The Summer Without Men

* * *

During our penultimate call before she was to leave for the month of August, I told Dr. S. what I had never told anyone. A week before Stefan killed himself, the two of us were sitting together on our sofa at home in Brooklyn, waiting for Boris. My brother-in-law had been released from the hospital only two days before. He was taking his lithium, but he had been explaining that it made his mind flat and the world distant. He leaned back on the sofa, closed his eyes, and said, But even when my head is dead, I love you, Mia, and I said I loved him, too, and he said, No, I love you. I’ve always loved you and it’s killing me.

Stefan was crazy, but he was not always crazy. He wasn’t crazy then. And he was beautiful. I had always found him beautiful, worn and disappointed though he was. The brothers resembled each other, but Stefan was much thinner and far more delicate, almost feminine in his features. His manias starved him because he forgot to eat. When he was flying, he went on sex binges with floozies he stumbled over in bars and on book-buying sprees he couldn’t afford and, like my friend Nobody, he spouted mysterian philosophies that were sometimes hard to follow. But that day he was in a state of quiescence. I said something about his feeling being a mistake, about all the time we had spent together, that he had come to rely on me, stuttering in confusion, and then my sentences dwindled to silence, but he went on: I love you because we’re the same. We’re not like the Commander General. That was one of Stefan’s nicknames for Boris. In belligerent moods, Stefan sometimes saluted his older brother. Sister Life, Stefan said, turning his face to me and taking my cheeks in his hands and he kissed me long and hard and I let him and I loved it and I never should have, I said to Dr. S. Before Boris walked through the door I had told Stefan that we couldn’t and it had been stupid, all the usual claptrap, and he had looked so hurt. And it’s killing me. Sister Guilt. His terrible dead face, his terrible dead body.

I knew that I was not to blame for Stefan’s death. I knew that he must have decided in a moment of despair that he did not want to ride the dragon anymore, and yet I had never been able to reproduce our conversation aloud, had never been able to get the words out into those open fields under the vast sky. Hearing myself speak, I understood that by declaring our mutual weakness and anger at Big Boris, Stefan had bound himself to me with a kiss. It was not the kiss as such that had mortified me and kept me silent, but what I had felt in Stefan, his jealousy and vengeance, and it was this that had frightened me, not because the feelings belonged to Stefan but because they also belonged to me. The little brother. The wife. The ones who came second.

“But you and Stefan were not the same,” Dr. S. said, not long before we hung up.

Not the same. Different.

“In the hospital I felt like Stefan.”

“But Mia,” Dr. S. said, “you are alive, and you want to live. From what I can tell, your will to live is bursting out all over.”

Sister Life.

I listened to myself breathe for a while. I heard Dr. S. breathe through the telephone. Yes, I thought. Bursting out all over. I liked that. I told her I liked it. We are such strange creatures, we human beings. Something had happened. Something unbound in the telling.

“If I were there with you right now,” I said, “I would jump into your lap and give you a big squeeze.”

“That would be an armful,” said Dr. S.

* * *

Around the same time, give or take a few days, even weeks, backward or forward, the following events were taking place beyond my immediate phenomenal consciousness, not necessarily in the order presented. They cannot be unscrambled by me or perhaps by anyone, hence in medias res:

My mother is reading Persuasion for the third time in preparation for the book club meeting to be held in the Rolling Meadows lounge on August 15. She assumes a position of ultimate comfort for this task. Lying on her bed with three pillows behind her, a soft neck brace to cushion arthritic twinges, hot water bottle for h cold feet, reading glasses for the bridge of her nose to bring the type into focus, and a special-order lap desk that holds the volume in position, she immerses herself in the lives of people she knows well, especially Anne Elliot, whom my mother, Bea, and I all love and chat about as if Kellynch Hall is down the hall, and good, old, long-suffering, sensible Anne might knock on the door at any moment.

Pete and Lola are fighting, a lot.

Daisy, who is still Muriel every evening at the playhouse, becomes Daisy Detective post-performance and trails her sphinx of a father around the city. The man has taken to long nocturnal perambulations, the meaning of which she does not understand. True to her character, Daisy dons flamboyant costumes for her gumshoe expeditions, which (although I know nothing of them or of her life as a spy at the time) seem likely to make her more conspicuous rather than less: Groucho Marx glasses, eyebrows, nose, and mustache; long blond wig with spangly red evening dress; tailored suit and briefcase; bowler hat and cane. Of course, in NYC, where the naked, the nuts, and the outlandish mingle freely with the staid and the conventional, she might have passed hordes of pedestrians without receiving a single glance. At around three in the morning, every morning, Boris returns to the apartment on East Seventieth Street, lets himself in, and vanishes from our daughter’s sight, upon which she returns to her apartment in Tribeca, throws herself exhausted onto her bed, and, as she put it to me later, crashes.

Simon laughs for the first time. While Lola and Pete lean over the princely crib, their faces contorted with adoration, he looks up at his two devotees, waves all four limbs in a rush of excitement, and chortles.

Abigail works her way through my six slim collections of poems, all faithfully published by the Fever Press in San Francisco, California: Lost Diction, Little Truths, Hyperbole in Heaven, The Obsidian Woman, Dang It, and Winks, Blinks, and Kinks.

Regina forgets. Neither my mother nor Peg nor Abigail can say exactly when they first notice the decline in their friend’s memory. They all forget bits and pieces of recent reality, after all. They, too, occasionally repeat questions or stories, but Regina’s forgetting has a different coloring. The three Swans (four when George was alive) have tolerated Regina’s vanity, self-absorption, and restlessness (she could not eat at a restaurant without changing tables three times) because she knows how to have fun. She has arranged teas for them and called for tickets to this event and that one. She has told charmingly garbled jokes, and rarely appeared at the door of her friends’ apartments without an offering: a flower or decorative box or candleholder picked up somewhere on her life’s journey across continents; but the advent of potential thrombosis—“straight to my lungs and I’m dead”—has given her already flighty character an extra propeller that has started to whirl at high speed. Her growing amnesia for appointments, conversations, the location of her keys and purse, her glasses, and some faces (not Swan faces, but others) quickly turns into panic and tears. The deficits the other three joke about as “senioritis” or “old-lady brain” seem to devastate Regina. She has been rushing to her doctor three or four times a week, has sulkily repeated that she simply can’t believe, can&x2019t believe that she, she, Regina, who was once, by marriage anyway, a crucial player in the world of international diplomacy, has ended up in this place, a home — that’s what it is, isn’t it, a home? It strikes her as an outrage. And so, little by little, without anyone being able to pinpoint the moment of transformation, the old coquette has alienated herself from her far more stoical friends.

Flora becomes psychological: “Mommy, you know what’s funny?”

“No, Flora,” says Lola.

“Sometimes I love you so, so, so much, but other times I really, really hate you!”

Ellen Wright calls the other mothers, calmly recounts Alice’s story, and arranges a meeting of parents and children at her house. She asks me as well, but I beg off due to Bea and say I will reorient my class toward verses that promote the greater good — mutual understanding, warm camaraderie, melting kindness — although I have no clue how I will achieve this. I do know that the colloquy took place the Sunday after the fatal Friday when Alice poured forth the unsavory details of her persecution. The mothers and daughters (Alice’s father is the only male personage in attendance) convene around the time Bea, my mother, and I are having a glass of Sancerre as we prepare our farewell dinner for Bea in my rented kitchen — a succulent roast chicken with garlic, lemon, and olive oil, a new-potato salad, and beans from Lola’s garden. The secondhand reports cannot be reassembled perfectly, but the drama unfolds, if not as follows, then in a way very much like it and, as we all know, even eyewitness accounts are hardly reliable, so you will just have to swallow this report as I have decided to render it.

Six tense mothers straggle into the Wrights’ living room with sullen, irritable daughters in tow. (Whether or not anyone glances at the large poster of Goya’s priest defeating a robber in six frames from the Chicago Art Institute that hangs over the sofa, I cannot say, but it is a great work even in reproduction.) Ellen Wright, who once trained in social work, now employed as an administrator at the Bonden Health Clinic, opens the forum with a short speech, during which she uses the current verb of choice to describe the events in question: bullying. She notes its prevalence, its potential damage to long-term mental health, notes that girls are sneakier and more underhanded than boys (my adjectives) and that these activities do not go away by themselves; it takes a village. I am not responsible for the dead phrases that litter the discourse of pop sociology. Mrs. Wright then articulates a heartfelt desire to listen, to open the floor to all players.

