The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

Escape from the Invasion of the Love-Killers

gerard maines lived across the hall from a woman named Benna, who four minutes into any conversation always managed to say the word penis. He was not a prude, but, nonetheless, it made him wince. He worked with children all day, taught a kind of aerobics to pre-schoolers, and the most extreme language he was likely to hear seemed to him to be in code, in acronyms, or maybe even in German—boo-boo, finky, peenick—words that were difficult to figure out even in context, and words, therefore, from which he felt quite safe. He suspected it was not unlike people he knew who hated operas in translation. "Believe me," they would explain, "you just don't want to know what they're saying."

Today they were talking about families.

"Fathers and sons," she said, "they're like governments: always having sword fights with their penises."

"Really," said Gerard, sitting at her kitchen table, gulping at near-beer for breakfast. He palmed his beard like a man trying to decide.

"But what do I know." She smiled and shrugged. "I grew up in a trailer. It's not like a real family with a house." This was her excuse for everything, her own self-deprecating refrain; she'd grown up in a trailer in upstate New York and was therefore unqualified to pronounce on any of the subjects she continued to pronounce on.

Gerard had his own line of self-excuse: "I was a retard in my father's play."

"A retard in your father's play?"

"Yes," he said, realizing that faced with the large questions of life and not finding large answers, one must then settle for makeshift, little answers, just as on any given day a person must at least eat something, even if it was not marvelous and huge. "He wrote plays in our town. Then he did the casting and directing. It was harder to venture out through the rest of life after that."

"How awful for you," said Benna, pouring more near-beer into both their glasses.

"Yes," he said. He loved her very much.

benna was a nightclub singer. Four nights a week she put on a black mini-dress and what she wearily called her Joan-Crawford-catch-me-have-me shoes, and went off to sing at the various cocktail lounges around Fitchville. Sometimes Gerard would go see her and drink too much. In the spotlight up front she seemed to him hopelessly beautiful, a star, her glass jewelry launching quasars into the audience, her laughter rumbling into the mike. He'd watch other men fall in love with her; he knew the fatuous gaze, the free drinks sent over between songs — he'd done that himself. Sometimes he would stay for all three sets and buy her a hamburger afterward or just give her a ride home. Other times, when it was crowded, he would leave her to her fans — the businessmen with loosened neckties, the local teenage girls who idolized her, the very musicians she hired to play with her — and would go home and sit in his bathroom, in his bone-dry tub, with his clothes on, waiting. The way their apartments were laid out, their bathrooms shared a wall, and Gerard could sit in his own tub and await her two-in-the-morning return, hear her enter her bathroom, hear her pee, hear the ruckle of the toilet-paper roll, the metal-sprung flush, the sliding shower door, the squirt, spray, hiss of the water. Sometimes he would call to her through the tiles. She would turn off the shower and yell, "Gerard, are you talking to me?"

"Yes, I'm talking to you. No. I'm talking to Zero Mostel."

"Listen, I'm tired. I'm going to bed."

Once she came home at three in the morning, completely drunk, and knocked on his door. When he opened it, she was slumped against the frame, eyes closed, shoes in hand. "Gerard," she drawled, thrusting her shoes at him, "will you make love to me?" and then she sank to the floor and passed out.

Every morning she downed a whole six-pack of near-beer. "You know, I'm a widow," she said, and then told him quickly about a husband, a lawyer who had been killed in a car crash.

"You're so young," murmured Gerard. "It must have been devastating."

"Nah," she exhaled, and then, peeling an orange, sang "O what a beautiful mourning," just that line. "I don't know," she said, and shrugged.

near their apartment building was a large baseball field, rarely used. From Gerard's living-room window he could see the field's old rotting scoreboard, weathered as driftwood, its paint peeling but still boasting the neat and discernible lettering: home and visitor. When he'd first moved into the apartment, the words seemed to mock him — scoring, underscoring, his own displacement and aloneness — so much that he would close the blinds so as not to have to look at them.

Occasionally now, however, late at night, he would venture out onto the diamond and, if it was summer and warm, would sprawl out on the ground at a place just to the left of the pitcher's mound and stare up at the sky. It was important to dizzy yourself with stars, he thought. Too often you forgot they were even there. He could stare at one star, one brilliant and fidgety star, so long that his whole insides seemed suddenly to rush out into the sky to meet it. It was like the feeling he'd had as a boy playing baseball, focusing on the pitched ball with such concentration that the bat itself seemed at the crucial moment to leap from him with a loud smack and greet the ball mid-air.

As an adult he rarely had those moments of connection, though what ones he'd had recently seemed mostly to be with the children he taught. He'd be showing them how to do reaches and bends — like trees, he would tell them — and when he put on music and finally had them do it, their eyes would cry "Look at me! I'm doing it!" the sudden bonds between them and him magical as home runs. More and more he was becoming convinced that it was only through children that one could connect with anything anymore, that in this life it was only through children that one came home, became a home, that one was no longer a visitor.

"Boy, are you sentimental," Benna told him. "I feel like I'm talking to a Shirley Temple movie." Benna was a woman who knew when she was ovulating by the dreams she'd have of running through corridors to catch trains; she was also a woman who said she had no desire to have children. "I watched my friend Eleanor give birth," she said. "Once you've seen a child born you realize a baby's not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what you've been eating for nine months."

"But look at the stars," he wanted to say to her. "How does one get there?" But then he thought of her singing in the Ramada Inn cocktail lounge, her rhinestones flashing out into the dark of the place, and thought that maybe in a certain way she was already there. "Tell me why you don't want to have children," Gerard said. He had for a solid week recently allowed himself the fantasy of someday having a family with her, although she had shown no real interest in him after that one night in his doorway, and usually went out with other men anyway. He would sometimes hear them clunk up and down the stairs.

"You know me," she said. "I grew up in a trailer. Your own father made you a retard. You tell me why you want to have kids."

Gerard thought about the little deaf boy in his class, a boy named Barney, how just today Barney had said loudly in his garbled and unconsonanted speech, "Please, Mr. Maines, when you stand behind, can you stomp your feet louder?" The only way Barney could hear the music and the beat was through the vibrations in the floor. Gerard had smiled, kind and hearty, and said "Certainly, young man," and something raced and idled in his heart.

"Sometimes I think that without children we remain beasts or dust. That we are like something lost at sea."

Benna looked at him and blinked, her eyes almost swelling, as if with allergy. She took a long glug of near-beer, swallowed, then shrugged. "Do you?" she said. "I think maybe I'm just too exhausted from work."

"Yes, well," said Gerard, attempting something lighthearted. "I guess that's why they call it work. I guess that's why they don't call it table tennis"

"What are you watching?" Gerard had knocked on her door and sauntered in. Benna was curled under a blanket on the sofa, watching television. Gerard tried to smile, had even been practicing it, feeling the air on his teeth, his cheeks puff up into his vision, the slight rise of his ears up the sides of his head.

"Some science-fiction thing," she said. "Escape from something. Or maybe it's invasion of something. I forget."

"Who are those figures rimmed in neon?" he asked, sitting beside her.

"Those are the love-killers. They love you and then they kill you. They're from another planet. Supposedly."

He looked at her face. It was pale, without make-up, and the narrow planes of her cheeks seemed exquisite as bone. Her hair, pulled off her face into a rubber band, shone auburn in the lamplight. Just as she was, huddled in a blanket that had telltale signs of dog hair and coffee, Gerard wanted more than anything else to hold her in his arms. And so, in a kind of rush out of himself, he leaned over and kissed Benna on the mouth.

"Gerard," she said, pulling away slightly. "I like you very much, but I'm just not feeling sexual these days."

He could feel the dry chap of her lips against his, still there, like a ten-second ghost. "You go out with men," he insisted, quickly hating the tone of his own voice. "I hear them."

"Look. I'm going through life alone now," she said. "I can't think of men or penises or marriage or children. I work too hard. I don't even masturbate."

Gerard sank into the back of the sofa, feeling himself about to speak something bitter, something that tomorrow he would apologize for. What he said was, "What, do you need an audience for everything?" And without waiting for a reply, he got up to return to his own apartment where visitor and home, like a rigged and age-old game, would taunt him even through the blinds. He went back across the hall, where he lived.

Strings Too Short to Use

although i was between jobs and afraid I would slip into the cracks and pauses of two different Major Medical policies, I was pleased when they said I had a lump in my breast. I had discovered it on my own, during a home check, had counted to twenty and checked again, and even though Gerard had kept saying, "Where? There? Is that what you mean? It feels muscular," I brought it in to them.

"Yes," the nurse-practitioner said. "Yes. There's a lump in your breast."

"Yes, there is," said the surgeon standing beside her like a best man.

"Thank you," I said. "Thank you very much." I sat up and put my clothes back on. The surgeon had pictures of his wife and kids on the wall. The whole family looked like it was in high school, pretty and young. I stared at them and thought, So? I slipped my shoes on, zipped up my fly, tried not to feel somehow like a hooker.

This is why I was pleased: The lump was not simply a focal point for my self-pity; it was also a battery propelling me, strengthening me — my very own appointment with death. It anchored and deepened me like a secret. I started to feel it when I walked, just out from under my armpit — hard, achy evidence that I was truly a knotted saint, a bleeding angel. At last it had been confirmed: My life was really as difficult as I had always suspected. "It's true. It's there," I said to Gerard when I got home.

"Who's there?" he muttered, preoccupied and absent as a landlord. He was singing the part of Aeneas in a local production of his own rock opera, and he was on his way downtown to shop for sandals "that sort of crawl up the leg."

"This is not a knock-knock joke, Gerard. The lump. The lump is there. It's now a certified lump."

"Oh," he said slowly, soft and bewildered. "Oh, baby."

I bought big stretchy bras — one size fits all, catches all, ropes all in and presses all against you. I started to think of myself as more than one organism: a symbiotic system, like a rhino and an oxpecker, or a gorgonzola cheese.

gerard and i lived across the hall from each other. Together we had the entire top floor of a small red house on Marini Street. We could prop the doors open with bricks and sort of float back and forth between our two apartments, and although most of the time we would agree that we were living together, other times I knew it wasn't the same. He had moved to Marini Street after I'd been there three years, his way of appeasing my desire to discuss our future. At that point we'd been lovers for nineteen months. The year before he'd unilaterally decided to go on living on the other side of town, in a large "apartment in the forest." (He called my place "the cottage in the city.") It was too expensive, but, he said, all wise sparkle, "far enough away to be lovely," though I never knew what he thought was lovely at that distance — himself or me or the apartment. Perhaps it was the view. Gerard, I was afraid, liked the world best at a distance, as a photograph, as a memory. He liked to kiss me, nuzzle me, when I was scarcely awake and aware — corpse-like with the flu or struck dumb with fatigue. He liked having to chisel at some remove to get to me.

