For half a minute or more, Roy Tabak considered that. “You asked me if I knew the appliance industry. Remember?”

  Frostfree nodded. She had dropped a tomato into the boiling water in the saucepan, and was holding its head down.

  “I am. Only I’ve never even heard of a refrigerator that could turn into a woman. Maybe all this is just a bad dream, the curse and everything. What do you think?”

  “I think that this has been boiled long enough for me to slip the skin off,” Frostfree murmured. “Ah! There it goes.”

  “You had your hand in the boiling water,” Roy Tabak remarked. “Didn’t it hurt?”

  “No, sir. I am an appliance, sir.” Frostfree smiled. “I was built in the twenty-third century, sir. I am native to the year twenty-two ninety-one—it is when the WSPC purchased me. May I speak of your curse, sir? You’ve been avoiding the matter.”

  “You can jump around in time?”

  “No, sir. The Society dispatched me to this period, sir. It will return me to my own period in due course, I believe.”

  “You believe?”

  “Yes, sir. It is a matter of faith—but yes, I do.” As she spoke, Frostfree picked up a pepper.

  “How many of those are you going to make?” Roy Tabak asked.

  “Four, sir. I have two tomatoes and two peppers, and four seems to me reasonable number.”

  “I don’t eat more than two eggs, usually.”

  “You have not tasted my eggs Columbus, sir.”

  “I guess not.” Roy Tabak got out a fresh cigarette, examined it, and slipped it back into the pack. “Could you change back into a refrigerator so I could have another beer?”

  “That is hardly necessary, sir.” Dropping her pepper into the boiling water, Frostfree turned to face him. Her apron swung aside, and the front of her dress with it. Reaching into herself, she took out a cold longneck and handed it to him.

  “Did you just get thinner? I mean you’re still fat—I mean not really fat, but didn’t you lose a little bit of weight just now, maybe?”

  She nodded. “The bottle you hold has been deducted from my gross mass. I take it that is what you meant.”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “The World Society for the Prevention of Curses has been policing the past, sir. I was about to say so.” She dunked the pepper. “Hyperhistory rec ords many effectual cursings, including yours. They have done incalculable harm. The present brightens as they are removed.”

  “My present or your present?”

  “Both, sir. Or so I would hope.” Frostfree sighed. “Normally, sir, some bold but warmhearted individual volunteers to visit the past and lift the curse. In your case, that proved impossible.”

  “I still don’t believe I’m under a curse,” Roy Tabak said. “I don’t buy that part at all. If I’m under a curse why would somebody send me a refrigerator that turns into a woman who can cook?”

  “It is the nature of your curse, sir.” Frostfree stripped the skin from the pepper. “Your curse limits you to coldhearted persons. No warmhearted person will find you tolerable.”

  “People buy from me,” Roy Tabak declared, “and it’s not just refrigerators. I sell stoves, grills, mixers, all kinds of stuff, and I’m one of the most successful salesmen at the store. Ask anybody.”

  “Coldhearted persons find you sympathetic, sir.” With a deft twist of Roy Tabak’s paring knife, Frostfree disposed of the seedy interior of a tomato. “There are a great many of them in this century.”

  Roy nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve noticed that about my customers.”

  “Thus I was sent. I—I like you, sir.”

  He twisted the cap from his beer. “I like you, too, Frostfree.”

  “Do you really, sir?” Smiling, she turned to face him. “As a refrigerator, I have no heart at all.”

  “Naturally,” Roy Tabak agreed.

  “While as a woman, my ice-cube trays perform the function, sir. They’re in my ice maker. They have the little chambers, you see, and they expand and contract. It’s exactly like your human heart, but colder.”

  It was excellent beer, Roy decided. Aloud he said, “It was one of my ex-girlfriends, wasn’t it? I think I could even guess which one.”

  “I’m to find you a warmhearted young lady,” Frostfree told him. “If I can accomplish it, your curse will be broken. Will you please pass the pepper, sir? The pepper and the salt.”