Silence ensues. Several pairs of eyes glare at Alice, who sits between parental buffers.

Mrs.-Lorquat-of-the-frowning-Deity, mother of Jessie, wonders aloud how, when so much of what went on was anonymous, can it be known that her Jessie was even involved.

Mrs. Hartley, mother of Emma, pokes her child to prompt words. Several pokes later, Emma, red-faced, confesses to messages cooked up by an ensemble cast. And she names names: Jessie, Ashley, Joan, Nikki, and herself. But they hadn’t really meant it; it was just stupid stuff kids do.

Nikki and Joan alternately make short exclamatory remarks to the effect that they, too, had not intended to do any real harm. It was just that Alice was always talking about Chicago and she was always reading books and acting better than they were and so they thought she was kinda stuck-up and everything and so …

Mrs. Larsen, mother of Ashley, weary-faced, meek-voiced, inquires innocently of stone-faced daughter: But I thought you and Alice were such good friends.

We are!

Peyton, squirming under an avalanche of guilt, shouts the word liar and unloads revelations that will come as no surprise to either you or me, while Mrs. Berg tries to dampen her daughter’s zeal by saying quietly, Don’t shout, Peyton, but Peyton shouts anyway that Ashley took the photographs and posted them, that she suggested the Zack deception, and that she, Peyton, went along with it and she feels bad, really bad. But Peyton isn’t finished. There is more. Peyton says she was scared to tell, freaked, because she, Ashley, started a club called the Coven. Before joining the group, each girl agreed to cut herself with a knife and bleed enough to sign her name in blood to a document, in which she swore her allegiance to the other members and promised that their dark alliance would remain a secret forever. Peyton produces small scar on thigh of very long left leg as evidence.

This gothic twist on the proceedings, with its air of satanic ritual, creates a stir among the adults. Poor Mr. Wright, a chemistry professor, accustomed to shepherding premed students through the peaks and valleys of predicting formulas with polyatomic ions, is uncomfortable in the extreme and begins an intense examination of his fingernails. Mrs. Lorquat issues a gasp, as bloody documents are even more offensive to God than D. H. Lawrence. The mothers of Nikki and Joan, friends for life, seated side by side, drop their jaws in unison. Aghast questioning of Coven members ensues.

Ashley commences crying.

Alice watches.

Ellen watches Alice.

What Alice thinks at this juncture we do not know, but it is more than likely that she feels some satisfaction that the pubescent witches of Bonden have been exposed. At the same time, Alice isn’t going anywhere. She is staying in town with the little she-devils, her friends.

* * *

Commentary: The instruments of darkness tell us truths. What are they? Boys will be boys: rambunctious, wild, kicking, hanging from the trees. But girls will be girls? Gentle, nurturing, sweet, passive, conniving, stealthy, mean?

We all start out the same in our mothers’ wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn’t swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around. Men are the metaphorical ribs of women, not women of men. Most of the time, it’s XX = ovaries, XY = testes. The renowned Greek physician Galen believed that female genitalia were the inversion of the male’s and vice versa, a view that held for centuries: “Turn outward the woman’s, turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man’s and you will find the same in both in every respect.” Of course, outward trumped inward every time. Inward was definitely worse. Exactly why, I can’t say. Outward is pretty vulnerable, if you ask me. In fact, castration anxiety makes a lot of sense. If I were carrying my reproductive organs on the outside, I’d be pretty damned nervous about that delicate little package, too. As with the human navel, the ancient sex model had innies and outies, which meant that an innie might just surprise you by becoming an outie, especially if you went around behaving like someone who already had an outie. That hidden, folded-over yard might just make a sudden appearance. Montaigne, great literary peak of the sixteenth century that he was, subscribed to the innie/outie thesis: “Males and females are cast in the same mold, and, education and usage excepted, the difference is not great.” He repeats a well-known story about Marie-Germain, who was just plain Marie until the age of twenty-two in Montaigne’s version (fifteen in other versions), but one day, due to strenuous exercise (jumping over a ditch while chasing pigs), the male rod popped out of her, and Germain was born. Incredible, you say. Impossible, you say. But there is a particular family in Puerto Rico and another in Texas with a genetic condition in which XY looks for all the world exactly like XX. In other words, phenotype disguises genotype, until puberty that is, when late in the game the little girls become little boys and grow up to be men. Carla turns into Carlos! Darling daughter becomes darling son without a surgical instrument in sight. What is certain is that in utero, the sex differentiation story is fragile. Things can and do get all mixed up.

Mia, you are saying, get to the point. Relax, breathe deeply, and I will make my rhetorical turn shortly. This is a question of sameness and difference, of what Socrates in the Republic calls a “word controversy.” He tells his interlocutor, Glaucon, that they find themselves in “eristic wrangling” because they hadn’t bothered to inquire “what was the sense of ‘different nature’ and what was the sense of ‘same nature’ and what we were aiming at in our definition when we allotted to a different nature different practices and to the same nature the same.” The Great Father of Western Philosophy is working out the man/woman problem for his utopia and comes to rest (uneasily, I think, but he rests nevertheless) on this: “But if the only difference is that the female bears and the male begets, we shall not admit that it is a difference relevant for our purpose.” The purpose: whether women should be given the same education as men and then allowed to rule beside them in the Republic.

Mostly the same, but different in parts, mostly in those lower begetting and bearing parts Or different in kind? Thomas Laqueur, bless his heart, has written a whole book on the subject. Once the innie-outie theory collapsed, sometime in the eighteenth century, women were no longer inverted men; we were wholly OTHER: our bones, nerves, muscles, organs, tissues, all different, another machinery altogether, and this biological alien was ever so delicate. “While it is true that the mind is common to all human beings,” wrote Paul-Victor de Sèze in 1786, “the active employment thereof is not conducive to all. For women, in fact, this activity can be quite harmful. Because of their natural weakness, greater brain activity in women would exhaust all the other organs and thus disrupt their proper functioning. Above all, however, it would be the generative organs which would be the most fatigued and endangered through the over exertion of the female brain.” The thought-shrivels-your-ovaries theory had a long and robust life. Dr. George Beard, author of American Nervousness, argued that unlike the “squaw in her wigwam,” who focused on her nether regions and popped out one child after another, the modern woman was being deformed by thinking, and to prove it, he cited the work of a distinguished colleague who had measured highly educated uteruses and found them to be only half the size of those never exposed to learning. In 1873, Dr. Edward Clarke, following the noble Beard, published a book with a friendly title: Sex in Education: A Fair Chance for Girls, in which he argued that menstruating girls should be banned from the classroom and cited hard evidence from clinical studies conducted at HARVARD on intellectual women which had determined that too much knowledge had made these poor creatures sterile, anemic, hysterical, and even mad. Maybe that was my problem. I read too much, and my brain exploded. In 1906, the anatomist Robert Bennett Bean claimed that the corpus callosum — the neural fibers that bind the two halves of the brain together — were bigger in men than in women and hypothesized that the “exceptional size of the corpus callosum may mean exceptional intellectual activity.” Big thoughts = Big CC.

But no one utters such nonsense now, you say. Science has changed. It is based on facts. And yet, colleagues of my wayward husband are hard at work measuring brain volume and thickness, scanning its oxygenated blood flow, injecting hormones into mice, rats, and monkeys, and knocking out genes left and right to prove beyond all doubt that the difference between the sexes is profound, predetermined by evolution, and more or less fixed. We have male and female brains, different not only for reproductive functions but in countless other essential ways. While it is true that the mind is common to all human beings, each sex has its own KIND of MIND. Dr. Renato Sabbatini, for example, distinguished neurophysiologist, who was a postdoc fellow at the MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE, enumerates a long list of differences between us and them and then announces: “This may account, scientists say, for the fact that there are many more [male] mathematicians, airplane pilots, bush guides, mechanical engineers, architects and race car drivers than female ones.” Study all you want, girls, you will never solve a Riccati equation. Why? The wigwam idea returns without bringing in Native Americans (it is no longer possible to demonize or idealize the wigwam; we must retreat to peoples who can no longer be insulted): “Cave men hunted. Cave women gathered food near the home and took care of the children.” But not to worry, our esteemed professor assures us (citing an even higher paternal AUTHORITY, that great “‘Father’ of sociobiology” at HARVARD, Edward O. Wilson), you might not have evolved to make it as a bush guide, but “human les tend to be higher than males in empathy, verbal skills, social skills and security seeking, among other things, while men tend to be higher in independence, dominance, spatial and mathematical skills, rank-related aggression, and other characteristics.” Our superior “verbal skills,” if we follow the professor’s own logic, explain why women have dominated the literary arts for so long, nary a man in sight. I am sure you have also noticed that when the titans of contemporary literature are referred to, both in academia and in the popular press, the numbers of women among them are, quite simply, overwhelming.