"He's a sexist pig," said Eleanor.

"Maybe he's just a latent necrophiliac," I said, realizing afterward that probably they were the same thing.

"Lust for dust," shrugged Eleanor. "Into a cold one after work."

So we never had the ritual of discussion, decision, and apartment hunting. It was simply that the Indian couple across the hall broke their lease and Gerard suddenly said during the Carson monologue one night, "Hey, maybe I'll move in there. It might be cheaper than the forest."

We had separate rents, separate kitchens, separate phone numbers, separate bathrooms with back-to-back toilets. Sometimes he'd knock on the wall and ask through the pipes how I was doing. "Fine, Gerard. Just fine."

"Great to hear," he'd say. And then we'd flush our toilets in unison.

"Kinky," said Eleanor.

"It's like parallel universes," I said. "It's like living in twin beds."

"It's like Delmar, Maryland, which is the same town as Delmar, Delaware."

"It's like living in twin beds," I said again.

"It's like the Borscht Belt," said Eleanor. "First you try it out in the Catskills before you move it to the big time."

"It's living flush up against rejection," I said.

"It's so like Gerard," said Eleanor. "That man lives across the hall from his own fucking heart."

"He's a musician," I said doubtfully. Too often I made these sorts of excuses, like a Rumpelstiltskin of love, stickily spinning straw into gold.

"Please," cautioned Eleanor, pointing at her stomach. "Please, my B.L.T."

these are the words they used: aspirate, mammogram, surgery, blockage, wait. They first just wanted to wait and see if it was a temporary blockage of milk ducts.

"Milk Duds?" exclaimed Gerard.

"Ducks!" I shouted. "Milk ducks!"

If the lump didn't go away in a month, they would talk further, using the other three words. Aspirate sounded breathy and hopeful, I had always had aspirations; and mammogram sounded like a cute little nickname one gave a favorite grandmother. But the other words I didn't like. "Wait?" I asked, tense as a yellow light. "Wait and see if it goes away? I could have done that all on my own." The nurse-practitioner smiled. I liked her. She didn't attribute everything to "stress" or to my "personal life," a redundancy I was never fond of. "Maybe," she said. "But maybe not." Then the doctor handed me an appointment card and a prescription for sedatives.

There was this to be said for the sedatives: They helped you adjust to death better. It was difficult to pick up and move anywhere, let alone from life to death, without the necessary psychic equipment. That was why, I realized, persons in messy, unhappy situations had trouble getting out: Their strength ebbed; they simultaneously aged and regressed; they had no sedatives. They didn't know who they were, though they suspected they were the browning, on-sale hamburger of the parallel universe. Frightened of their own toes, they needed the bravery of sedatives. Which could make them look generously upon the skinny scrap of their life and deem it good, ensuring a calmer death. It was, after all, easier to leave something you truly, serenely loved than something you really and frantically didn't quite. A good dying was a matter of the right attitude. A healthy death, like anything — job promotions or looking younger — was simply a matter of "feeling good about yourself." Which is where the sedatives came in. Sedate as a mint, a woman could place a happy hand on the shoulder of death and rasp out, "Waddya say, buddy, wanna dance?"

Also, you could get chores done.

You could get groceries bought.

You could do laundry and fold.

Gerard's Dido and Aeneas was a rock version of the Purcell opera. I had never seen it. He didn't want me going to the rehearsals. He said he wanted to present the whole perfect show to me, at the end, like a gift. Sometimes I thought he might be falling in love with Dido, his leading lady, whose real name was Susan Fitzbaum.

"Have fun in Tunis," I'd say as he disappeared off to rehearsals. I liked to say Tunis. It sounded obscene, like a rarely glimpsed body part.

"Carthage, Benna. Carthage. Nice place to visit."

"Though you, of course, prefer Italy."

"For history? For laying down roots? Absolutely. Have you seen my keys?"

"Ha! The day you lay down roots…" But I couldn't think of how to finish it. "That'll be the day you lay down roots," I said.

"Why, my dear, do you think they called it Rome?" He grinned. I handed him his keys. They were under an Opera News I'd been using to thwack flies.

"Thank you for the keys," he smiled, and then he was off, down the stairs, a post-modern blur of battered leather jacket, sloppily shouldered canvas bag, and pantcuffs misironed into Mobius strips.

during rehearsal breaks he would phone. "Where do you want to sleep tonight, your place or mine?"

"Mine," I said.

Surely he wasn't in love with Susan Fitzbaum. Surely she wasn't in love with him.

eleanor and iaround this time founded The Quit-Calling-Me-Shirley School of Comedy. It entailed the two of us meeting downtown for drinks and making despairing pronouncements about life and love which always began, "But surely…" It entailed what Eleanor called, "The Great White Whine": whiney white people getting together over white wine and whining.

"Our sex life is disappearing," I would say. "Gerard goes to the bathroom and I call it 'Shaking Hands with the Unemployed.' Men hit thirty, I swear, and they want to make love twice a year, like seals."

"We've got three more years of sexual peak," says Eleanor crossing her eyes and pretending to strangle herself. "When's the last time you guys made love?" She tried looking nonchalant. I did my best. I sang, " 'January, February, June, or July,'" but the waitress came over to take our orders and gave us hostile looks. We liked to try to make her feel guilty by leaving large tips.

"I'm feeling pre-menstrual," said Eleanor. "I was coerced into writing grant proposals all day. I've decided that I hate all short people, rich people, government officials, poets, and homosexuals."

"Don't forget gypsies," I said.

"Gypsies!" she shrieked. "I despise gypsies!" She drank chablis in a way that was part glee, part terror. It was always quick. "Can you tell I'm trying to be happy?" she said.

Eleanor was part of a local grant-funded actor-poets group which did dramatic and often beautiful readings of poems written by famous dead people. My favorites were Eleanor's Romeo soliloquies, though she did a wonderful "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." I was a crummy dancer with no discipline and a scorn for all forms of dance-exercise who went from one aerobics job to the next, trying to convince students I loved it. ("Living, acting, occurring in the presence of oxygen!" I would explain with concocted exuberance. At least I didn't say things like "Tighten the bun to intensify the stretch!" or "Come on, girls, bods up.") I had just left a job in a health club and had been hired at Fitchville's Community School of the Arts to teach a class of senior citizens. Geriatric aerobics.

"Don't you feel that way about dancing?" Eleanor asked. "I mean, I'd love to try to write and read something of mine, but why bother. I finally came to that realization last summer reading Hart Crane in an inner tube in the middle of the lake. Now there's a poet."

"There's a poet who could have used an inner tube. Don't be so hard on yourself." Eleanor was smart, over-thirty, over-weight, and had never had a serious boyfriend. She was the daughter of a doctor who still sent her money. She took our mutual mediocrity harder than I did. "You shouldn't let yourself be made so miserable," I attempted.

"I don't have those pills," said Eleanor. "Where do you get those pills?"

"I think what you do do in the community is absolutely joyous. You make people happy."

"Thank you, Miss Hallmark Hall of Obscurity."

"Sorry," I said.

"You know what poetry is about?" said Eleanor. "The impossibility of sexual love. Poets finally don't even want genitals, their own or anyone else's. A poet wants metaphors, patterns, some ersatz physics of love. For a poet, to love is to have no lover. And to live" — she raised her wine glass and failed to suppress a smile—"is to have no liver."

basically, i realized, I was living in that awful stage of life from the age of twenty-six to thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight. Nonetheless you tried things out:

"Love is the cultural exchange program of futility and eroticism," I said. And Eleanor would say, "Oh, how cynical can you get," meaning not nearly cynical enough. I had made it sound dreadful but somehow fair, like a sleepaway camp. "Being in love with Gerard is like sleeping in the middle of the freeway," I tried. "Thatta girl," said Eleanor. "Much better."

on the community school's application form, where it had asked "Are you married?" (this was optional information), I had written an emphatic "No" and next to it, where it asked "To whom?" I'd written "A guy named Gerard." My class of senior citizens somehow found out about it and once classes got under way, they smiled, shook their heads, and teased me. "A good-humored girl like you," was the retrograde gist, "and no husband!"

Classes were held at night on the third floor of the arts school, which was a big Victorian house on the edge of downtown. The dance studio was creaky and the mirrors were nightmares, like aluminum foil slapped on walls. I did what I could. "Tuck, lift, flex, repeat. Tuck, lift, flex, now knee-slap lunge." I had ten women in their sixties and a man named Barney who was seventy-three. "That's it, Barney," I would shout. "Pick it up now," though I didn't usually mean the tempo: Barney had a hearing aid which kept clacking to the floor mid-routine. After class he would linger and try to chat — apologize for the hearing aid or tell me loud stories about his sister Zenia, who was all of eighty-one and mobile, apparently, as a bug. "So you and your sister, you're pretty close?" I asked once, putting away the cassettes.

"Close!?" he hooted, and then took out his wallet and showed me a picture of Zenia in Majorca in a yellow bathing suit. He had never married, he said.

The women mothered me. They clustered around me after class and suggested different things I should be doing in order to get a husband. The big one was frosting my hair. "Don't you think so, Lodeme? Shouldn't Benna frost her hair?" Lodeme was more or less the ringleader, had the nattiest leotard (lavender and navy stripes), was in great shape, could hold a V-sit for minutes, and strove incessantly for a tough, grizzly wisdom. "First the hair, then the heart,"

bellowed Lodeme. "Frost your heart, then you'll be okay. No one falls in love with a good man. Right, Barn?" Then she'd chuck him on the arm and his hearing aid would fall out. After class I would take a sedative.

there was a period where I kept trying to make anagrams out of words that weren't anagrams: moonscape and menopause; gutless and guilts; lovesick and evil louse. I would meet Eleanor either for a drink at our Shirley School meetings or for breakfast at Hank's Grill, and if I got there first, I would scribble the words over and over again on a napkin, trying to make them fit — like a child dividing three into two, not able to make it go.