  It was shortly after ten when they strolled arm-in-arm into the Home Office Bar & Grill. “This is as good a spot as any,” Roy Tabak told Frostfree. “The real action won’t start until eleven or so, but it’s good to be a little early.” He leaned toward her, almost shouting to make himself heard. “Usually I sit at the bar, and it can be tough to get a seat there later.”

  “We must have a table, sir,” she said as she sat down at one. “We must be seen together.”

  He nodded, secretly glad that he had removed a head of cabbage and all of the remaining beer before they left. “Okay, here we are and everybody’s seeing us. Are you a good dancer?”

  “No, sir. It might be better if we did not dance.”

  Two blondes and a brunet came in, all talking at once.

  “Do you like any of those, sir?” Frostfree leaned across the table.

  “Yeah, Kay—that’s the brunet in the middle, only she turned me down flat last week.” A barmaid had appeared at Roy’s elbow, and he added, “What are you having, Frosty?”

  “I haven’t decided.” Frostfree smiled at the barmaid. “What do you suggest?”

  “Most people drink beer,” the barmaid told her. “We have Bud, Miller, Old Style, and a lot of foreign beers. Just about anything you want, really.”

  Roy Tabak ordered a Miller Lite.

  “Scotch and water might be nice,” Frostfree said.

  Roy Tabak waited until the barmaid had gone before asking, “Can you really drink that?”

  “I will drink it slowly, sir. I doubt that you will have to buy me another.”

  “That’s not the point. You’re—” He choked it back. “I still don’t see how dating you is going to get me a girlfriend.”

  “A warmhearted one, sir. One breaks curses, you see, by doing whatever the curse forbids. Let us suppose, for example, that a curse were to stipulate that you die before your twenty-first birthday.”

  “I’m thirty-two already.”

  “If you lived beyond your twenty-first birthday, the curse would be neutralized. Or let us say that your curse was in the form of a pig that followed you everywhere.”

  “You’re really not all that stout.” Roy found he was shouting to make himself heard above “Gotta Shine.”

  “Anyhow, I like you.”

  “If you could slip into an elevator and shut its doors before the pig could follow, the curse would be broken. That is an actual case from the eleventh century, although of course no elevator was involved. Our operative dropped a portcullis, I believe.”

  Their drinks arrived. Frostfree sipped and smiled.

  “You can taste things.”

  “Of course. It’s difficult to cook when one cannot.” She sipped again. “Please give me fifty dollars, sir.”

  “What?”

  “Fifty dollars. I would think that would suffice. A fifty-dollar bill might be best, but two twenties and a ten should be acceptable.”

  “You need the money.”

  “Yes, sir. I do.”

  “To get me a warmhearted girlfriend.”

  “Yes, sir. I will not hire her, sir.”

  Roy Tabak shrugged. “You can’t get much for fifty anyway.”

  “It depends upon the thing bought, sir. Passing it to me beneath the table might be prudent.”

  He did, and she rose. “I must attend to a call of nature.” Her lips brushed his forehead, cold and firm.

  He was still trying to imagine what a refrigerator might do in the lady’s room when she returned to their table. He raised an eyebrow. “Everything come out all right?”

  “I believe so, sir. I emptied my drip pan, and my negotiations should be effectual.” She glanced to her left.

  Their waitress and another were pushing through the throng of lookers and drinkers.

  “It might be wisest if you said nothing, sir.”

  Roy Tabak nodded.

  The waitresses arrived, panting and pointing to Frostfree. “He said he couldn’t call you,” gasped the one who had served them.

  The other added, “Your phone’s off. He said he’s dying!”

  “He called here. He said you’d be here.”

  Frostfree raised a hand. “Calm yourselves! The man is a hypochondriac, a faker. It probably isn’t serious at all.”

  “But—”

  “He just wants attention.” Frostfree sighed, her sigh visible but inaudible. “I suppose I have to go.”

  “Yeah,” Roy put in. “Maybe you’d better.”

  “You’re a darling.” Leaning over the table (in which something popped under the stress of her weight) she kissed him.

