable again, and faced forward, and rang the bell.
It was not the bright quick rattle he had given the doorman. It was something else, long and slow and complicated, a rhythm that started simple and built and doubled back on itself, a ring that went all the way down Powell to Jackson and around the corner, so that people on the sidewalks turned to look, and the honeymooners from Tokyo took a picture of it, and Manny on the back brake shouted, "Hey, Agostini, you auditioning?" Remy did not answer. He rang it until the car turned onto Hyde Street and the whole of the Bay opened up in front of them at once, blue and enormous and scattered with sails, Alcatraz squatting in the middle of it like a dropped stone, the Marin hills gold beyond, as if somebody had pulled a sheet off a painting.
"Well," said her mother, sitting back, satisfied. "He's very good with the bell."
On Tuesday, she turned thirty-two in Department Fourteen, taking down the testimony of a forensic accountant named Mr. Pell, who spent the entire morning explaining Mrs. Lucchesi's loan payments in a voice so devoid of inflection that Juror Number Eleven fell asleep and had to be prodded by Mrs. Louie with a pencil. Nobody wished her a happy birthday. This was not unusual. She did not tell people when her birthday was, because then they would have to say something, and she would have to say something back, and the whole business seemed to her to be fraught with consonants. Her mother would call that evening. Bunny was out with the flu. Thurston, who knew everyone's birthday on the fourth floor and brought them each a single Hostess cupcake in its cellophane, had somehow, this year, forgotten hers.
At ten minutes past twelve she went to Tillie's, and it was not raining, and he had gotten there first. He was at the counter. She went to the booth and sat in it alone and ordered a tuna melt and looked out the window at Larkin Street, at the pigeons and the buses and a man in a Dukakis button arguing with a man in a Bush hat, and to her own enormous surprise and disgust, she began to cry.
She did not know exactly why. It was not about the birthday, or not only. It was the accountant, and the oven, and the bread painted on the plywood, and her mother on the cable car saying Couldn't get her own name out, in front of him, in front of Ohio. It was thirty-two years of being the person in the room whom nobody looked at, and having arranged it that way on purpose, and discovering in the last booth at Tillie's that she had been wrong about what she wanted. She cried silently, efficiently, the way she did everything, with her face turned to the window, and hoped that nobody would notice.