"Howdy," I said to Eleanor when she arrived and flopped down. I had lovesick and evil sock scrawled in large letters.

"You're losing it, Benna. It must be your love life." Eleanor leaned over and wrote bedroom and boredom; she had always been the smarter one. "Order the tomato juice," she said. "That's how you get rid of the smell of skunk."

Gerard was a large, green-eyed man who smelled like baby powder and who was preoccupied with great music. I'd lie there in bed explaining something terrible and personal and he'd interrupt with, "That's like Brahms. You're like Brahms." And I'd say, "What do you mean, I'm old and fat with a beard?" And Gerard would smile and say, "Exactly." Once, after I'd shared with him the various humiliations of my adolescence, he said, "That's kind of like Stravinsky."

And I said, annoyed, "What, he didn't get his period until the ninth grade? At least it's consoling to know that everything that's happened to me has also happened to a famous composer."

"You don't really like music, do you?" said Gerard.

Actually, I loved music. Sometimes I think that's the reason I fell in love with Gerard to begin with. Perhaps it had nothing to do really with the smell of his skin or the huge stretch of his legs or the particular rhythm of his words (a prairie reggae, he called it), but only to do with the fact that he could play any instrument that had strings — piano, banjo, cello — that he composed rock operas and tone poems, that he sang pop and lieder. I was surrounded by music. If I was reading a newspaper, he would listen to Mozart. If I was watching the news, he'd put on Madame Butterfly, saying it amounted to the same thing, Americans romping around in countries they didn't belong in. I had only to step across the moat of the hallway and I would learn something: Vivaldi was a red-haired priest; Schumann crippled his hand with a hand extender; Brahms never married, that was the biggie, the one Gerard liked best to tell me. "Okay, okay," I would say. Or sometimes simply, "So?"

Before I met Gerard, everything I knew about classical music I'd gleaned off the sound track record of The Turning Point. Now, however, I could hum Musetta's Waltz for at least three bars. Now I owned all of Beethoven's piano concertos. Now I knew that Percy Grainger had been married in the Hollywood Bowl. "But Brahms," said Gerard, "now Brahms never married."

It's not that I wanted to be married. It's that I wanted a Marriage Equivalent, although I never knew exactly what that was, and often suspected that there was really no such thing. Yet I was convinced there had to be something better than the lonely farce living across town or hall could, with very little time, become.

Which made me feel guilty and bourgeois. So I comforted myself with Gerard's faults: He was infantile; he always lost his keys; he was from Nebraska, like some horrible talk show host; he had grown up not far from one of the oldest service plazas on I-80; he told jokes that had the words wiener and fart in them; he once referred to sex as "hiding the salami." He also had a habit of charging after small animals and frightening them. Actually, the first time he did this it was with a bird in the park, and I laughed, thinking it hilarious. Later, I realized it was weird: Gerard was thirty-one and charging after small mammals, sending them leaping into bushes, up trees, over furniture. He would then turn and grin, like a charmed maniac, a Puck with a Master's degree. He liked also to water down the face and neck fur of cats and dogs, smoothing it back with his palms, like a hairdresser, saying it made them look like Judy Garland. I realized that life was too short for anyone honestly and thoroughly to outgrow anything, but it was clear that some people were making more of an effort than others.

In my early twenties I got annoyed with women who complained that men were shallow and incapable of commitment. "Men, women, they're all the same," I said. "Some women are capable of commitment, some are not. Some men are capable of commitment and some are not. It's not a matter of gender." Then I met Gerard, and I began to believe that men were shallow and incapable of commitment.

"It's not that men fear intimacy," I said to Eleanor. "It's that they're hypochondriacs of intimacy: They always think they have it when they don't. Gerard thinks we're very close but half the time he's talking to me like he met me forty-five minutes ago, telling me things about himself I've known for years, and asking me questions about myself that he should know the answers to already. Last night he asked me what my middle name was. God, I can't talk about it."

Eleanor stared. "What is your middle name?"

I stared back. "Ruth," I said. "Ruth." Hers, I knew, was Elizabeth.

Eleanor nodded and looked away. "When I was in Catholic school," she said, "I loved the story of St. Clare and St. Francis. Francis gets canonized because of his devotion to vague, general ideas like God and Christianity, whereas Clare gets canonized because of her devotion to Francis. You see? It sums it up: Even when a man's a saint, even when he's good and devoted, he's not good and devoted to anyone in particular." Eleanor lit a Viceroy. "Why are we supposed to be with men, anyway? I feel like I used to know."

"We need them for their Phillips-head screwdrivers," I said.

Eleanor raised her eyebrows. "That's right," she said, "I keep forgetting you only go out with circumcised men."

Gerard's and my courtship had consisted of Sunday chamber music, rock concerts, and driving out into the cornfields surrounding Fitchville to sing "I Loves You, Porgy," loud and misremembered, up at the sky. Then we'd come back to my apartment, lift off each other's clothes, and stick our tongues in each other's ears. In the morning we'd go to a coffee shop. "You're not Czechoslovakian, I hope," he would say, always the same joke, and point to the sign on the cash register which said, sorry, no checks.

"He'd look great, legless and propped in a cart," said Eleanor.

Actually Eleanor was pleasant when he was around. Even flirtatious. Sometimes they talked on the phone: He asked her questions about The Aeneid. I liked to see them get along. Later he would say to me in a swoon of originality, "Eleanor would be beautiful if she only lost weight."

"it's in the wing of your breast," said the surgeon.

I hadn't known breasts had wings, and now I had something waiting in them. "Oh," I said.

"Let's assume for now that it's cystic," said the surgeon. "Let's not immediately disfigure the breast."

"Yes," I said. "Let's not."

And then the nurse-practitioner told me that if I had a child it might straighten out my internal machinery a bit. Prevent "Career Women's Diseases." Lumps often disappear during pregnancy. "Can I extend my prescription on the sedatives?" I asked. With each menstrual cycle, she went on to explain, the body is like a battered boxer, staggering back from its corner into the ring, and as the years go by, the body does this with increasing difficulty. Its will gets broken. It screws up. A woman's body is so busy preparing to make babies that every year that goes by without one is another year of rejection that is harder and harder for it to recover from. Soon it could go completely crazy.

I suspected it was talk like this that had gotten women out of the factories and started immediately on the baby boom. "Thank you," I said. "I'll think about it."

one problem with teaching aerobics was that I didn't like Jane Fonda. I felt she was a fickle, camera-wise, overconfident half-heart who had become rich and famous taking commercial advantage of America's spiritual crises. And she had done it with such self-assurance. "You just want people to be less convinced of themselves," said Gerard.

"Yes, I do," I said. "I think a few well-considered and prominently displayed uncertainties are always in order." And uncertainty and fuzziness were certainly my mirrors then.

Barney adored Jane Fonda. "That woman," Barney'd say to me after class. "You know, she used to be just one of those sex queens. Now she's helping America."

"You mean helping herself to America." Oddly enough Jane Fonda was one of the few things in the world I did feel certain about, and she made me prone to such uncharacteristically bald pronouncements. I should beware of such baldness, I thought. I should think hedge, think fuzz, like the rest of my life.

"Aw go on," said Barney, and then he filled me in on the latest regarding Zenia, who was chairing a League of Women Voters committee on child abuse.

I packed up my tape deck, took a sedative at the urinal-like water fountain in the hall, trudged downstairs and home. I went into Gerard's apartment and spread out on his bed, to wait for him to come home from work. I looked at a black and white print he had on the wall opposite the bed. Close up it was a landscape, a dreamily etched lake, tree, and mountain scene, but from far away it was a ghoulish face, vacant and gouged like a tragedy mask. And from where I was, neither close nor far, I could see both lake and face, one melting into the other and then back again, competing for my perception until finally I just closed my eyes, tight so as to see colors.

loving gerard, I realized, was like owning a tomcat, or having a teenaged son. He was out five nights a week and in the day was sleepy and hungry and sprawled, eating a lot of cold cereal and leaving the bowls around. Rehearsals for Dido and Aeneas were growing more frequent, and on other nights he was playing solo jazz gigs in town, mostly at fern bars (one was called The Smoky Fern) with four-armed ceiling fans torpid as winter insects, and ferns that were spidery and crisp. He played guitar on a platform up front, and there was always a group of women at a ringside table who giggled, applauded adoringly, and bought him drinks. When I went out to see him at gigs, I would come in and sit alone at a table way in the back. I felt like a stray groupie, a devoted next-door neighbor. He would come talk to me on his breaks, but he talked to almost everybody who was there. Everyone got equal time, equal access. He was public. He was no longer mine. I felt foolish and phobic. I felt spermicidal. I drank and smoked too much. I started staying home. I would do things like watch science specials and Bible movies on TV: Stacy Keach as Barabbas, Rod Steiger as Pontius Pilate, James Farentino as Simon Peter. My body became increasingly strange to me. I became very aware of its edges as I peered out from it: my shoulders, hands, strands of hair, invading the boundaries of my vision like branches that are made to jut into the camera's view to decorate and sentimentalize the picture. The sea turtles' need to lay eggs on land, said the television, makes them vulnerable.

Only once, and very late at night, did I run downstairs and out into the street with my pajamas on, gasping and watering, waiting for something — a car? an angel? — to come rescue or kill me, but there was nothing, only streetlights and a cat.

at the shirley school we wondered aloud about male hunters and female nesters. "Do you think there's something after all to this male-as-wanderer stuff?" I asked Eleanor.

She made something of a speech. She said she could buy the social diagram of woman as nestmaker (large, round, see ovum) and man as wanderer, invader, traveler in gangs (see spermatozoa), but that if she were minding the fort, she wanted some guests, a charging, grinning cavalry. Her life was misaligned, she said. The cavalry bypassed her altogether, as if the roadmaps were faulty, and she was forced to holler after them, "Hey, where's everybody going?" Or a few deserters managed to stroll by, but then mostly just sat on the curb to talk about how difficult it was to save money nowadays. Her D.N.A. was in danger of extinction. What lovers she'd had had always depressed her. She preferred being with friends.

"Sex used to console me," I said. "It was my anti-coma coma."

Eleanor shrugged, gulped vermouth. She liked to yell out her car window at couples holding hands on the street. "Cut it out! Just cut it out!"