I am happy to say that my own (or used-to-be own) Boris would not agree with Dr. Sabbatini. Up to his ears in rats as my old man is and attached to evolution and genes as he also is, he knows that genes are expressed through the environment, that the brain is plastic and dynamic; it develops and changes over time in relation to what’s out there. He also knows, despite our commonalities, that people are not rats and that the higher executive functions in human beings can be decisive in determining what we become, and he knows that good science one day can become bad science the next, as was true of the sensational discovery in 1982 that the corpus callosum, the selfsame fibrous brain-hemisphere connector of Dr. Bean, especially one part of it known as the splenium, is actually LARGER in women than in men. This study, soon to be trumpeted to the masses by Newsweek magazine, claimed not that women were intellectually superior (an idea never advanced in the annals of human history) but, rather, that we of the large CCs have greater communication between the hemispheres of our brains, which in Newsweek was conveniently translated as “women’s intuition.” But then a study of Korean men and women found that the pesky thing was bigger in men. Koreans must be special. Then another study found no difference. Other studies followed: a little bigger, a little smaller, about the same, no difference. In 1997, Bishop and Walsten, the authors of a review of forty-nine studies on the corpus callosum, concluded: “The widespread belief that women have a larger splenium than men and consequently think differently is untenable.” Whoops. But the myth is still circulating. One simpleton, eagerly spewing his own brand of pseudoscience, has dubbed the CC the “caring membrane of the brain.”

It is not that there is no difference between men and women; it is how much difference that difference makes, and how we choose to frame it. Every era has had its science of difference and sameness, its biology, its ideology, and its ideological biology, which brings us, at last, back to the naughty girls, their escapades, and the instruments of darkness.

We have several contemporary instruments of darkness to choose from, all reductive, all easy. Shall we explain it through the very special, although dubious otherness of the female brain or through genes evolved from those “cave women gathering food near the home” thousands of years ago or through the dangerous hormonal surges of puberty or through nefarious social learning that channels aggressive, angry impulses in girls underground? Surely our Ashley, contrary to the good doctor’s analysis, is deeply interested in “social dominance” and “rank-related aggression,” despite her XX status, just as my old friend Julia was, when I was a sixth grader in an earlier era and I opened a piece of paper that had been left on my desk and read the words, formed by letters cut out of a magazine, “Everybody hat”0em” wiu because you are a big fake.” And I recall wondering, Am I a fake? Hadn’t I checked out from the library books with tiny print that were too hard for me? Did that prove they were right? The note stirred the psychic muck within me — guilt and weakness and a worry that as much as I wanted to be admired and loved, I wasn’t worthy — and I, wimp and crybaby, allowed them to taint me. Fake! I wasn’t fake enough. Glory to artifice, to the clown mask, to the Dracula face to hide the softness. Put on your armor and pick up your lance. Hail a bit of falseness if it protects you from the vipers.

Truisms are often untrue, but that cruelty is a fact of human life is not one of them. We must go closer, so close that we smell the blood from their cuts and the frisson of secrecy and theatrical danger the girls found in the Coven. We must be so close that we feel the pleasure they took in hurting Alice and so close to Alice that we can see how in her vulnerability and her need to be so very, very good, she defanged herself, just as I had before her.

But, I told myself, you are no longer twelve. Your fangs may not be the sharpest, but they have grown back and now you can act. I made seven phone calls and explained to seven mothers that I wanted to take a week off, but that during that week each of the girls had to write her story of what happened in either poetry or prose. Two pages minimum. The rest of the class would be spent dealing with that material in one way or another. I was forceful. Although I heard some murmurs of concern about “going over all that again,” no one opposed me in the end, not even Mrs. Lorquat, who seemed genuinely shaken by the whole ungodly mess.

* * *

Dear Mom,

Dad has moved into a hotel. I’m not sure what’s going on exactly, but we’re going to have dinner on Thursday, and he has promised to talk to me, to be totally honest. I told him that he really should write to you, and he said he would, but I have to tell you he sounds awfully sad on the telephone, all slowed down. He’s no open book, Mom, but I will keep you posted. A week and a half and I’ll be in Bonden, my little Mammy dear, and will pop through your door and fling my arms around you!

Love from your own Daisy girl

* * *

A. Boris dumped the Pause.

B. The Pause dumped Boris.

C. The affair was still on, but the duo had decided the pausal quarters were too small, hence hotel.

D. The two parted by mutual agreement.

E. None of the above.

* * *

A was preferable to B, B to C. D was preferable to B. E was an unknown quantity, or X. Much inward churning and burning over A, B, C, D, and X. Considerable spinning of satisfying fantasies of prodigal spouse prostrate or kneeling in state of keen remorse. Other, less satisfying fantasies of spousal heart broken by Frenchwoman. Some introspective activity on the conflicted state of own worn and tattered heart. No crying.

* * *

And then, on Wednesday evening, around nine-thirty, while I was reading Thomas Traherne aloud to myself in a very low voice as I lay on the sofa, my face covered in a mud mask of a green hue, a concoction I had purchased because its makers promised it would soften and purify an older face like mine (they did not state this explicitly, but the euphemism “fine lines” on the label had made their intention clear), I heard him next door, the volatile Pete, howling two well-known expletives, an adjective for the sex act and a noun for female genitalia, over and over again, and with every verbal assault my body stiffened as if from a blow, and I walked to the glass doors that opened to the yard and stood looking out toward my neighbor’s low modest house, but the windows revealed no persons. It wasn’t entirely dark yet, and the sky’s deep blue was streaked with darker trails of graying clouds. I opened the doors and stepped onto the grass and into the hot summer air, and I heard Simon wail, then the front door slam. I saw a racing shadow that was Pete, heard the car door slam, the ignition, the revving motor, and the skid of tires as the Toyota Corolla vanished down the empty street and took a violent left, presumably into town. Then, framed in the window, I saw Lola walk into the living room with Simon, her head bent over him, bouncing the child in her arms as Flora trailed after them like a sleepwalker. They were all whole.

I didn’t move for a few minutes. I stood there with my bare feet in the warm grass and felt immeasurably sad. All at once, I felt sad for the whole lot of us human beings, as if I had suddenly been transported skyward and, like some omniscient narrator in a nineteenth-century novel, were looking down on the spectacle of flawed humanity and wishing things could be different, not wholly different, but different enough to spare some of us a little pain here and there. This was a modest wish, surely, not some utopian fantasy, but the wish of a sane narrator who shakes her red head with its slices of gray and mourns deeply, mourns because it is right to mourn the endless repetitions of meanness and violence and pettiness and hurt. And so I mourned until the door opened, and my three neighbors emerged from the house and came across the lawn, and I took them in.

There were four, really, because Flora had brought Moki. As she walked toward me over the grass dressed only in her Cinderella underpants, she spoke urgently to him, telling him it was okay, that he mustn’t worry, mustn’t cry, that it would be all right. The child patted the air beside her and kissed it once and when we were inside, she ran to the sofa, curled up in the fetal position, and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. I noticed she was not wearing her wig. I sat down beside Flora, beconed to Lola by pointing at a chair, and watched her lower herself into it as if she were an old woman with sore joints, her face oddly expressionless. She did not appear to have shed any tears — her cheeks were dry and the whites of her eyes were untouched by redness — but her chest rose and fell as she breathed deeply, like a person who had been running. I placed my hand gently on Flora’s back. She opened her visible eye, took me in, and said, “You’re green.”

My hand flew to my face as I remembered the beauty product, rushed off to remove it, returned to the room, and noticed that more than anything Lola looked exhausted. She was wearing a thin paisley bathrobe of some synthetic material that had fallen open at the neck so that it exposed much of her right breast. Her blond hair hung in disordered clumps over her eyes, but she made no effort to adjust the robe or push away the hair. She was limp, beyond effort. Simon whimpered as he pressed the crown of his head against his mother’s arm, but she didn’t move. I took the baby from her and began to pace, jiggling him as I walked back and forth across the floor. Without turning to look at me, she said in a voice hard with determination, “I will not go back there tonight. I do not want to be there when he comes home. Not tonight.” I offered them my bed, to which she said, “We can sleep there, all four. It’s a king, right?”

