The spider's legs moved slowly, one at a time. She danced cautiously over her thready spinning, and the old lady watched her from her bed. Speckled light patterned the ceiling, reflecting off puddles on the patio outside.
        Voices drifted into the room from the kitchen -Stupid gossipers, Estrella thought- and with them came the sour scent of fallen unripe guava fruit. Guanábana. The name of the fruit was as beautiful as the color of its flesh, and had a rhythm like hurried hoofbeats.
          Estrella lay on her back, her thin hands folded over her chest. In the play of light on the ceiling she saw men who had been dead for years hurrying toward the hacienda, their wide sombreros slanting darkness across their bodies. Three little children running through the chickens toward them, It's that Pancha's son Joaquinito without his pants again, he's getting too old for that, the sun beating unmercifully on the red dust, the scattered grass in front of the hacienda. High bundles tied behind the men's saddles, small feathers drifting down from them like trailsof sad stars. Pounds and pounds of egret feathers, Now we can be sure of eating for a while, at least, and she stepped out of the porch's shade into the harsh sun, trying not to think about those long, leggy birds rising white, so white against the morning sky.
        "Here you go, señora, your lunch." The woman's voice, too bright, too loud, from just across the room. Her sudden shadow splaying across the light patterns on the ceiling, pulling Estrella away. Her pompous footsteps carried her over to the bed. She brought with her a bitter smell of strong medicine. Boiled mashed carrots and strained peas lay in submissive heaps on the tray she carried. The woman frowned at the expression on Estrella's face, thunked the tray down on the bedside table. Turned on her heel, walked back out the door.
        -Her shirt was unseemly,- Estrella thought. -Too tight, too small. I shall have to speak to her about it. - She imagined herself standing, pointing a finger toward the middle of that woman's conceited forehead. In my day, señorita..... But she knew what the woman's response would be. She hated scorn, but she had always been so much more afraid of being laughed at.
        She remembered her father's face that day, and her stomach felt again how it had quaked at his expression. He could not decide whether to punish her or laugh at her-- one hand reaching for his little whip, the other twining the long, knotted red thread about its large knuckles. Someone had told him about the knotted string under her pillow.
        "Keep it close to you," the old crone spoke, her tongue flicking and licking at the gaps where she had lost her eyeteeth, the beads shaking and glimmering in her dirty hair. "Take the measure of your amante's waist with this string and keep it close. Don't worry. You'll see."
        But in only a few months those floating clouds of white lace were hers to wear anyway.
     Do you want the whole of Argentina to laugh at you? Her father's voice, angry even in her pre-wedding nightmares. I won't have my daughter believing in pampa-trash witch-women and those Indian tonterías!<.br>         Perhaps the charm didn't work because she didn't wholly believe in it; because she didn't love the sun-gilded boy she had cajoled into letting her measure his waist; because she had only gone to the witch-woman because she was desperate. Frightened. Scared because of what her father had told her a few weeks ago candelight flickering across his shiny forehead, throwing his eyes into shadow about the agreement he had made with Don Alfonso. And all she knew of Don Alfonso was his round, earnest face, always slick with sweat; his crooked teeth, too tentative when they smiled at her; and his small hands, fluttering near his face or crawling nervously, spider-like, on his waist-coat-clad belly.
        Estrella stared upwards again, where the spider hung and crawled among the flickering light shadows. She'd just lie here, then. Dignified. But she felt anything but dignified, splayed out on that hard, narrow bed. Naked and chilled in her nightgown, with the smell of guanábana floating through her daydreams.
        She felt like the crocodile skins that the vaqueros sometimes brought home to the hacienda holding her nose against the smell, edging farther forward. The sunset behind her, throwing her shadow huge against those splayed skins. Those grisly martyred scarecrows, stretching scaly and stinking behind the workmen's houses. Some tall and ugly, Much more frightening than Papá with his little whip, even, teeth stained and grinning in the dying light. Some so small... their limp swaying tails only long enough for a small girl's necklace. Fingering the glass beads resting on her collar bone, wondering about the swirling of muddy waters and the taste of raw fish.