"How's Gerard?" she said.

"I don't think he loves me anymore." I bit my fist in mock melodrama.

"Give that man a mustache to twirl and a girl to tie down to the railroad tracks. Look, you're going to be fine. You're going to end up with Perry." Perry was a man she'd invented for my future. He was from Harvard, loved children, and believed in Marriage Equivalents.

The only problem was that he was an epileptic and had had fits at two consecutive dinner parties. "Me," said Eleanor, "I'll probably end up with some guy named Opie who collects Pinocchio memorabilia and says things like 'Holy-moley-pole.' He'll want me to dress up in sailor suits."

in the senior citizens' class it was hard to concentrate. One of the women there, Pat, had stained and streaked her legs orange with Q-T or something. Barney kept having trouble with his hearing aid. Lodeme spent a lot of time in the back row taking everyone's pulse the way I had shown them: two fingers placed on the side of the neck. "Holy Jesus," she shouted at them. "You must be hibernating!"

This was my fear: that someone would have a stroke in there and die.

"Okay," I said. "Let's begin with the 'Dance Madness' routine. Remember: It's important not to be afraid of looking like an idiot." This was my motto in life. I slapped in the cassette and started up with some easy lunges, step-digs, and a slow Charleston.

"Are we healthy yet?" yelled Pat over the music, her legs like sepia sunsets, her face the split-apple face of an owl. "Are we healthy yet?"

"let me feel your breast again," said Gerard. "Is this the lump?"

"Yes," I said. "Be careful."

"It's not muscular?" His fingers pressed against the outside wall of my breast.

"No, Gerard. It's not muscular. It's floating like fruit in Jell-O. Remember fruited Jell-O? There's no muscle in Jell-O." Although of course there was. I'd learned that long ago from a friend in junior high school who'd told me that Jell-O was made from horses' hooves and various dried bones and muscles. She had also told me that breasts were simply displaced buttocks.

Gerard slipped his hand back out from beneath my bra. He leaned back into the sofa. We were listening to Fauré. "Listen to the strings," Gerard murmured, and his face went beatific. The world, all matter, I knew, was made up of strings. I had learned this on television. Physicists used to believe that the universe was made up of particles.

But recently they had found out they'd been wrong: The world, unsuspectedly, was made up of little tiny strings. "Yes," I said. "They're lovely."

the women in the class were suggesting that I get my face sanded. I had had acne as a teenager, a rough slice of pizza face, and it had scarred my skin. Gerard had once said he loved my skin, that it didn't look pitted and old, but that it looked sexy, a tough, craggy sexy.

I sunk into one hip and fluttered my eyelashes at Betty and Pat and Lodeme. "Gee, I thought my face looked sort of scrappy," I said.

"You look like a caveman," said Lodeme, her voice half gravel, half gavel. "Get your face sanded."

in bed i tried to be simple and straightforward. "Gerard, I need to know this: Do you love me?"

"I love being with you," he said, as if this were even better.

"Oh," I said. And then he reached for my hand under the covers, lifted his head toward mine, and kissed me, his lips outside then inside, back and forth like polyps. The heel of his hand ran up my side beneath my nightgown, and he moved me, belly up, on top of him. His penis was soft against my buttocks and his arms were clasped tight around my waist. I didn't know what I was supposed to do, offered up to the ceiling like that. So I just lay there and let Gerard figure things out. He lay very still beneath me. I whispered finally: "What are we supposed to be doing, Gerard?"

"You don't understand me," he sighed. "You just don't understand me at all."

the senior citizens' class was only eight weeks in duration but by about the sixth week the smallness of the class, and whatever makeshift intimacy had sprung up there, became suddenly oppressive to me. Perhaps I was becoming like Gerard. Suddenly I wanted the big, doughnut-faced anonymity of a large class, where class members did not really have faces and names and problems. In six weeks with Susan, Lodeme, Betty, Valerie, Ellen, Frances, Pat, Marie, Bridget, and Barney, I felt we'd gotten to know each other too well, or rather, brought to the stubborn limits of our knowability, we were now left with the jagged scrape of our differences, our unknowability laid glisteningly bare. I developed a woodlands metaphor—"swirls before pine," I told Eleanor. Aerobics in front of a forest took much less courage than the other way around, aerobics before a few individuated trees. A forest would leave you alone, but trees could come at you. They witnessed things. When you could see them, they could see you. They could see there were certain things about you. You were not a serious person. You were not a serious dancer. I didn't want my life to show. At a distance, I was sure, it couldn't possibly.

Moreover, it was hard being close to these women who, I realized, had exactly what I wanted: grandchildren, stability, a post-menopausal grace, some mysterious, hard-won truce with men. They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

And so the sadnesses started to ricochet around and zap me right in the heart, right in the middle of the Michael Jackson tape. I was, I knew, unconvinced of myself. I wanted to stop. I wanted to fall dead as a leaf. Which I tried to turn into a move for the rest of the class: "One-two and crumple, one-two and crumple." Once in Modern Dance class in college one sunny September afternoon we had been requested to be leaves tumbling ourselves across the arts quad. I knew how to perform it in a way that prevented embarrassment and indignity: One became a dead leaf, a cement leaf. One lay down on the dying grass of the arts quad and refused to blow and float and tumble. One merely crumpled. One was no fool. One did not listen to the teacher. One did not want to be spotted fluttering around on campus, like the others who were clearly psychotics. One did not like this college. One wanted only to fall in love and get a Marriage Equivalent. One just lay there.

I looked up into the mirror. Behind me Lodeme, Bridget, Pat, Barney, everyone was stiffly though obediently crumpling. I loved them, in a way, but I didn't want them, their nippled fist-faces, their beauty advice, their voices old, low, and scratchy. I wanted them to recede into some lifeless blur. I didn't want to hear about Zenia or about how I could use a good pair of hips. I didn't want to be responsible for their hearts.

We got back up on our tiptoes. "Good! Good! Punch the air, three-four. Punch the air." In the mirror we looked as if we had melted — puddles that shimmered and shimmied.

Afterward, Barney came up and told me more about Zenia. I tried to be minimally attentive, packing up the cassettes, waving good night to the other women who were leaving. Barney's voice seemed to have a new sort of gobble and snort. "I saw a program on child abuse," he was saying, "and now I realize I was an abused child myself, though I didn't know it." I looked at him and he smiled and shook his head. I didn't want to hear this. Christ, I thought. "My sister Zenia was fourteen and I was six and she climbed into bed with me once and we didn't know no better. But technically that's abuse, that. And funny thing is is that I…" He wanted badly to be telling someone this. He followed me around the studio as I switched off lights and locked windows. "I never would have watched that show but for the committee she's heading. She's my sister, I've got to love her, but—"

"No you don't," I snapped at the old man. The world was a carnival of fiends and Zenia was right in there with everyone else. "Good night, Barney," I said, locking the studio door and leaving him standing at the top of the stairs. "Good night," he mumbled, not moving. I did a fast bounce down the three flights, the cassettes rattling in my bag, out into the cool drink of the night. If only this were some other city, I would go exploring in it! If only this were someplace, if there were someplace, new in the world.

in a single week four things happened: Barney stopped coming to class; Gerard announced he was thinking of spending a year in Europe on a special fellowship ("Sounds like a good opportunity," I said, trying to keep my voice out of his way, like a mother); I got a letter from a friend asking me if I wanted to come to New York and work in a health club that she and her husband were partners in; I did a home-kit pregnancy test, which came out positive. I tried to recall when last Gerard and I had even made love. I double-checked the kit. I re-read the instructions. I waited, hopelessly, as I had in the ninth grade, for my period to come like a magic trick. "New York, eh?" said Eleanor.

"I'd be teaching yuppies," I complained. Despite our various ways of resembling yuppies (Eleanor was a wine snob, and I owned too many pairs of sneakers), we hated yuppies. We hated the word yuppie, though we used it. Eleanor would walk down the street looking at people she passed and deciding whether or not they qualified for this ignominy. "Yup, yup, nope," she would say out loud, as in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose. Yuppies, we knew, were greedy, shallow, and small. They made their own pasta. They would rather play racquet-ball than read Middlemarch. "Go home and read Middlemarch" Eleanor once shouted at a pastel jogger, who glanced sideways to see Eleanor and me zipping by in Eleanor's car. We renamed the seven dwarves: Artsy, Fartsy, Cranky, Sleazy, Beasty, Dud, and Yuppie.

"Well," said Eleanor, "if you're in New York, it's either yuppies or mimes. That's all New York's got. Yuppies or mimes."

i loved Dido and Aeneas. It had electric guitars, electric pianos, Aeneas in leather and Dido in blue sequins, sexily metallic as a disco queen. The whole thing resembled MTV, replete with loud guitar solos. Aeneas shouldered his guitar and riffed and whined after Dido throughout the whole show: "Don't you see why I have to go to Europe? / I must ignore the sentiment you stir up." Actually it was awful. But nonetheless I sniffled at her suicide, and when she sang at Aeneas, "Just go then! Go if you must! / My heart will surely turn to dust," and Aeneas indeed left, I sat in my seat, thinking, "You ass, Aeneas, you don't have to be so literal." Eleanor, sitting next to me, nudged me and whispered, "Shirley's gonna turn her heart to dust."

"I doubt it will be Shirley," I said.

Gerard, as Aeneas and director, got a standing ovation and a long-stemmed rose. In my mind I gave Dido a handful of tiger lilies, a bouquet of floral gargoyles.

Afterward, Eleanor had to go home and nurse a headache, so I went backstage and shook hands with Susan Fitzbaum. She was out of her sparkles and crown. She was wearing a plaid skirt and loafers. She had a large head. "So nice to meet you," she said in a low, tired voice.

I kissed Gerard. He seemed anxious to go. "I need a beer," he said. "The cast party's not until midnight. Let's go and come back."

In the car he said, "So what did you really think?" and I told him the show was terrific, but he didn't necessarily have to leave someone just because they told him to, and he smiled and said, "Thanks," and kissed my temple and then I told him I was pregnant and what did he think we should do.

We sat for a long time in a nearby bar with our fingers drawing grids and diagonals in the frost of the beer glasses. "I'm going back to the cast party," Gerard eventually said. "You don't have to go if you don't want to." He got up and put down cash for half the check.