We did sleep there, all four or five of us, depending on how you counted. After giving Lola a couple of shots of whiskey from the Burdas’ stash of hard liquor, I rocked Simon to sleep and laid him on the bed, a fat ball of babyhood in blue pajamas with feet, who breathed loudly from his chest, tiny lips pursing and unpursing automatically. I dug out a small blanket I had hidden away and wrapped him up in it to protect him from the air-conditioning and then carried in the unconscious Flora, who snorted once when I pulled the blanket over her, but she quickly rolled over and settled into deep sleep. After I returned, Lola and I sat together for a while. She did not want to talk about Pete. I asked her about the row, but she said that their fights were stupid, that they were always about nothing, nothing that was important, that she was tired, tired of Pete, tired of herself, sometimes even tired of the children. I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, without a transition of any kind, she began to tell me that for three years after she had started school as a child, she had not uttered a word. “I talked at home, to my parents, to my brothers, but I never said anything in school, not to anybody. I don’t remember much about preschool, but I remember a little about kindergarten. I remember Mrs. Frodermeyer leaning over me. Her face was really big and close. And she asked me why I didn’t answer her. She said it wasn’t polite. I knew that. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t understand. I just couldn’t.” Lola looked at her hands. “My mom says that sometime in the first grade I started whispering in school. She was overjoyed. Her kid had whispered. And then, little by little, I guess I just got louder.”

After Lola was nestled beside her children on the bed, I sat down on the edge and stroked her head for about twenty minutes. She’s only two years older than Daisy, I said to myself. I thought of her, Lola, the silent little girl who couldn’t talk in school. The anxiety of speaking in a place that isn’t home, that’s outside, that’s strange. It had a name, as so many things do, selective mutism, not so uncommon in young children. I thought then of a young woman who had been a patient with me in the hospital, and I tried to remember her name, but I couldn’t. She hadn’t spoken either, not a word. Thin and white and blond, she had made me think of a tubercular revenant from the Romantic age. I saw her as she wandered stiffly up and down the hallway, hunched over, long pale hair drawn over her face like a veil, carrying a plastic pitcher she held very close to her mouth so she could spit into it, sometimes silently, sometimes noisily hawking up gobs of mucus from her lungs, which made the other patients snicker. Once, I had seen her dart behind a sofa in the common area, crouch down, disappear from sight, and then, after a moment, I heard the hoarse roar of her vomiting into the pitcher. Inside out. Keep the outside out. Seal me shut, tight as a drum. Close my eyes. Shut my mouth. Bar the doors. Pull down the shades. Leave me be in my wordless sanctum, my fortress of madness. Poor girl, where was she now?

I found a spot beside Flora and eventually fell asleep, despite the slumberland concert provided by my overnight guests: the whistling of congested little Simon, the masticatory noises of Flora as she sucked and chomped on her index finger, and the restless murmurs and single word emitted by Lola. Several times, in a small high voice, she said, “No.” Although I remained in bed with them, my mind roamed as was its wont onto thoughts of Boris and Sidney and the Pause and the sex diary in hiatus. I thought of writing about the innumerable dreams from which I had woken in full riotous orgasm or perhaps about F.G., whom I had called the Grazer because he was a nibbler and a chewer, who moved up and down my body as if it were a delectable green field. I then allowed myself several minutes of extreme irritation over the biogenetic fantasy that it was possible to calculate accurately the percentage of gene influence as opposed to environmental influence on human beings and began writing a scathing critique in my head, but the last thing I remember, which softened my mood considerably, was the RETURN TO TRAHERNE and his poem “Shadows in the Water,” which I had read several times to myself only hours earlier. It was prompted, I believe, by an idle musing about Moki and whether he lay invisible among us, the strong, wild little boy with long hair who flew only slowly, but needed comfort after the paternal eruption, needed pats and kisses from his very short, plump, newly wigless authoress.

O ye that stand upon the brink,

Whom I so near me through the chink

With wonder see: what faces there,

Whose feet, whose bodies do ye wear?

I my companions see

In you, another me.

They seemed others, but are we;

Our second selves these shadows be.

I woke to Pete, not in the flesh, but to his voice on the phone. It was not an angry voice but a composed one, polite but strained, asking for “my wife.” I couldn’t see the visitors — the bed was empty — but I heard them in the kitchen. Flora was singing nonsense; there was the clink of dishes and the dull bang of some object hitting another, which was then followed by the unmistakable smell of toast.

Lola took the call in the bedroom while I held Simon and supervised the second course of Flora’s breakfast, toast with jam, which she waved in the air between bites as she marched back and forth across the black and white tiles, still singing. The babe barfed milk all over my pajama top. The mild odor of the regurgitated milk, the stain that seeped through the cloth and wet my skin, the squirming, bucking body I held securely to my chest brought back the old days with my own Daisy girl, my fierce, agitated infant Daisy. I had walked the floors with her for hours in the first months of her life as I breathed soothing words into her tiny curl of an ear, repeating her musical name over and over until I felt her tense chest and limbs relax against me. I had had only one child, and it hadn’t been easy. And Lola had two. And Mama had had two. When Lola emerged from the bedroom, she paused in the door and smiled an enigmatic smile. I wondered whether Pete-of-the-Blasting-Expletives had begged forgiveness and caused that smile or whether I looked ridiculous holding the now howling Simon. Before she gathered her two charges, one in each arm, and trudged heavily across the lawn back to her sick, sorry, and sober husband, the laconic Lola said, “It never changes. It’s always the same. You’d think I’d wise up, wouldn’t you? It gave him a start, though, when I wasn’t home, scared him. Thanks, Mia.”

* * *

Good old Mama Mia, who lies alone in the great king bed with its wide-open spaces, a blank expanse of white sheets she fills up with inner speech and memory, a whirligig of words and thoughts and aches and pains. Mia, Mother of Daisy. Mia, Mother of Loss. Once, Wife of Boris. But O the heavy change, now thou art gone. O Milton on the brain. O Muse. O Mia, rhapsodic boob, blustering bimbo, pine no more! Roll up your troubles, wipe up your stains, kick off your shoes, and sing something silly for your own sake as you sail on kingless in that great groaning schooner of a bed, not a tawdry queen for you, Bard of the Laughing Countenance, but a king.

* * *

Thursday afternoon, Boris wrote the following. Explication de texte included:

Mia,

It has ended with [proper name of French love object]. I am staying in the Roosevelt. In the last two weeks I have thought more about my life than at any other time. It has been a black period for me. I even called Bob [psychiatrist friend doing research at Rockefeller. The even here is an example of the radical understatement of which B.I. is capable. He has always stubbornly, vehemently resisted any oughl kinds of psychotherapeutic intervention. Calling Bob suggests desperation.] It has become obvious to me that I have acted precipitously in order to escape parts of myself, parts of my past, and you have suffered because of this. [Read: mother, father, Stefan, and remember, Boris is a scientist. His prose is going to thud forward. It seems to go with the job.] When [proper name of young Francophone bewitcher] and I were together, I found myself talking to her a lot about you. This, as you probably can imagine, did not go over well. She was also annoyed by my domestic habits or lack of them. [Read: cigar butts piling up in ashtrays, recently read papers from Nature, Science, Brain, Genomics, and Genetics Weekly stacked in piles on every surface of apartment, clothes thrown on floor. Also read: Despite three postdocs, claims he is unable to master the technology of dishwasher, clothes washer, or dryer.] I came to see her as someone I had idealized from afar, and I suspect that she had done the same with me. [The unreal no longer occludes the real.] Working together and living together are different. [You bet they are, Bub.] I would like to see you, Mia, and talk to you. I have missed you. I am sharing a meal with Daisy tonight.

Boris

I concluded that reality had to coincide with either A or B or D. Both C and X appeared to have been eliminated.

* * *

If this little epistle strikes you as inadequately emotional in light of what had happened, I cannot disagree, but then you haven’t lived with the man for thirty years. Boris is scrupulously honest. I knew every word he had written was both considered and truthful, but I also knew that the man was prone to a wooden demeanor. In some people, this indicates a genuine lack of feeling underneath, but this is not true of Boris. The entire letter turns on three sentences: “It has been a black period for me.” “I even called Bob,” and “I have missed you.”

