She had put the funeral and interment off yet another day.

The relatives began to rumble, but Anne was more than equal to them, thank you. The funeral director took one look at her and decided the old mick could rot in his pine box before he got involved. Anne, who spent the whole day on the phone, would have congratulated him on making a wise decision. Her fury was rapidly passing all previous bounds. Now all the phones into Haven seemed out of service.

She could not delay the funeral another day longer and she knew it. Bobbi had won this battle; all right, so be it. But not the war. Oh no. If she thought that, the bitch had several more thinks coming-and all of them would be painful.

Anne bought her plane tickets angrily but confidently-one from upstate New York to Bangor… and two returns.

She would have flown to Bangor the following day-that was when the ticket was for-but her idiotic mother fell down the back stairs and broke her hip. Sean O'Casey had once said that when you lived with the Irish you marched in a fool's parade, and oh how right he had been. Her mother's screams brought Anne in from the back yard, where she had been lying on a chaiselongue, soaking up some sun, and going over her strategy for keeping Bobbi in Utica once she had gotten her here. Her mother was sprawled at the bottom of the narrow staircase, bent at a hideous angle, and Anne's first thought was that for a row of pins she would gladly have left the stupid old bitch there until the anesthetic effects of the claret began to wear off. The new widow smelled like a winery.

In that angry, dismayed moment Anne knew that all of her plans would have to be changed, and she thought that their mother might actually have done it on purpose-gotten drunk to nerve herself up and then not just fallen but jumped downstairs. Why? To keep her from Bobbi, of course.

But you won't, she had thought, going to the phone. You won't; if I want a thing to be, if I mean a thing to be, that thing will be; I am going to Haven and I am going to cut a wide swath there. I'm going to bring Bobbi back, and they're going to remember me for a long time. Especially the hayseed dork who hung up on me.

She picked up the phone and punched the Medix number-it had been pasted to the phone ever since her father's first stroke-with quick, angry stabs of her forefinger. She was grinding her teeth.

Thus it was the ninth of August before she could finally get away. In the caesura, there was no call from Bobbi, and Anne didn't try to get her again, or the hick town manager, or Bobbi's drunken fuck in Troy. He had apparently moved in so he could poke her full-time. Okay. Let them both fall into a lull. That would be very fine.

Now she was here, in Bangor's Cityscape Hotel, sleeping badly… and grinding her teeth.

She had always ground her teeth. Sometimes it was so loud it awoke her mother in the night… on a few occasions even her father, who slept like a brick. Her mother mentioned it to the family doctor when Anne was three. That fellow, a venerable upstate New York G. P. whom Doc Warwick would have felt right at home with, looked surprised. He considered a moment, then said: “I think you must be imagining that, Mrs Anderson.”

“If I am, it must be catching,” Paula had said. “My husband's heard it, too.”

They looked toward Anne, who was building a shaky tower of blocks, one on top of the other. She worked with grim, unsmiling concentration. As she added a sixth block, the tower fell down… and as she started to rebuild it, they both heard the grim, skeletal sound of Anne grinding her baby teeth together.

“She also does that in her sleep?” the doctor asked.

Paula Anderson nodded.

“Well, it'll probably go away,” the doctor said. “It's harmless.” But of course it didn't go away and it wasn't harmless; it was bruxism, a malady which, along with heart attacks, strokes, and ulcers, often afflicts driven, self-assertive people. The first of Anne's baby teeth to fall out was noticeably eroded. Her parents commented on it… then forgot it. By then Anne's personality had begun to assert itself in more gaudy and startling ways. By six and a half she was already ruling the Anderson family in some strange way you could never quite put your finger on. And they had all gotten used to the thin, slightly gruesome whisper of Anne's teeth grinding together in the night.

The family dentist had noticed the problem wasn't going away but getting worse by the time Anne was nine, but it wasn't treated until she was fifteen, when it began to cause her actual pain. By then she had worn her teeth down to the live nerves. The dentist fitted her with a rubber mouth-splint taken from a mould of her teeth, then an acrylic one. She wore these appliances, which are called “night-guards,” to bed every night. At eighteen she was fitted with all-metal crowns on most of her top and bottom teeth. The Andersons couldn't afford it, but Anne insisted. They had allowed the problem to slide, and she was not going to allow her skinflint father to turn around when she was twenty-one and say, “You're a grownup now, Anne; it's your problem. If you want crowns, you pay the bill.”

She had wanted gold, but that really was beyond their means.

For several years thereafter, Anne's infrequent smiles had a glittery, mechanized look that was extremely startling. People often actually recoiled from that grin. She took a grim enjoyment from these reactions, and when she had seen the villain Jaws in one of the later James Bond movies, she had laughed until she thought her sides would split-this unaccustomed burst of amusement had left her feeling dizzy and ill. But she had understood exactly why, when that huge man first bared his stainless-steel teeth in a sharklike grin, people had recoiled from her, and she almost wished she hadn't finally had porcelain fused over the metal. Yet, she thought, it was perhaps better not to show oneself so clearly-it could be as unwise to wear your personality on your sleeve as it was to wear your heart there. Maybe you didn't have to look as though you could chew your way through a door made of oak planks to get what you wanted as long as you knew you could.

Bruxism aside, Anne also had had a lot of cavities both as a child and an adult in spite of Utica's fluoridated water and her own strictly observed regimen of oral hygiene (she often flossed her teeth until her gums bled). This was also due in large part to her personality rather than her physiology. Drive and the urge to dominate afflicts both the softest parts of the human body-stomach and vitals-and the hardest, the teeth. Anne had a chronic case of dry-mouth. Her tongue was nearly white. Her teeth were dry little islands. Without a steady flow of saliva to wash away crumbs of food, cavities began quickly. By this night when she lay sleeping uneasily in Bangor, Anne had better than twelve ounces of silver-amalgam fillings in her mouth-on infrequent occasions she had set off airport metal-detectors.

In the last two years she had begun to lose teeth in spite of her fanatic efforts to save them: two on the top right, three on the bottom left. In both cases she had opted for the most expensive dental bridgework available-she had to travel to New York City to have the work done. The dental surgeon removed the rotting husks, flayed her gums to the dull white of the jawbone, and implanted tiny titanium screws. The gums were sewn back together and healed nicely-some people reject metal implants in the bone, but Anne Anderson had no trouble at all accepting them-leaving two little titanium posts sticking out of the flesh. The bridgework was placed over the metal anchors after the flesh around them had healed.