"No, I'll go," I said. "If you want me to."

"It's not that I want you to or don't want you to. It's up to you."

"Well, it would be nice if you wanted me to. I mean, I don't want to go if you don't want me to."

"It's up to you," he said. His eyes were knobby, like knuckles.

"I get the feeling you don't want me to go."

"It's up to you! Look, if you think you'll have things to say at a party full of music-types, fine. I mean, I'm a musician, and sometimes even I have trouble."

"You don't want me to go. Okay, I won't go."

"Benna, it's not that. Come along if you—"

"Never mind," I said. "Never mind, Gerard." I drove him to the cast party and then drove home, where I got into my pajamas and in my own apartment listened to the soundtrack from The Turning Point, an album, I realized, I had always loved.

there was one main reason I didn't tell Eleanor I was pregnant, although once, when we both had gone into the ladies' room together, a not unusual occurrence of synchronized plumbing, which allowed chit-chat between the stalls, I almost told her anyway. I attempted it. I stared at the crotch of my underwear and said, "You know, I think I'm pregnant." There was no response, so when I was finished, I stepped out, washed my hands slowly, and then just said to the feet in Eleanor's stall, "Welp, see you out in the real world." I looked in the mirror; the glare and precision of it startled me. I had that old look: that look where you look — old. When I got back to our table, Eleanor was already sitting there lighting one of my Winstons. "You took a long time," she said.

"Oh, my god," I laughed. "I just confessed my entire life story to someone in black boots."

"I would never wear black boots," said Eleanor.

Which was some residual thing, she said, having to do with Catholic school. Which was why I never finally told her about the pregnancy: She still had weird, unresolved strings to Catholicism. She was sentimental about it. She once told me about a frugal, lapsed Catholic aunt of hers who, when she died, left two large, mysterious boxes in her attic, one full of various marital and contraceptive devices, and one labeled "Strings Too Short to Use," which was a huge collection of small pieces of string, multicolored and inexplicable, matted together in large coils and nests. That, I realized, was both Eleanor's and her aunt's relationship to Catholicism: ties too short to bind and therefore stowed away in a huge and secret box. But Eleanor clearly liked to lug her box around, display her ties like a traveling waresperson.

"You can't really be a fallen Protestant," she said. "How can there be any guilt?"

"There can be guilt," I said. "It's my piety, I can cry if I want to."

"But being a fallen Catholic — that's skydiving! Being a fallen Protestant — that's like mugging an old lady, so easy why bother."

"Yeah, but think how awful you'd feel after you'd mugged an old lady."

Eleanor shrugged. She liked lapsed Catholics; I think the only reason she managed to like Gerard at all was that they both had been Catholics. Sometimes when Gerard got on the phone to ask her things about Virgil, they would end up talking about Dante and then about nuns they'd known in Catholic school. They'd both attended parochial schools called The Assumption School, where, they said, they had learned to assume many things. More than once I sat at Gerard's kitchen table and listened while he talked on the phone with Eleanor, uproarious and slap-happy, exchanging priest stories. I had never known a priest. But it was curious and lovely to see Gerard so taken up by his own childhood, so communed via anecdotes with Eleanor, so pleased with his own escape into an adulthood that allowed him these survivor's jokes, that I would sit there, floating and transfixed as a moon, laughing along with him, with them, even though I didn't really know what the two of them were talking about.

"i've made an appointment," I said to Gerard.

We were in my apartment. He thought he might have left his keys there.

"Christ, Benna," he said. "You stare at me with those cow eyes of yours — what am I supposed to say? I've got to go off to a gig in a half hour and you say, 'I've made an appointment.' It's like what you did the night of the cast party: cow eyes and then 'I think I'm pregnant.'"

"I just thought you'd want to know." I kept thinking of that horrible saying mothers tell you about getting the milk and buying the cow.

"You make me feel like I'm in a tiny store and all I want to do is relax, look, and enjoy, but because I'm the only potential customer there, you keep coming over and pressuring me."

"I don't pressure you," I said. I have a lump in my breast, I wanted to say but didn't. Maybe I will die.

"Yes, you do. You're like one of those ladies that just keeps coming over to say, 'Can I help you?'"

I stared at his square chin, his impossibly handsome unshaven chin and then I looked off at the Mary Cassatt print on the wall, mother bathing child, why did I own such a thing, and it was at that moment I really truly understood that he was in love with Susan Fitzbaum.

Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.

Gerard kept repeating himself. "You're like one of those ladies that just keeps coming up to you—'Can I help you, this is nice, let me know'—over and over and over. You won't leave me the hell alone."

I thought about this. Finally I said very quietly, "But you're in the store, Gerard. If you don't like it, get out of the goddamn store."

Gerard picked up a magazine and hurled it across the room; then, without looking further for his keys, he left early for his gig at The Smoky Fern.

I was not large enough for Gerard. I was small, lumpy, anchored with worry, imploded. He didn't want me, he wanted Macy's; like Aeneas or Ulysses, he wanted the anonymity and freedom to wander purchaseless from island to island. I could not be enough of the world for him. A woman could never be enough of the world, I thought, though that was what a man desired of her, though she flap her arms frantically trying.

Eleanor had said she was staying home to watch The Sound of Music, so I stayed in and read the abortion chapter in my women's health book. On TV I watched a nature documentary. It was on animal species who, due to a change in the landscape, begin to produce unviable eggs, or are chased into the hills.

I wandered into Gerard's apartment and fetched back some of my stuff that had ended up there: shoes, dishes, magazines, silverware. It was like some principle of physics: Things flowed naturally back and forth between the two apartments until the maximum level of chaos was reached. I had his can opener, but he had my ice-cube trays. It was as if our possessions were embarked upon some osmotic, conjugal exchange, a giant french kiss of personal effects, which had somehow left us behind.

on Monday I met Eleanor for breakfast at Hank's. I wanted to discuss hopeful things: the job in New York, how she might feel about coming with me. Perhaps she could start up a reading group there. I would promise not to die of Globner's Disease.

"We should stop smoking cigarettes. Do you wanna stop smoking cigarettes?" said Eleanor as soon as I sat down.

Despite my degenerating health, I enjoyed them too much. They were sororal. "But they're so cysterly," I said, and stuck out a breast. No idiocy was too undignified for me. I might as well have sat in a corner and applied Winstons directly to my lymph nodes, laughing and telling terrible jokes.

Eleanor's mouth formed a small, tough segment of a smile. "I have something to tell you, Benna."

Something to do with cysterly; I said, "What?"

"Benna, I asked Gerard to go to bed with me."

I was still smiling, inappropriately, and my breast was still stuck out a bit. "So, when was this?" I said. I pulled back my breast, realigned my torso. Something between us had suddenly gone pale and gray, like a small piece of meat one dislodges hours late from between the teeth. I lit up a cigarette.

"Saturday night." Eleanor's face looked arranged in anxiety, the same face she used when reading Romeo's speech to the County Paris he's just killed: O, give me thy hand I One writ with me in sour misfortunes book. She looked pink and beseeching, though essentially she looked the same, as people do despite the fact they have begun to turn into monsters and are about to tell you something that should require horns or fangs or vaulted eyebrows but never apparently does.

"I thought you said you were staying in to watch The Sound of Music" I said in the same voice I always used when blowing cigarette smoke out my nostrils.

"I, uh, ended up not doing that. I went to see Gerard play instead. He said you'd had a fight, Benna."

And suddenly I knew this was only a half-truth. Suddenly I knew there'd been more than this. That there always had been.

"Benna, I thought at first we were kidding," she continued. She kept saying my name. "I sat down next to him and said, 'Hey, let's ruin a beautiful friendship—'"

"You hated each other," I insisted.

"— and he said, 'Sure why not?' and Benna, I'm convinced he thought at first he was kidding…"

Kidding? That was what my Mary Cassatt print was a picture of. A woman with kids.

"Benna, I'm sure it's not…"

Eleanor's skin was smooth and poreless. Her hair was frosted golden like some expensive, marbley wood. I wanted her to stop saying my name.

"But you didn't actually sleep together, did you?" I asked, though it sounded pathetic, like a tiny Hans Christian Andersen character.

Eleanor stared at me. Her eyes started to fill with water. She felt sorry for me. She felt sorry for herself. I could feel my heart wither like a hand. I could feel the lump in my breast rise into my throat, from where perhaps it had fallen to begin with.

"Oh, Benna, he's such a shit." They did hate each other. That was why she was telling me this: We all hated each other. "I'm so sorry, Benna. He's such a shit. I knew he would never tell you."

She was fat. She didn't know anything about music. She was a child. She still received money from her parents in Doc Country. No animal is as problematic in captivity as the elephant, I thought meanly, like an aerobics teacher who watches too much PBS. Every year around the world at least one zookeeper is killed.

Something in Eleanor now began crumbling and biting. "How long do you think I could have been a sounding board for the two of you, Benna?"

This was horrible. This was the sort of thing you read about in magazine advice columns. O, give me thy hand I One writ with me in sour Ms. Fortune's book.

"… I deserved a love affair, and instead I was spending all of my time being envious of you. And you never noticed me. You never even noticed I'd lost weight." She knew nothing about music. She knew none of the pieces from The Turning Point.

"Don't you see, sisterhood has to be redefined," she was saying. "There are too few men in the world. It's a heterosexual depression out there!"

What I finally managed to say, looking at the Heimlich Maneuver poster, was, "So, is this what's called sociobiology?" She smiled weakly, hopefully, and I started to laugh, and then we were both laughing, tearyeyed, our faces falling into our arms on the table, and that's when I took the ketchup bottle and cracked it over her head. And then I got up and wobbled out, my soul numb as a crossed leg, and Hank yelled something at me in Greek and rushed out from behind the counter over to Eleanor who was sobbing loudly and would probably need stitches.

for nine days Gerard and I didn't speak to each other. Through the walls I could hear him entering and exiting his apartment, and presumably he could hear me, but we didn't speak. On the very first day I had refused to answer his knock.

I went out at night to all the really bad movies in Fitchville and just sat there. Sometimes I brought a book and a flashlight.

I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.