* * *

Boris, I replied. I have missed you, too. Your letter is oblique, however, as to who left whom? You can understand that from my point of view, this matters. If the Pause threw you onto the street, and this act caused a reconsideration of our marriage, it is very different from an alternative, which is that you decided to leave her, after reconsidering your relationship with her because of your former relationship with me. Those two are also distinct from a mutual decision to part ways. Mia

(If he wasn’t going to write “Love,” I sure as hell wasn’t going to stoop to that devilishly tricky noun.)

* * *

Excitement usually comes at a clip. Agitation in one corner is often mirrored by a similar hubbub in another. There tleo rhyme or reason to this. Correlation is not cause. It is just “the music of chance,” as one prominent American novelist has phrased it. Long, lazy, uneventful periods are followed by sudden bursts of action, and so it was that the very morning after Pete’s screeching exit from his wife and children, another equally dramatic departure was taking place over at Rolling Meadows, which I discovered when I paid my daily visit to my mother. Regina had gone to the beauty parlor to have her long hair “professionally put up,” packed two suitcases, called the three Swans to announce that she couldn’t bear her incarceration in the Home any longer, and then, after slamming the door to her apartment, had made a speedy march down the hall (or as speedily as was possible for Regina with her delicate leg). My mother and Peg (Abigail was indisposed) had followed the fugitive to the front door, where they cross-examined her about what in heaven’s name she was up to. Her three daughters had counseled her to stay. She had ended it with Nigel, hadn’t she, after the story about the gold watch and the buxom barmaid? Within seconds, they concluded that Regina had no idea where she was going. Her flight was pure flight, that is to say, flight without a destination. Moreover, she had rambled on about Dr. Westerberg, whom she claimed had threatened her, and said that if she didn’t “get away” she was convinced he would “put her away.” After a quarter of an hour, my mother and Peg had cajoled Regina back to her apartment. A tearful scene had followed, but in the end, she had seemed resigned to her fate and had promised her friends to stay put.

Chapter 2: Only a couple of hours before I arrived, my mother had knocked on Regina’s door to check on her state of mind. Regina had refused to let her in. Not only that, she had claimed she had pushed the furniture up against the door as a barricade against enemies, especially Westerberg. When my mother reported this, she shook her head sadly. I could only sympathize. When paranoia arrives, it does little good to tell the paranoiac that the fear is unfounded. I understood. My brain had cracked, too. And so, after trying to reason with her unreasonable friend, my mother had gone to the nurse to report on the developments in No. 2706, and the medical staff had been summoned, including the diabolical Westerberg, and the door had been unlocked, and the furniture had been removed from the doorway, and after that Regina herself had been removed to a hospital in Minneapolis for “testing.”

When she finished this story, my mother appeared to gaze straight through me. She looked sad. Sadness was chasing us all, it seemed. I was sitting beside her and took her hand but said nothing.

“I don’t think she will come back,” my mother said. “She won’t come back here, anyway.”

I squeezed my mother’s thin fingers and she squeezed mine in return. Through the window I saw a robin alight on the bench in the courtyard.

“She had spunk,” my mother said. I noted her use of the past tense.

Another robin. A pair.

My mother began to talk about Harry. All losses led back to Harry. She had often spoken of him, but this time she said, “I wonder what would have happened to me if Harry hadn’t died. I wonder how I would have been different.” She told me what I already knew, that after her brother’s death, she had decided to be perfect for her parents, never to give them any grief, ever again, that she had tried so hard, but it had not worked. And then she said what she had never said before, in a barely audible voice: “Sometimes I wondered if they wished it had been me.”

“Mama,” I said sharply.

She paid no attention and continued talking. She still dreamed of Harry, she said, and they weren’t always good dreams. She would find his body lying somewhere in the apartment behind a bookshelf or chair, and she couldn’t understand why he wasn’t in his grave in Boston. Once in a dream, her father had appeared and demanded to know what she had done with Harry. When Bea and I were children, she said, she had had periods of terror that something would take us from her, an illness or accident. “I wanted to protect you from every kind of hurt. I still do, but it doesn’t work, does it?”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

My mother’s melancholy didn’t last, however. I told her Boris had been in touch, which both cheered and worried her, and we weighed several possible outcomes and discussed what I wanted from my husband, and I discovered I didn’t exactly know, and we went over Daisy’s acting life and how precarious it all was, but how damned good the kid was, after all, and then Bea called while I was still there, and I listened to my mother laugh at some witticism of my sister’s, and over dinner she laughed again, hard, at one of my own. She embraced me tightly when we parted, and I sensed that her earlier gloom had been dispelled, not forever, of course, but for the evening. Twelve-year-old Harry would always be there, the ghost of Mama’s childhood, the empty figure of her parents’ hopes and of her guilt for having lived. I imagined my six-year-old mother as I had seen her in an old photograph. She has red hair. Although it is impossible to see the color in black and white, I add the redness in my mind. Little Laura stands beside Harry, a head shorter than he is. They are both wearing white sailor suits with navy trim. Neither child is smiling, but it is my mother’s face that interests me. By chance, she is the one looking ahead, into the future.

* * *

Below, without commentary, an epistolary dialogue made possible by racing twenty-first-century technology that took place the following day between B.I. and M.F. on the scenarios A, B, or D, and so on.

B.I.: Mia, does it really matter what happened? Isn’t it enough that it is over between us, and I want to see you?

M.F.: If the story were reversed, and I were you, and you I, wouldn’t it matter to you? It is a question of the state of your heart, old friend of mine. Heart dented by rejection à la française, unhappy and surprisingly helpless alone, Husband decides it may be better o begin reconciliation proceedings with Old Faithful; or, Seeing the error of his ways, Spouse penetrates his Folly (ha, ha, ha) and has revelation: Worn Old Wife looks better from Uptown.

B.I.: Can we dispense with the bitter irony?

M.F.: How on earth do you think I would have made it through this without it? I would have stayed mad.

B.I.: She broke it off. But the thing was already broken.

M.F.: I was broken, and you came to the hospital once.

B.I.: They wouldn’t let me come. I tried to come, but they refused me.

M.F.: What do you want from me now?

B.I.: Hope.

I couldn’t answer “hope” until the next day. The reversal I had dreamed of had come, and I felt as hard as a piece of flint. My answer to the big B. arrived in the morning: “Woo me.”

And he, in high Romantic style, wrote back, “Okay.”

* * *

Mr. Nobody had not written in some time, and I began to worry. We had been lobbing balls back and forth on the subject of play, that is, playing with play. He threw me a Derridian fastball first, the endless play of logos, round and round we go without end and without resolution, and it’s all in the text, the doing and the undoing, then I threw back Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” in which the esteemed doctor tells us that transference, the spooky place between analyst and patient, is like a spielplatz, a playground, a terrain somewhere between illness and real life, where one can become the other, and then he hurled back a beautiful quote from the great mountain himself: “If anyone tells me that it is degrading to the Muses to use them only as a plaything and a pastime, he does not know, as I do, the value of pleasure, play, and pastime. I would almost say that any other aim is ridiculous.” I fired back with Winnicott and Vygotsky, the latter dead since 1934 but a brand-new love of mine, and after that, my spouting phantom went silent.

I decided too much time had passed: “Everything okay? I’m thinking of you. Mia.”

* * *

The book club is big. It has been sprouting up like proverbial fungi all over the place, and it is a cultural fm dominated almost entirely by women. In fact, reading fiction is often regarded as a womanly pursuit these days. Lots of women read fiction. Most men don’t. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don’t. If a man opens a novel, he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it’s reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside. Moreover, men like to boast about their neglect of fiction: “I don’t read fiction, but my wife does.” The contemporary literary imagination, it seems, emanates a distinctly feminine perfume. Recall Sabbatini: we women have the gift of gab. But truth be told, we have been enthusiastic consumers of the novel since its birth in the late seventeenth century and, at that time, novel reading gave off an aroma of the clandestine. The delicate feminine mind, as you will remember from past rants inside this selfsame book, could be easily dented by exposure to literature, the novel especially, with its stories of passion and betrayal, with its mad monks and libertines, its heaving bosoms and Mr. B.’s, its ravagers and ravagees. As a pastime for young ladies, reading novels was flushed pink for the risqué. The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on her silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, was one-handed reading.

