I had a new job where I worked at a desk that was side by side with others, like those of Mary and Murray on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Although management didn’t like it, we kept rearranging them like my college roommates and I used to — facing each other, at right angles, and so forth.

I seemed to be doing well, although I worried a great deal about approvals. One day when I was wearing a favorite dress (in reality, one that has been donated because the style is too young for me), I was horrified to notice in a mirror that, while it didn’t show anything else, somehow it was sheer enough to show that I was wearing a bright white bra. I was mortified, but no one seemed to notice. If they did, they appeared to accept me rather than judge me. I felt strange and wondered how long it would last.

I went home and found that a man who’d been haranguing people in the street was looming in my front window, still shouting, but not at me personally despite the proximity. When I went around the corner to the front door, where he would not be able to see me (unfocused as he was), I found three strangers huddled there, also trying to escape him. Did they think it was natural to walk into a stranger’s house under the circumstances? I accepted this and talked to them. I don’t know why we were afraid of being observed by the man’s unseeing eye.