From across the hall I could hear Gerard's phone ring, and I would listen and wait for him to pick it up and speak into it. The words were always muffled. Sometimes I could hear him laugh, as if he were quite ready to be happy again. A few times when he stayed out all night, his phone rang until three in the morning.

i stopped taking sedatives. The days were all false, warm-gray. Monoxide days. Dirty bathmat. Shoe sole. When I went downtown the stores all bled together like wet magazines. There was a noise in the air that changed with the wind and that could have been music, or roaring, or the voices of children. People were looking up into the trees for something, and I looked up as well and saw what it was: Not far from Marini Street thousands of dark birds had landed, descended from their neat, purposeful geometry into the mess of the neighborhood, scattered their troubled squawking throughout trees and on rooftops, looking the rainbowy, shadowy black of an oil spill. There were scientists, I knew, who did studies of such events, who claimed to discern patterns in such chaos. But this required distance and a study that took no account of any single particle in the mess. Particles were of no value. Up close was of no particular use.

From four blocks away I could see that the flock had a kind of group-life, a recognizable intelligence; no doubt in its random flutters there were patterns, but alone any one of those black birds would not have known what was up. Alone, as people live, they would crash their heads against walls.

I walked slowly, away from Marini Street, and understood this small shred: Between large and small, between near and far, there was no wisdom or truce to be had. To be near was to be blind; to be one among so many was to own no shape or say.

"There must be things that can save us!" I wanted to shout. "But they are just not here."

i got an abortion. Later I suffered from a brief heterosexual depression and had trouble teaching my class: I would inadvertently skip the number three when counting and would instead call out, "Front-two-four-five, Side-two-four-five." Actually that happened only once, but later, when I was living in New York, it seemed to make a funny story. ("Benna," said Gerard, the day I left. "Baby, I'm really sorry.")

Because of the pregnancy, the lump in my breast disappeared, retracted and absorbed, never to sprout again. "A night-blooming-not-so-serious," I said to the nurse-practitioner. She smiled. When she felt my breast, I wanted her to ask me out to dinner. There was a week in my life when she was the only person I really liked.

But I believed in starting over. There was finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the best revenge was to turn your life into a small gathering of miracles.

If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind.

And so before I left, I phoned Barney and took him out for a drink. "You're a sweet girl," he said, loud as a sportscaster. "I've always thought that."

Yard Sale

there are, i've noticed, those in the world who are born salespeople. They know how to transact, how to dispose. They know how to charm their way all the way to the close, to the dump. Then they get in their cars and drive fast.

"Every time I move to a new place," Eleanor is saying, "I buy a new shower caddy. It gives me a nice sense of starting over." She smiles, big and pointed.

"I know what you mean," says Gerard, bending over in his lawn chair to tie a sneaker. We are in the side yard of the house, liquidating our affections, trading our lives in for cash: We are having a yard sale. Gerard straightens back up from his sneaker. His hair falls into his face, makes him look too young, then too handsome when he shakes it back. My heart hurts, spreads, folds over like an omelette.

It's two against one out here.

Eleanor is trying to sell her old shower caddy for a quarter, even though the mush of some horrible soap has dried to a green wax all over it. Eleanor is a good friend and has come to our yard sale this weekend with all of the mangy items she failed to sell in her own sale last weekend. I invited her to set up her own concession, but now I wonder if she's not desecrating our yard. Gerard and I are selling attractive things: a ten-speed bike, a cut-glass wine decanter, some rare jazz albums, healthy plants that need a healthy home, good wool sweaters, two antique ladderback chairs. Eleanor has brought over junk: foam rubber curlers with hairs stuck in them; a lavender lace teddy with a large, unsightly stain; two bags of fiberglass insulation; three seamed and greasy juice glasses, which came free with shrimp cocktail, and which Eleanor now wants to sell for seventy-five cents. She's also brought an entire crate of halter tops and an old sound track of Thoroughly Modern Millie. She spreads most of this out on one of the low tables Gerard and I have constructed from cement blocks and two old doors hauled from the shed out back. Magdalena, our dog, has a purple homemade price tag somehow stuck ("like a dingleberry," says the ever-young Gerard) to her rear end. She sniffs at the shrimp glasses and knocks one of them over. Gerard smooths her black coat, strokes her haunches, tells her to cool it. Eleanor once described Magdalena as a dog that looked exactly like a first-grader's drawing of a dog. Now, however, with her ornamented rear end, Magdalena looks a bit wrong — dressed up and gypsied, like a baby with pierced ears. Her backside says "45 cents." Magdalena has the carriage of a duchess. I've always thought that.

Eleanor places various articles of clothing — some skirts, a frayed jacket, the wounded teddy — in the branches of the birch trees next to us. Now we are truly a slum.

"That is just lovely, Eleanor," says Gerard, pointing to the birch trees. Magdalena has run over and started woofing up at Eleanor's clothes.

"Oh, go off and be a yuppie puppy," says Eleanor to the dog. Sometimes, like a spooky ventriloquism act, Eleanor assumes, and overassumes, my anger. Gerard is a tired lounge pianist who is leaving in two days to start law school in California. He is taking Magdalena. He is not taking me. He says he needs to make Law Review so he can get some wonderful job somewhere. Eleanor likes to define yuppies as people who buy the expensive mustard and the cheap ketchup, while the rest of the world gets it the other way around. "Gerard, you're too old to become a yuppie," she says, though she is wrong. Gerard is one year younger than Eleanor, and almost two years younger than I.

Eleanor strolls over with a paper bag and sits down. "A watershed moment!" she announces, and reaches into the bag and pulls out an opened box of Frost 'N' Tip for Brunettes Only and places it on the table next to my beautiful Chinese evergreen and my wine decanter, which my brother gave me; I'm willing to pawn more than I realized. "My entire past, right here, and I'm only asking a dime." Eleanor grins. She has recently rinsed her hair red. She and her husband, Kip, are moving in ten days to Fort Queen Anne, New York, where Kip got a better job, and Eleanor wanted to start over. "Dead town," she said, "but you can't beat the money with a stick."

I stare at the frost kit. The lettering is faded and there are coffee cup rings, like an Olympics insignia, on the front. "Eleanor," I say slowly. People walk by, look at the clothes in the trees, smile, and keep walking. I'm about to tell her her sense of retail is not ours. "Eleanor," I begin again, but then instead I dig a dime out of my change cup and give it to her. "How do you think I'll look?" I smile and hold the frost kit next to my face like a commercial. I'm the only one here who's not moving out of town, though I am taking a vacation and going to Cape Cod for two weeks to think about my life.

"The terror of Truro," she says. "You'll dazzle." She rips off a hangnail with her teeth. "Gerard'll rue the day."

It's two against one out here.

Gerard sits back down next to me on the other side. Eleanor, suspecting she's been overheard, reaches over and pats Gerard on the thigh, tells us again about the ketchup and mustard.

Gerard isn't smiling. He stares off at the trees. Magdalena has settled at his feet. "Looks like someone was murdered in that thing, Eleanor," he says, pointing at the lace teddy.

I reach next to me, under the table, and clasp Gerard's hand, in warning, in rescue. It's two against one out here; we just keep taking turns.

"no, we're not getting married," I told my mother on the phone when she asked. "He's going to California and I'm staying here." Usually she doesn't phone. Usually she just does things like send me notes with histrionic scrawlings that read, "Well, you know, I can't use these," and along with the notes she encloses coupons for Kotex or Midol.

"Well," said my mother. "The advice I hear from my women friends nowadays is don't get married until you're thirty. Just take your time. Have fun gallivanting around while you're young. Get everything out of your system."

Gallivanting is a favorite word of my mother's. "Mom," I said slowly, loudly. "I'm thirty-three. What on earth do you think I'm getting out of my system?"

This seemed to stump her. "You know, Benna," she said finally. "Not every woman thinks like you and I do. Some just want to settle down." This yoking of mother and daughter was something she'd taken to doing of late — arbitrarily, without paying attention. "No, you and I are kind of exceptional that way."

"Mother, he said he thought it would be hell to live with me while he was in law school. He said it already was a kind of hell. That's what he said."

"I was like you," said my mother. "I was determined to be single and have fun and date lots of men. I didn't care what anyone thought."

everyone keeps asking about Magdalena. "Dog's for sale?" they say, or "How much ya asking for the dog?" as if it's their own special joke. Then they laugh and stay around and poke through our belongings.

The first thing to go is my ten-speed bike. It is almost new, but it's uncomfortable and I never ride it. "How much?" asks a man in a red windbreaker who has read about our sale in the classifieds.

I look at Gerard for assistance. "Forty-five?" I say. The man nods and gets on the bike, rides it around on the sidewalk. Gerard scowls at his sneakers, walks off, circles back. "Next time," he whispers, "ask for sixty-five." But there isn't a next time. The man comes back with the bike. "I'll take it," he says, and hands me two twenties and a five. Gerard shrugs. I look at the money. I feel sick. I don't want it. "I don't think I'm good at these things," I say to Gerard. The man in red loads the bike into his Dodge Scamp, gets in and starts the ignition. "It was a good bike, but you didn't feel comfortable with it. The guy got a great deal," says Gerard. The Scamp has already lumbered off out of sight. Now I own no bike. "Don't worry," says Eleanor, putting her arm around my shoulder and leading me off toward the birch trees. "It's like life," and she jerks a thumb back toward Gerard. "You trade in the young spiffy one and then get yourself an old clunker and you're much happier. The old clunker's comfortable and never gets stolen. Look at Kip. You have the old clunkers for life."

"Forty-five dollars," I say and hold the money up in front of my face like a Spanish fan.

"You'll get the hang of it," says Eleanor. There is now something of a small crowd gathering by Eleanor's box of halter tops, by Gerard's records, by my plants. Not the plants, I say to myself. I'm not sure I should be selling the plants. They are living things, even more so than Eleanor's halter tops.

Eleanor is being a saleswoman by the birches. She indicates the black skirt. "This is a Liz Claiborne," she says to a woman who may or may not be interested. "Do you know who she is?"

"No," says the woman, annoyed, and she moves off toward the jazz records.

"We'll take the plants," says a teenaged girl with her boyfriend. "How much?"

There's a small ficus tree and the Chinese evergreen. "Eight dollars," I say, picking a number out of the air. The sick feeling overtakes me again. The Chinese evergreen is looking at me in disbelief, betrayed. The couple scrounge up eight dollars, give it to me, and then take the plants in their arms, like kindly rescuers of children.

"Thanks," they say.