  At the bar, Frostfree spoke urgently to Kay. Roy Tabak, watching and very much wishing he could overhear them, saw Kay nod reluctantly. A moment later, Kay and Frostfree turned to stare at him before resuming their conversation.

  Before Frostfree had left, Kay rose, slipped through the crowd to Roy Tabak’s table, and sat. “Your friend told me about the awful thing that’s happened to you,” she said.

  Roy nodded sadly without having the least idea what she was talking about.

  “I don’t usually do this,” she said.

  He stood as if to leave. “You don’t have to. Really you don’t.”

  She stood, too. “Do you dance?”

  “Sometimes,” he admitted, “but I’m not very good.”

  “Just follow my lead, Roy.” Her smile was brightly encouraging. “Only do it, you know, in a man sort of way.”

  “Like a mirror reflection.”

  “That’s it. That’s it exactly.”

  The truth was that he enjoyed dancing, and danced agilely with a good sense of rhythm. The crowded floor limited them both until the people gave way to watch. Kay’s smile widened and her hips rolled more wildly. He had thrown her high into the air and caught her before they sat down, and she had slid between his legs and spun like a top.

  Hours later, in the kitchen of his apartment, she came across a lone uneaten egg. “This egg in the tomato—did you cook this, Roy?”

  “For my supper, after I got home from work.” When she stared at him, he added. “Eggs Columbus is really pretty easy and a good way to bake eggs. I ate the other three.”

  “An egg baked in a tomato, on toast…”

  “Or a green pepper,” Roy Tabak told her. “I like those better. And you add butter, and salt and pepper.” He shrugged. “Other spices if you want them, or bread crumbs. It’s easy and quick.”

  The brunet sat. “You cook. Eggs Columbus, you said. Just for you.”

  Roy nodded.

  “Can I have a cigarette?”

  He found an unopened pack and gave it to her.

  As she opened it, she murmured, “You know, you’re really quite a person.”

  There was a butane lighter in the pocket of his robe. He used it to light her cigarette.

  “You’re going to drive me home.”

  He nodded.

  “My roommate will be asleep, but she’ll wake up and want to know where I’ve been and everything we did.” Kay inhaled, blew smoke through her nostrils, and looked pleased. “I don’t know how much I’m going to tell her, but I certainly won’t tell everything.”

  “Up to you,” Roy Tabak said.

  “Yes.” Kay smiled. “You’re going to drive me, so you shouldn’t have another beer. I’d like one just the same. Maybe you’d like a Pepsi or something.”

  Frostfree, who had apparently returned to his kitchen some time ago, had replaced the beer and the cabbage. Roy got Kay a cold beer and poured it into a spotless tulip glass before pouring a glass of milk for himself.

  “That’s an interesting refrigerator you’ve got there,” Kay remarked. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

  “That right there,” Roy Tabak told her in a tone that brooked no disagreement, “is the best damned refrigerator in the whole world.”

  · · · ·

  Much later, when he had finished his crepes, Roy Tabak said, “Kay, that’s her name. The brunet you sent over to talk to me.”

  Frostfree, who had been washing dishes, turned to face him. “Yes, sir.”

  “She’s a warmhearted person.”

  “Yes, sir. She is, sir.”

  “Warmhearted and loving. Affectionate. I’m not. I’m a coldhearted, lying son-of-a-bitch, and I know it. Also, I don’t make half as much as I’m worth, and I smoke. She already smokes a little, so we’ll smoke together.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I lied to her, and you lied to her to get her to come over and talk to me. We’re both liars.”

  “No, sir. I explained that you are friendless man, not far from suicide and insanity, and that you had been terribly hurt by the actions of a woman you once loved. What I said was true, sir. Every word of it.”

  “Okay.”

  “I expressed myself persuasively and urgently, and explained that I was only an acquaintance of yours and that I was leaving. I asked her to stay with you for at least an hour, and she consented.”

  Roy Tabak seemed not to have heard. “I lied to get her into the sack, and I lied afterward so she wouldn’t find out about you. That’s what I did, and now she’s mixed up with me. Is she under some sort of curse, like I was?”

  “I cannot tell you, sir. I have no information upon the topic. It was not part of any download I received.”

