I had spent decades being looked at — remembered, greeted, deferred to — and now, in the space of an afternoon, I had become scenery.

And I thought, with a chill, that this was the ordinary daily experience of the people who kept my life running: to move through beautiful rooms full of people who did not see them, and to know that their dignity, their exhaustion, their whole inner lives were invisible to the very people they served.

Luis lived in this.

Verena lived in this.

I was only visiting it for an afternoon, in costume, and I could already feel how it might, over years, teach a person to make herself small.

The difference was that I got to take the wig off at the end.

They did not.

That thought was still turning over in me when Sabine found me and began, with real relish, to give me orders.

Chapter 8 — The Garment Boxes

It did not take long.