The branches of the ficus tree bob farewell, but the Chinese evergreen screeches, "You're not fit to be a plant mother!" or something like that all the way out to the couple's car. I put the eight dollars in my cup. I'm wondering how far you could go with this yard sale stuff. "Sure," you might say to perfect strangers. "Take the dog, take the boyfriend, there's a special on mothers and fingers, two-for-one." If all you wanted to do was to fill up the cash cup, you might get carried away. A nail paring or a baby, they might all have little masking-tape price tags. It could take over you, like alcoholism or a religion. "I'm upset," I say to Gerard, who has just sold some records and is gleefully putting cash in his cup.

"What's the matter?" Again I've unsweetened his happiness, gotten in the way, I seem to do that.

"I sold my plants. I feel sick."

He puts one arm around my waist. "It's money. You could use some."

"Gerard," I say. "Let's run off to New Hampshire and wear nothing but sleeping bags. We'll be in-tents."

"Ben-na," he warns. He takes his arm away.

"We had a good life here, right? So we ate a lot of beans and rice."

"Take your eight dollars, Benna. Buy yourself a steak."

"I know," I say. "We could open a lemonade stand!" The evergreen still shrieks in the distance like a bird. In the birch trees the stain on Eleanor's teddy is some kind of organic spin art, a flower or target; a menstrual eye bearing down on me.

i know what will happen: He will promise to write every other day but when it turns out to be once a week he will promise to write once a week, and when it becomes once a month and even that's a postcard, he'll get on the phone and say, "Benna, I promise you, once a month I'll write." He will start saying false, lawyerly things like "You know, I'm extremely busy" and "I'm doing my best." He will be the first to bring up the expense of long distance calls. Words like res ipsa loquitur and ill behooves will suddenly appear on his tongue like carbuncles. He will talk about what "some other people said," and what he and "some other people did," and when he never specifically mentions women it will be like the Soviet news agency which never publicizes anything containing the names of the towns where the new bombs are.

"sure, I'll take a check," Eleanor is saying. "Are you kidding?" Miraculously, someone is buying Thoroughly Modern Millie. A man with a swollen belly and a checkbook but no shirt. The hair on his chest is like Gerard's: a land very different from his face, something exotic and borrowed, as if for Halloween. He picks up the wine decanter. It's ugly, a hopeful gift, expensive and wrong, from my lonely and overweight brother. "You can have it for a dollar," I say. Once I found a fairly new book of poems in a used bookstore, and on the inside cover someone had written, "For Sandra, the only woman I've ever loved." I blushed. I blushed for the bitch Sandra. Betrayals, even your own, can take you by surprise. You find yourself capable of things.

The man writes checks to both Eleanor and me. "Is the dog for sale?" he chuckles, but none of us responds. "My wife's crazy about Julie Andrews," he says, holding up the record. "When she was little she wanted to grow up to be a nanny, just so she could sing some of her songs. Doe a deer and all that."

"Ha! me too," I say, a ridiculous nanny, a Julie Andrews with a toad in her throat. The man toasts me with the wine decanter, then takes off down the sidewalk.

"The taste of a can opener," mutters Eleanor.

and on the phone in California, in one final, cornered burst of erotic sentiment, he will whisper, "Good night, Benna. Hold your breasts for me," but the connection won't be very good and it will sound like "Hold your breath for me," and I'll say "You're out of your mind, baby doll," and hang up with a crash.

there is a lull in our yard sale. I go inside and bring out beers, pouring one into a dish for Magdalena. "Well," says Gerard, leaning back in his lawn chair, exploding open a can and eyeing the birches. "No one's gone for the lavender teddy yet, Eleanor. Maybe they think it's stained."

"Well, you know, it's not really a whole stain," Eleanor explains. "It's just the outline of a stain — it's faded in the middle already. Bruises fade like that, too. After a few more washings the whole thing'll be gone."

Gerard blinks in mock seriousness. I gulp at my beer like a panicked woman. Gerard and Eleanor count their money, rolling it and unrolling it, making cylindrical silver towers. It's two against one. People stroll by, some stop and browse, others keep on going. Others say they'll come back. "People are always saying they'll come back, and then they never do," I say. Both Eleanor and Gerard look quickly up at me from their money cups, as if I have somehow accused them, one against two. "Just noticing," I say, and they return to their money.

A very beautiful black-haired woman in a denim jumper walks by, and, noticing our sale, stops in to poke and rearrange the merchandise. She is tan and strikingly gray-eyed and all those things that are so obviously lovely you really have to give her demerits for lack of subtlety. "Oh, is the dog for sale?" She laughs rather noisily at Magdalena, and Gerard laughs noisily back (to be polite, he'll explain later), though Eleanor and I don't laugh; he is closer to her age than we are.

"No, the dog's not for sale," says Eleanor, recrossing her legs. "But you know, you're the very first person to ask that question."

"Am I?" says the beautiful woman. The problem with a beautiful woman is that she makes everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you're already male to begin with poses no particular problem. But if you're anyone else, your whole sexual identity gets dragged into the principal's office: "So what's this I hear about you prancing around, masquerading as a woman?" You are answerless. You are sitting on your hands. You are praying for your breasts to grow, your hair to perk up.

"A clunker," whispers Eleanor, noticing Gerard. "Get yourself a clunker."

i'll probably watch a lot of TV specials: Sammy Davis singing "For Once in My Life," Tony Bennett singing "For Once in My Life," everybody singing "For Once in My Life."

"can i interest you in a Liz Claiborne?" says Eleanor, pulling down the black skirt from the tree. "I don't know much about designer clothes, but supposedly Liz Claiborne is good stuff."

The beautiful raven-haired woman in the denim jumper smiles only slightly. "It's okay except for the lint," she says, gingerly lifting the hem of the skirt, then dropping it again. Eleanor shrugs and puts the skirt back up in the tree. "No one knows anything about character anymore," she sighs, and lurches back toward the tables where she piles up old complimentary airlines magazines and back issues of People and Canadian Skater.

"Just this, then, I guess," says the woman, and she hands Gerard a dollar for a record album. I look quickly and see that it's a Louis Armstrong record I gave him last Christmas. When the woman has left, I say, "So what's this, you're selling gifts? I gave you that record last Christmas and now it's in our yard sale?"

Gerard blushes. I've made him feel bad and I'm not sure whether I intended it. After all, I have sold the wine decanter my brother gave me last year, his foot jiggling, his entire impossible life printed on his face like a coin.

"I've got it on tape," Gerard says. "I've got the Louis Armstrong on tape."

I look at Eleanor. "Gerard tapes," I say.

She nods. She's looking through some old People magazines that she wants to sell for a dime apiece. "So, Billy Joel's getting married to a fashion model," she is saying, flipping pages. "What can you expect from a guy who writes 'I don't want clever conversation' and calls that a love song." Pretty soon Eleanor has lost it and is singing "I don't want clever conversation, I just want gigundo buzooms."

"Kip loves Billy Joel," she adds. "The man's got the taste of a can opener."

It's every man for himself out here.

i will move to a new apartment in town. I will fill it with new smells — the vinyl of a shower curtain, the fishy percale of new sheets, the peppery odor of the landlord's pesticides. I will take too many hot baths — a sex and alcohol substitute and an attempt to get reoriented. At work, suddenly, no one will seem to understand when I'm joking.

we are actually doing fairly well in the yard sale, though the sweaters aren't a big hit since the weather's warm. "I'm sorry about the record album," says Gerard, putting his hand on the part of my thigh where the shorts end.

"That's okay," I say, and go into the house and bring out a lot of junky little presents he's given me in the last two years: crocheted doilies, Crabtree and Evelyn soaps, a drawer sachet that says, "I Pine for You, and Sometimes I Balsam." They are all from other yard sales. They have sat for years in someone else's drawers, and then in their yards, and now I'm getting rid of them. I suppose I'm being vengeful, but I never really liked these presents. They are for an old maid, or a grandmother, and now's my chance to dump them. Perhaps I'm just a small person. Sometimes I think I must love Magdalena more than I love Gerard, because when they both take off for California, I want Magdalena to be happy and I want Gerard to mope and lose his hair into his water dish. I don't want him to be happy. I want him to miss me. That is not really love; I suppose I understand that. But perhaps it is like a small girl who for one baffled and uncharmed instant realizes her rigid plastic doll is not a real baby — before she resumes her pretending again. Perhaps it is like a football player who, futile and superfluous, dives in on top of the manpile, even after he knows the tackle's over; even after he knows the play's completed and it all had nothing to do with him; he just leaps in there anyway.

"Oh my god," cries Eleanor, picking up the balsam sachet. "I've seen this in at least two other yard sales."

"I got it down on Oak Street," says Gerard. "Is that where you saw it?"

"I don't think so." She holds it up by two fingers and eyes it suspiciously.

for a while I'll find myself talking to myself, which will be something I've always done, I'll realize, it's just that when you're living with someone else you keep thinking you're talking to them. Simply because they're in the same room, you assume they're listening. And then when you start living alone, you realize you've developed a disturbing habit of talking to yourself.

As medication, I will watch a lot of HBO and eat baked apples with sour cream. The whites of my eyes will chip and crack with scarlet. Only once or twice will I run out into the street, in the middle of the night, with my pajamas on.

by three-thirty-five business really winds down. I have already sold my ladderback chairs and my Scottish cardigans. I'm not even sure now why I've sold all these things, except perhaps so as not to be left out of this giant insult to one's life that is a yard sale, this general project of getting rid quick. What I really should have brought out is the food Gerard and I still have: potatoes already going bad, growing dark intestines; parsley and lettuce swampy in plastic bags; on the shelf above the stove, spices sticking to the sides of their bottles. Or I should have brought down all the mirrors — the one in the bathroom, the one over the dresser. I'm tired of looking into them and putting on so much make-up I look like a prostitute. I'm tired of saying to myself: "I used to be able to get better-looking than this. I know I used to be able to get better-looking than this."

It all gives me a stomachache. "There goes my dowry," I say when a ten-year-old girl actually buys the "I Pine for You" for a quarter. I feel concerned for her. She is mop-haired and shy, with a small voice that whispers "Thank you." She walks with tiny steps and holds the sachet against her chest.