On Saturday at five in the afternoon, the Rolling Meadows Book Club met in the library over small sandwiches and even smaller glasses of wine to discuss the novelist Jane Austen, author of Persuasion, ironic observer, precise dissector of human feeling, stylist from heaven, and an author who did away with perverted monks but retained her own version of virtue rewarded. Both loved and detested, she has kept her critics hopping. “Any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen,” said America’s literary darling Mark Twain. “Even if it contains no other book.” Carlyle called her books “dismal trash.” But today, too, she is accused of “narrowness” and “claustrophobia” and dismissed as a writer for women. Life in the provinces, unworthy of remark? Women’s travails, of no import? It’s okay when it’s Flaubert, of course. Pity the idiots.

You may recall that I had been asked to introduce the proceedings. With some editing here and there and taming of my prose from the incendiary to the palatable, as well as additional rigmarole about the Great Jane teetering between two literary eras and inventing a new road for the novel, the above paragraph gives you an idea of what I said, so we won’t bother to rehearse it here.

* * *

The DISCUSSANTS: The three remaining Swans, my mother, armed with well-marked copy of book in question; Abigail, looking more doubled over than ever and exceedingly frail, dressed in elaborately embroidered blouse depicting dragons; and the mild, good-natured Peg, with her bright side showing, as well as three ladies new to me: Betty Petersen, with a sharp chin and sharper gaze, had made extra money for the family as the author of humorous texts for a greeting card company; Rosemary Snesrud, former — grade English teacher, and Dorothy Glad, widow of Pastor Glad, who had once presided at the small Moravian Church on Apple Street.

The SETTING: two sofas upholstered in an alarming green-and-violet print of aggressive foliage facing each other, two stuffed chairs, far less excited in appearance, also parked across from each other, all of which circled long oval coffee table with one unstable leg, which caused it to lurch every now and again when especially perturbed. Three windows on far wall with view of courtyard and gazebo. Bookshelves with volumes, most of which were lying wearily on their sides or leaning with a desultory air against a divider, but too few of these to qualify for the noun library. General hush in building interrupted only by squeaking walkers in nearby hallway and the occasional cough.

The CONTROVERSY: Should the young Anne Elliot have been persuaded by her vain, silly, profligate father, her vain and cold sister, Elizabeth, and her well-meaning, kind, but very possibly misguided older friend, Lady Russell, to break with Captain Wentworth, with whom she was madly in love because he had only prospects, no fortune? As you may have noticed, in general members of book clubs regard the characters inside books exactly the way they regard the characters outside books. The facts that the former are made of the alphabet and the latter of muscle, tissue, and bone are of little relevance. You may think I would disapprove of this, I, who had endured the ongoing trials of literary theory, who had taken the linguistic turn, witnessed the death of the author and somehow survived fin de l’homme, who had lived the life hermeneutical, peered into aporias, puzzled over différance, and worried about sein as opposed to Sein, not to speak of that convoluted Frenchman’s little a versus his big one, and a host of additional intellectual knots and wrinkles I have had to untie and smooth out in the course of my life, but you would be wrong. A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other. Back to the controversy at hand:

Peg looks on the bright side. Because Anne gets Wentworth in the end, all is well.

Abigail strongly disagrees: “Wasted years! Who has time to waste years?” Adamant statement followed by table limping to one side. Glass slides. Grabbed by Rosemary Snesrud. Does not fall.

Uncomfortable silence pertaining to waste, my own silence among the other silences, a wondering silence about wasted years, about the not done, the not written.

Dorothy Glad injects extraliterary not-at-all-glad possibility: “He might have drowned at sea! Then she would never have found love.”

I suggest sticking to the text itself, as it was written without that particular shipwreck.

My mother holds up imaginary scale and weighs familial duty against passion. Imagine the pain of alienating one’s family. That has to be considered, too. There was no easy solution for Anne. For the motherless Anne, breaking with Lady Russell was tantamount to breaking with her mother.

Rosemary S. defends my mother. According to the Snesrud philosophy, life’s decisions are “sticky.”

Betty Petersen brings in unsavory Elliot cousin destined to inherit family baronetcy: “She might have hitched herself to that snake in the grass, if her friend, what’s-her-name, hadn’t given her the dope on him. Lady Russell was completely snowed.”

Abigail, irritation mounting, insists that stepping on one’s desires is deforming. She makes strong pronouncement accompanied by feeble bang on the table’s surface: “It mutilates the soul!” Table nods in agreement, but Peg clicks her tongue. Talk of mutilation threatens brightness of all kinds.

My mother gazes soberly at her friend Abigail, understanding that it is not Anne’s soul that has been mutilated. The crooked Abigail is trembling. I notice how skeletal her arms are under her dragon blouse. I suffer irrational worry that the strength of her emotion will shake her fragile bones to the breaking point, and I deflect the conversation to men and women and the question of constancy, one close to my heart. What do the discussants think of Anne’s argument about women and men in her conversation with Captain Harville?

“Yes, we certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.”

With the exception of myself, there wasn’t a woman in the room under seventy-five. The two schoolteachers, three housewives, and part-time greeting card wit may all have been born in the Land of Opportunity, but that opportunity had been heavily dependent on the character of their private parts. I remembered my mother’s words: “I always thought I’d go on and get at least a master’s degree, but there was so little time and not enough money.” A sudden image of my mother at the kitchen table with her French grammar book came back to me, her lips moving as she silently repeated the verb conjugations to herself.

Harville brings out the BIG GUNS to refute Anne, albeit in a highly civil manner.

“… I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Song and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”

“Perhaps I shall. — Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”

Of course, the pen that inscribed those words was in Austen’s hand, and a neat hand it was, too. The woman’s handwriting had all the clarity and precision of her prose. And the pen, as it were, Dear Reader, is now in my hand, and I am claiming the advantage, taking it for myself, for you will notice that the written word hides the body of the one who writes. For all you know, I might be a MAN in disguise. Unlikely, you say, with all this feminist prattle flying out here and there and everywhere, but can you be sure? Daisy had a feminist professor at Sarah Lawrence, most decidedly a man, married, too, with children and a Yorkie, and on the rampage for women, a noble defender of the second sex. Mia might really be Morton for all you know. I, your own personal narrator, might be wearing a pseudonymous mask.

But back to our story: Not surprisingly, the women of Rolling Meadows are in Anne’s corner. Even our Peg of Permanent Sunshine allows that there were times at home with her five “wonderful children” when she longed for some diversion, when her feelings preyed upon her, and then, in a moment of startling revelation, the resident optimist confesses that there had been days when she had been “pretty darned tired and blue,” and that in her experience far more men have the gift for forgetting women than women have for forgetting men. Weren’t they the ones who turned around and got married just months after their wives “passed away”? (I suppressed comment that Boris hadn’t even waited for me to die.)

Betty offers humorous quote: “I am woman. I am invincible. I am pooped!”

Laughter.

Rosemary notes the exception to the rule of women waiting, pining, hoping: Regina.

Titters.

My mother rises to fellow Swan’s defense: “She had fun, though!”

Abigail nods, regards my mother lovingly, and says in a loud, if hoarse voice, “Who’s to say we shouldn’t all have had more fun!”

Who is to say? Not I surely. Not my mother, not Dorothy, not Betty, not Rosemary, not even Peg, although the latter proffers the buoyant comment that they are having fun, well, aren’t they, right now, at this “very minute”? And the carpe diem sentiment does, in fact, brighten the entire room, if not literally, then figuratively.

After that, there was some pleased nodding, some silent sipping, and some tangents onto the movie being shown in the screening room at seven, It Happened One Night, followed by some mooning over Clark Gable and chatter about how films used to be so much better and, good grief, what had happened? I volunteered that Hollywood films were now made exclusively for fourteen-year-old boys, an audience of limited sophistication, which had drained the movies of even the hope of sprightly dialogue. Farts, vomit, and semen had taken its place.

I seated myself beside Abigail then and held her hand for a little while. She asked me to come see her. The request was not casual. She had some urgent business to discuss, and it had to happen in the next couple of days. I promised, and Abigail began the protracted rigors of pulling her walker toward her, getting herself into a standing position, and then moving, one small, careful step after another, toward her apartment.