  Roy Tabak blew a thoughtful smoke ring and watched it float away. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think so, too.”

  La Befana

  When Zozz, home from the pit, had licked his fur clean, he howled before John Bananas’ door. John’s wife, Teresa, opened it and let him in. She was a thin, stooped woman of thirty or thirty-five, her black hair shot with gray. She did not smile, but he felt somehow that she was glad to see him.

  She said, “He’s not home yet. If you want to come in we’ve got a fire.”

  Zozz said, “I’ll wait for him—,” and six-legging politely across the threshold sat down over the stone Bananas had rolled in for him when they had been new friends. Maria and Mark, playing some sort of game with bottle caps on squares scratched on the floor dirt, said, “Hi, Mr. Zozz—,” and Zozz said, “Hi—,” in return. Bananas’ old mother, whom Zozz had brought here from the pads in his rusty powerwagon the day before, looked at him from piercing eyes, then fled into the other room. He could hear Teresa relax, hear her wheezing outpuffed breath.

  He said, “I think she thinks I bumped her on purpose yesterday.”

  “She’s not used to you yet.”

  “I know,” Zozz said.

  “I told her, Mother Bananas, it’s their world and they’re not used to you.”

  “Sure,” Zozz said. A gust of wind outside brought the cold in to replace the odor of the gog-hutch on the other side of the left wall.

  “I tell you it’s hell to have your husband’s mother with you in a place as small as this.”

  “Sure,” Zozz said again.

  Maria announced, “Daddy’s home!”

  The door rattled open and Bananas came in, looking tired and cheerful. Bananas worked in the slaughtering market and though his cheeks were blue with cold, his two trousers cuffs were red with blood. He kissed Teresa and tousled the hair of both children and said, “Hi, Zozzy.”

  Zozz said, “Hi. How does it roll?” And moved over so Bananas could warm his back.

  Someone groaned and Bananas asked a little anxiously, “What’s that?”

  Teresa said, “Next door.”

  “Huh?”

  “Next door. Some woman.”

  “Oh. I thought it might be Mom.”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In back.”

  Bananas frowned. “There’s no fire in there. She’ll freeze to death.”

  “I didn’t tell her to go back there. She can wrap a blanket around herself.”

  Zozz said, “It’s me—I bother her.” He got up.

  Bananas said, “Sit down.”

  “I can go. I just came to say hi.”

  “Sit down.” Bananas turned to his wife. “Honey, you shouldn’t leave her in there alone. See if you can’t get her to come out here, okay?”

  “Johnny—”

  “Teresa, dammit!”

  “Okay, Johnny.”

  · · · ·

  Bananas took off his coat and sat down in front of the fire. Maria and Mark had gone back to their game.

  In a voice too low to attract their attention Bananas said, “Nice thing, huh?”

  Zozz said, “I think your mother makes her nervous.”

  Bananas said, “Sure.”

  Zozz said, “This isn’t an easy world.”

  “For us two-leggers? No, it ain’t, but you don’t see me moving.”

  Zozz said, “That’s good. I mean, here you’ve got a job anyway. There’s work.”

  “That’s right.”

  Unexpectedly Maria said, “We get enough to eat here, and me and Mark can find wood for the fire. Where we used to be there wasn’t anything to eat.”

  Bananas asked, “You remember, honey?” “A little.”

  Zozz said, “People are poor here.”

  Bananas was taking off his shoes, scraping the street mud from them, and tossing it into the fire. He said, “If you mean us, us people are poor everyplace.” He jerked his head in the direction of the back room. “You ought to hear her tell about our world.”

  “Your mother?”

  Bananas nodded. “You should hear what she has to say.”

  Maria said, “Daddy, how did Grandmother get here?”

  “Same way we did.”

  Mark said, “You mean she signed a thing?”

  “A labor contract? No, she’s too old. She bought a ticket—you know, like you would buy something in a store.”

  Maria said, “Why did she come, Daddy?”

  “Shut up and play. Don’t bother us.”

  Zozz said, “How did things go at work?”