I'm looking at the sky and hoping it will rain. "This gets dull after a while, doesn't it," I say. "I'd like to close up, except we advertised in the paper we'd stay open until five." Very few cars drive past on Marini Street; some slow down, check us out, then rev up their engines and speed away. Eleanor shakes a halter top and shouts, "Same to you, buddy."

"If we closed," I continue, "could we get sued for false advertising? Perpetrating a public fraud?"

"Littering," says Gerard, and he points to the lavender teddy again.

"Boy," says Eleanor, oblivious. "I hate it when someone comes by and pokes through a box of clothes that you always thought were kind of nice, and they just poke and stir and sniff and then move on. I mean, I wasn't even sure I wanted to get rid of the Liz Claiborne skirt, but now that it's been pawed over, forget it. There's no way it's going back inside my closet."

I go inside and Magdalena follows, stays, lies down on the linoleum of the kitchen floor where it's cool. I grab the remaining six-pack in the refrigerator and bring it outside. The pop and hiss of cans comforts me, the starchy bitterness bubbling under my tongue. Gerard strolls around the yard with his beer can. He is pretending to be a customer. He struts past the tables, past the birch trees, spins, and in some Brooklynesque, street-kid voice he picked up from the movies, he says, "Hey. How much will you pay me to take this stuff off your hands?" We laugh, resenting him for being cute. I swallow beer too quickly; carbonation burns and cuts my throat.

Eleanor jumps up, deciding it's her turn. She grabs the fiberglass insulation and models it like a stole. She scuddles and swishes up and down the sidewalk, a runway model on drugs. "Dahlinck, don't vurry about tuh spleentairs," she is saying. "So vut, a leetle spleentairs."

Gerard and I applaud.

my new apartment might be in a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, "Hi, do you have any kids?" and then, "Why not, don't you like kids?"

"I like kids," I will explain. "I like kids very much." And when I almost run over them with my car, in my driveway, I will feel many different things.

"your turn, benna," Eleanor and Gerard are saying. "Be somebody," they are saying. "Do something," they are saying. "Some feat of characterization. Some yard sale drama. We're bored. No one's coming."

The sky has that old bathmat look of rain. "Some daring dramatic feat?" I don't feel quite up to it.

"Three feats to a yard." Gerard grins, and Eleanor groans and smacks him on the arm with a People magazine.

I put my beer can, carefully, on the ground. I stand up. "All right," I exhale, though it sounds edged with hysteria, even to me. I know what hysteria is: It is your womb speaking up for its own commerce. "This is your sex speaking," it says. "And we are getting a raw deal."

I walk over and pretend to be interested in the black skirt. I yank it down out of the tree and hold it up to myself. I step back and dance it around in the air. I fold back the waistband and look at the tag. I point at it theatrically, aghast. I glance over my shoulders, then look front at Gerard who is waving and at Eleanor who is laughing. I make a horrible face. "Liz Claiborne?!" I yell, pretending to be outraged. I toss the skirt off toward the street; it lands on the curb. "Liz Claiborne's nothing but a hooker!"

And then there is a guffawing, hiccuping sort of laughter, but it seems to be coming mostly from me, and I have collapsed, squatted on the grass, holding my stomach, this thing that might be laughter coming insistently, in gulps and waves. I lift my head, and in the distance I see Eleanor and Gerard — Eleanor worried and coming toward me, Gerard afraid and not coming toward me, and jutting into my line of vision is the edge of my own body, fading from the center first like a bloodstain or a bruise, only my outlying limbs, my perimeter lingering. That is all I can see, the three of us, here, small and vanishing, and caught in the side yard, selling things.

Water

"so, you don't like the life you're leading?" asks Gerard, unbelieving as the police. He is an art history graduate student, a teaching assistant of Benna's, although they are about the same age. They are sitting in Benna's office, which could use some potted plants and more books. The art history department, she thinks, must be wondering about her empty shelves, whether this suggests an attitude problem. She has tried to joke and say that she's going to fill the shelves with Hummels and porcelain horses with gold chains connecting their hearts. But no one seems to find it funny. "You're Impressionist scholarship's new golden girl," Gerard is saying. "I don't get it."

Benna considers this. Leading a life always makes her think of something trailing behind her in a harness, bit, and reins. "You can lead a life to water, but you can't make it drink." She smiles at Gerard. Her books are all at home, still in boxes.

Gerard's grin is a large plastic comb of teeth, the form his fury has taken. "You're being ungrateful," he says. Benna has what he hopes someday to have: free pencils, department stationery, an office with a view. Of the lake. Of the ducks. Not the glamour bird, she has said. How can Benna suggest she's unhappy? How can she imply that what she's really wanted in her life is not this, that her new position and her oft-quoted articles on Mary Cassatt have fallen into a heap in her lap like, well, so many dead ducks. How can she say that she has begun to think that all writing about art is simply language playing so ardently with itself that it goes blind?

"Maybe I'm being ungrateful," bristles Benna, "but you're being insubordinate." Yet she likes Gerard, is even a bit attracted to him, his aqua sweaters and his classroom gift for minutiae; like a Shakespearean's pop quiz, he surprises everyone with years, dates, the names of dogs and manservants. Now Benna regrets a bit having said what she's just said. Even if Gerard is behaving badly. Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.

"Well, I guess that's a signal I should leave," says Gerard, and he gets up and does a stiff swagger out of her office, without even saying good-bye, the blues and greens of him bleeding like Giverny lilies.

benna takes a bus home, which she usually resents, tending, as she does, to think of buses as being little more than germs-on-wheels. But today, because of the October chill, the peopled humidity of the ride is comforting. In the city back east where she went to graduate school, everything was within walking distance: school, groceries, laundry. She lived in a house with a large group of friends and was known for her carrot soup and her good, if peculiar, sense of humor. Then in August, she packed up her car and drove out here alone, feeling like a map folded back against its creases. She stopped overnight at motels in Indiana, Nebraska, and Montana (where she danced in the cocktail lounges with truckers), and blinked back tears through prairie after prairie and towns that seemed all to have the same name: Watertown, Sweet Water, Waterville. She came to this California university for one reason, she reminds herself: the paycheck. Although every time the paycheck arrives the amount taken out in taxes for a single woman with no dependents is so huge it stuns her. The money starts to feel like an insult: For this, she thinks, I've uprooted my life? Whatever money she might save, moreover, she usually spends trying to console herself. And it is hard to make any job financially worth its difficulties, she realizes, when you're constantly running out to J. C. Penney's to buy bathmats.

BENNA MISSES EVERYONE.

Benna misses everyone she's ever known and spends her weekends writing long letters, extravagant in their warmth, signed always, "Lots of love, Benna." She used to pay attention to how letters people wrote her were signed, but now she tries not to notice when the letters she receives close with "Take Care" or "Be Well" or "See you Christmas" — or sometimes simply "Moi." Look for "Love," she jokes to herself, and you will never find it.

it is the eating dinner home alone that is getting to her. At first, because she had no furniture, she ate sandwiches over the kitchen sink, and in ways that was better than sitting down at her new dining-room table with a pretty place setting for one and a carefully prepared meal of asparagus and broiled chicken and pasta primavera. "I quickly exhaust my own charms," she writes in a letter to her friend Eleanor, who has begun to seem more imagined than real. "I compliment myself on the cooking, I ask myself where I got the recipe. At the end I offer, insincerely, to do the dishes. I then tell myself to just leave them, I'll do them later. I find myself, finally, quite dull."

"Things are going well," she writes to her father, who lives in a trailer and goes out on dates with women from his square dance club. "I think you would be proud."

There are children, beautiful, bilingual, academic children, who leave their mudpies on her porch, mud in Dixie cups with leaves and sticks splayed out at all angles. They do not know quite what to make of Benna, who steps out of the house and often onto one of their mudpies, and who merely smiles at them, as if she just wanted to please, as if they, mere children, had some say in her day's happiness.

Where she often goes is to the all-night supermarket, as if something she urgently needed were there. And in a kind of fluorescent hallucination, she wanders the aisles with a gimp-wheeled shopping cart, searching, almost panicked, for something, and settles instead for a box of glazed doughnuts or some on-sale fruit.

At home, before bed, she heats up milk in a saucepan, puts on a nightgown, looks over her lecture notes for the next day — the old familiar notes about the childless Mary Cassatt giving herself babies with paint; the expatriate Mary Cassatt, weary and traveling, dreaming homes for herself in her work; woman Mary Cassatt, who believed herself no woman at all.

Benna sifts through this, sipping the milk and half-waiting for the inevitable eleven o'clock phone call from an undergraduate who has been delinquent in some way and who wants very badly to explain. Tonight the phone rings at ten forty-five. She brings it into the bathroom, where the air is warmer, and gazes into the medicine cabinet mirror: This way at least she'll feel as if she's talking to an adult.

"Hello?" she says.

"Hi, Benna. This is Gerard. I want to apologize for this afternoon." His voice is careful, slow.

"Yes, well, I guess we got a little tense." She notices her face has started to do what her mother called bunch—age making pouches at her mouth and eyes: Are there such things as character bags? Benna opens the medicine cabinet mirror so she can look instead at the aspirin, the spearmint dental floss, the razor blades.

There is some noise on Gerard's end of the phone. It sounds like a whimpering child. "Excuse me," says Gerard. "My daughter's wiping something on my pant leg." He covers up the phone, but Benna can still hear him say in a patient, Dad voice: "Now, honey, go back to bed. I'm on the phone right now."

"Sorry about that," he says when he gets back on.

"You have a daughter?" Benna exclaims.

"Unfortunately, tonight I do," he says. "My wife's at the library, so it's my turn to stay home."

I didn't even know you were married, Benna almost says. A daughter? Perhaps he is imagining it. Perhaps he has only an imaginary daughter.

Her finger traces the edge of the cold water faucet.

"So… hello? Are you still there?" calls Gerard.

"Yeah," says Benna finally. She envies the spigot in her hand: solid, dry, clear as a life that has expected nothing else. "Sorry. I was just, uh, hemorrhaging."

She hears Gerard laugh, and she looks straight into the toothpasted drain and laughs too. It feels good to laugh. "Give to seizure what is seizure's," she adds, aiming for hilarity.

"You're crazy, Benna," Gerard says merrily.

"Of course," she says, "I'm here," though it sounds stale, like the hard rock of bread a timid child hurls into duck ponds, less to feed than to scratch at the black beads of the eyes.