Within minutes, the book club was over. And it had ended before I could say that there is no human subject outside the purview of literature. No immersion in the history of philosophy is needed for me to insist that there are NO RULES in art, and there is no ground under the feet of the Nitwits and Buffoons who think that there are rules and laws and forbidden territories, and no reason for a hierarchy that declares “broad” superior to “narrow” or “masculine” more desirable than “feminine.” Except by prejudice there is no sentiment in the arts banned from expression and no story that cannot be told. The enchantment is in the feeling and in the telling, and that is all.

* * *

Daisy sent this:

Hi, Mom. Dinner with Dad was okay. He seems a little better. He was shaved at least. I think he’s really, really embarrassed. He said he hoped that you would be able to see his “interlude” for what it was. He also mentioned “temporary insanity.” I said that’s what you had, and he said, maybe he had it, too. Mom, I think he’s sincere. It’s been awful for me to have you two against each other, you know. Love and kisses, Daisy

And yet, I could not leap at Daisy’s father. As I meditated on our story, I understood that there were multiple perspectives from which it could be viewed. Adultery is both ordinary and forgivable, as is the rage of the betrayed spouse. We are not unworldly, are we? I had endured my own French farce, starring my fickle, inconstant husband. Was it not time “to forgive and forget,” to use that inveterate cliche?” Forgiveness is one thing, forgetfulness another. I could not induce amnesia. What would it mean to live with Boris and the memory of the Pause or Interlude? Would it now be different between us? Would anything change? Can people change? Did I want it to be the same as it had been? Could it be the same? I would never forget the hospital. BRAIN SHARDS. For better or for worse, I had become so entwined with Boris that his departure had ruptured me, sent me screaming into the asylum. And wasn’t the fear I had felt old, the fear of rejection, of disapproval, of being unlovable, a fear that may be older even than my explicit memory? For months, I had drowned in anger and grief, but over the summer my mind had unconsciously, incrementally begun to change. Dr. S. had seen it. (How I missed her, by the way.) Reading Daisy’s letter, I felt those subliminal, not yet articulated thoughts rise upward, form sentences, and lodge themselves securely somewhere between my temples: Some part of me had been getting used to the idea that Boris was gone forever. No one could have been more shocked than I by this revelation.

* * *

And now the curtain must rise on the following Monday, when seven uncomfortable girls and a poet, laboring to hide her own anxiety, sat around a table at the Arts Guild. A torpor seemed to have taken hold of all seven young bodies, as if an invisible but potent gas had been unleashed in the room and was swiftly putting them all to sleep. Peyton had folded her arms on the table and laid her head down. Joan and Nikki, seated side by side as always, sat in heavy silence, eye-lined lids cast downward. Jessie, elbows propped on the table surface, rested her chin in her hands, a vacuous expression on her face. Emma, Ashley, and Alice all appeared limp with exhaustion.

I looked at each of them for a moment and, on a sudden impulse, burst out singing. I sang them Brahms’s lullaby in German: “Guten Abend, gute Nacht, mit Rosen bedacht…” I don’t have a sweet voice but my ear is good, and I let the vibrato go so it sounded suitably absurd. The look of surprise and confusion on their faces made me laugh. They did not laugh with me, but at least they had been rattled out of their fatigue. It was time for my speech, and I made it. The gist of it was that a single story with seven characters can also be seven stories, depending on the identity of the narrator. Every character will regard the same events in her own way and will have somewhat different motives for her actions. Our task was to make sense of a true story. I had given it a title: “The Coven.” This was met with a round of wordless murmurs. We would meet every day this week to make up for the lost classes. Today each girl would read her text and we would talk about it, but in the following four days, we would trade places and write the story from the point of view of someone else. Jessie would become Emma, for example, and Joan, Alice, and Jessie, Ashley, and I, Nikki, and so on. Eyes widened, worried looks exchanged across the table. By the end of the week, we would have a story authored by the entire class. The trick was, we would have to agree, more or less, on the content.

To be honest, I had no idea whether this would work. It was not without its risks. Note: The now famous psychology experiment at Stanford in 1971. A group of young men, all college students, took on the roles of either prisoners or guards. Within hours the guards began tormenting their prisoners and the experiment was stopped. The theater of cruelty made real? Performance becomes the person? How malleable were the seven?

I began with a short summary of my experience: my suspicions during class, my bafflement about the Kleenex, and my dim awareness that some plot was cooking. I also mentioned my involvement in a similar story as a girl. I did not say which role I had played. You, friend out there, will mostly be spared the tedium of early adolescent prose; it is worse than the poetry. (Not one child chose to describe the hex scandal in verse.) Suffice it to say that the clumsy and often ungrammatical narrations were not harmonious. After every reading, the refrains “I never said that!” “It was your idea, not mine!” “That’s not how it was at all!” rang out loudly. Some of the tiffs were of no importance, when and where and who. “You put the dead cricket in the formula, not me!” “Ask my mom. She saw you coming out of the bathroom with blood running down your arm, remember?” Nevertheless, there were recurring justifications for the plot: They had all liked Alice at first, but then, as time went on, she had distinguished herself in ways they didn’t like. She had been Mr. Abbot’s “pet” in history class and was always raising her hand with the answer. She bought her clothes in Minneapolis in a department store, not at the Bonden mall. She read all the time, which was “boring.” Ashley’s synopsis included the fact that Alice had been given a starring role in the school play, and after this “lucky break,” she had metamorphosed into “a big snob.” What had begun as a “little fun” among the conspiratorial witches to “get back at Alice” had somehow, mysteriously, run wild, of its own accord. There were no agents in this version of the story, just currents of feeling, very much like spells, that had pulled the girls hither and yon. Bea and I used to have a phrase when we were growing up that described such actions well: “accidentally on purpose.” When I mentioned this, there were sheepish smiles all around, except of course from Alice, who was hard at work scrutinizing the table’s surface.

She read last. Despite the ugliness of the tale she had to tell, the girl had cast herself as its heroine in the mode of Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, those wronged orphans I had loved so much when I was her age, and she had worked hard on the story. Heavily adjectival and hyperbolic though it was, and not free of diction errors (“torturous” for “tortured”), it articulated both her intense need to be inside the group and the agony of being an outcast. Listening to her, I guessed that although her dramatis persona would not endear her to all the members of the Coven, finding it had been a boon for her. The victim came out well in her version of events, if only because Alice had dressed up her alter ego in gothic conventions that had been conveniently aided by the memorable storm that had cracked the heavens as I lay in bed that night in June. Apparently, while “hanging out” at Jessie’s house, the girls had jointly decided not to look at or answer Alice when she spoke, to behave as if she were both invisible and inaudible. After half an hour of this treatment, our heroine had escaped into the “pelting rain, weeping violently, her hair whipping in the wind” while “lightning flashed crooked in the sky.” When she arrived home, this tragic creature was “soaked to the skin and frozen to her bones with crazily chattering teeth.” Although Alice may not have enjoyed the Coven’s version of Meidung, she had certainly taken pleasure in writing about it. Alice the literary character served a redemptive function for just plain Alice, who was going into the seventh grade. Her narrative ended with the words “Never before have I felt such deep, unbearable despair.”

I did not smile. I remembered.

Poor Peyton, whose remorse was already in full bloom, cried and blew her nose.

Jessie did not look at Alice, but she apologized in a mortified whisper.

Nikki and Joan wriggled with unease.

Ashley and Emma remained implacable.

I sent them off with their assignments. I gave Ashley and Alice to each other, paired Peyton and Joan, Nikki and Emma, and because seven is uneven, I took Jessie for myself, and she was given the task of writing as the mostly ignorant poetry teacher.

* * *

Boris wooed.

Mia,

I was just a fat-headed guy full of pain.

Boris

(Reference: T. R. Devlin, played by Cary Grant, to Alicia Huberman, played by Ingrid Bergman, near the end of Notorious. The hero is, if I remember correctly, carrying his drugged-by-poison beloved down the stairs when he makes this remark. Boris and I had seen the film at least seven times together, and every time B.I. had become tearful over this succinct explanation for Mr. Devlin’s genuinely wretched treatment of the divine Miss Huberman. I was not unmoved by this bit of wooing. No, I won’t hedge: I was moved. It would never do to replace Cary with Boris or me with Ingrid. When I imagine my slightly rotund in the middle, bespectacled neuroscientist puffing and groaning as he bears frizzy-headed fifty-five-year-old versifier down enormous Hollywood staircase, the illusion is lost. But that is not the point. We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.)

* * *

From Bea, after having been informed of the Boris/Mia developments:

Just remember, Baby Huey, we all screw up. Love, B.

* * *

From Nobody, finally:

Kidney stones.

Poor Mr. Nobody, my high-flying partner in dialogue, had been brought down by those excruciating pebbles. I wished him a swift recovery.

* * *

I had learned to wait for some time after knocking for Abigail to appear at the door. My visits had been fairly regular. I had gone either alone or with my mother, and we had both worried about our mutual friend since her fall. She seemed to dwindle daily, and yet, the force of her personality remained strong. In fact, what attracted me to Abigail was her rigidity. This is not usually regarded as a desirable feature in human beings, but in her it seemed to have developed as resistance to a particular midwestern ethos of frightened conformity. Abigail had sewn and embroidered and appliquéd in quiet but adamant insurrection. I now knew the story of Private Gardener. She had married him on an impulse just before he headed off for the Pacific, but when he returned after the war, he brought the war back with him. Plagued by nightmares, fits of rage, and bouts of ferocious drinking to the point of unconsciousness, the man who had come home bore little resemblance to the boy she had vowed to “love, honor, and obey,” but then, as she put it, “I didn’t really know him from a hole in the wall to begin with.” One day, to her immense relief, her spouse went AWOL. A year later, she received a letter of contrition from the ex-soldier asking her to join him in Milwaukee. Because the very thought of it turned her “cold as an ice cube,” Abigail refused, asked for a divorce, and the grade school art teacher was born.

Her mother had taught her to embroider, but it wasn’t until after her marital debacle that she had joined the sewing group, understood that “she needed to do it,” and her double life began. Over the years she had created many works, both conventional and subversive or, as she put it, “the real ones” and the “fakes.” She sold the fakes. One by one, she had been showing me the real ones, and the strangeness of Abigail’s project had become more and more apparent. Not all of them were spiteful or sexual in nature. There was an embroidery of delicate mosquitoes in various sizes, replete with traces of blood; a joyous image of a figure straight out of Gray’s Anatomy, organs exposed but dancing; another of a gargantuan woman taking a bite out of the moon; a large and oddly poignant tablecloth that featured women’s underclothing: a corset, bloomers, a chemise, stockings, panty hose, a thick brassiere of the old style, a girdle with garter belt, and a baby doll nightgown; and there was a remarkable portrait sewn into a pillow in tiny crosshatch stitches she had done years before of herself in a chair weeping. The tears were sequins.

When she opened the door, my friend looked tiny. The tremor had gone to her head, and her chin wobbled as she stood in front of me. She was beautifully attired in narrow black pants and a black blouse covered with red roses. Her short sparse hair was combed behind her ears, and through the lenses of her narrow glasses her eyes were as intensely focused as I had ever seen them.

That afternoon, Abigail and I made arrangements. She reclined on her sofa and spoke to me about her death. She had no one but a niece, a dear woman, but she would never understand the amusements. “She’ll get my money, what there is of it.” She then quoted a line from my first book of poems: We were mad for miracles and ships with lace. “That’s us, Mia,” she said. “We’re two peas in a pod.” I was flattered even though I was forced to see us round and green in the pod on a kitchen counter. Then she abruptly shifted metaphors, from the organic to the mechanical: “I’m an alarm clock, Mia, ready to go off, and when I do, there’ll be no going back. I hear myself ticking.” She had made it all legal in her will, she said. I was to have the secret amusements and do with them whatever I wanted. The papers were in the top drawer of her small desk. I should know. The key could be found in the little Limoges egg box, and I was to take it out now and open her drawer; there wasething she had to show me, a photograph slipped inside a manila envelope right on the top.

Two young women wearing tuxedos are standing with their arms over each other’s shoulders, grinning, one dark, whom I guessed had to be Abigail, and one blond. The blonde has a cigarette in her right hand. They look giddy and jaunty and careless and enviable.

Abigail lifted her head. Then she nodded. She nodded for several seconds before she spoke. “She had the same name as your mother. Her name was Laura. I loved her. We were in New York. It was nineteen thirty-eight.”

Abigail smiled. “Hard to believe that whippersnapper is me, huh?”

“No,” I said, “it’s not hard at all.”

When I embraced her before I left, I felt her bones under the rose-covered shirt, and they felt no larger than chicken bones, my Abigail, who couldn’t sit up straight anymore, who had the shakes and had once loved a girl named Laura in New York City in 1938, a remarkable woman, an art teacher for children and an artist, an artist who knew her Bible. The last thing she said to me was: “He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth.” Psalm 72:6.

* * *

Being the other is the dance of the imagination. We are nothing without it. Shout it! Shimmy, kick your heels, and leap. That was my pedagogy, my philosophy, my credo, my slogan, and the girls were trying. I can say that for them. Their “I”s had been scrambled, and they worked to find the meaning that comes with another role, another body, another family, another place. Their success varied, but that was to be expected.

Jessie as Mia wrote, “I had some kind of feeling about the girls’ problems, but they didn’t tell me. I remembered going into seventh grade and the messy stuff that happened to me, but it was a long, long, long time ago…” (Fair enough.)

Peyton as Joan wrote, “I’ve been Nikki’s best friend since first grade and I basically do what she does. When I saw she wasn’t afraid to cut herself, I decided to do it, too, even though I felt pretty yucky about it.”

Joan as Peyton: “I want to be a cool girl, but I’m immature. I like sports better, and I went along with doing bad things to Alice on account of I wanted to be cool.”

Nikki as Emma: “I suck up to Ashley because I think she can make me feel better about myself and it’s fun to be around her because she doesn’t really care about getting into trouble. When she decided to make me swallow that part of the dead mouse’s tail, I did it, even though it was disgusting. I’m like her slave. She dares people and I like falling for the dares. My little sister has muscular dystrophy and it worries me a lot so being with my friends and doing stupi things helps me not think about it.”

Emma as Nikki wrote, “I like showing off and acting wild, dressing up in black clothes, putting on crazy makeup that makes my mom upset. Being mean to Alice was a way to show off.”

Ashley wrote, “I’m Alice, Miss Perfect. I like Chicago because it’s a big city with lots of stores and museums and my mom escorted me to those artsy, fartsy places and now we can’t go anymore. I used to be Ashley’s friend, but I think I’m too sophisticated for her. I’m an only child and my parents spoil me, buying me expensive clothes and sending me to ballet in St. Paul. I use words the other kids don’t know just to make them feel stupid. I’m so moral I don’t know how to have any fun, and I look all hurt and weepy whenever somebody says the tiniest little thing. If I hadn’t been such a wimp, the girls wouldn’t have been able to do anything to me.”

Alice wrote: “I hate Alice because she was Charlene in the play. It made me putrid with jealousy. She didn’t comprehend my deceit, and that made it smooth for me, as smooth as jelly from the jar. I could feign to like her, but injure her violently behind her back. My brothers and sisters are always kicking and hitting each other, slamming doors, and my house is a huge mess, and I have to take meds for a mood disorder, and my mom is always yelling at me for not taking them…”

Recriminations, disavowals, and gasps punctuated the entire hour, but the fact that Ashley had assigned her own disorder, whatever it was, to Alice was by far the most disquieting revelation. Neither Alice nor Ashley had been able to penetrate each other’s psyches or find any mutual sympathy, but when Alice, unknowingly or knowingly, let go of Ashley’s secret, all the girls were quiet until Peyton yelled, “But Ashley, you said Alice had a mood disorder, not you.” The trick of trading first-person subjects had doubled back on itself. Ashley, it seemed, had already been playing the game.

* * *

1. I will check the refrigerator for juice and milk and remember to buy them if we are low.

2. I will promise to read Middlemarch all the way through. (That goes for The Golden Bowl, too.)

3. I will not interrupt you when you are writing.

4. I will talk to you more.

5. I will learn to cook something besides eggs.

6. I will love you.

Boris <

I read the list several times. To be frank, I did not believe the first five. That would require a revolution of the sort I had ceased to believe in. My world turned on number six, because, you see, Boris had loved me. He had loved me for a long time and the question was not so much whether he meant it — I believed he meant it — but whether there was self-delusion at work. Could he really leave his explosive Interlude behind him or would her phantom be in residence with us for the rest of our days? But worse, if Boris had lurched out the door once, what would prevent him from doing it again? When I replied, that was exactly what I asked him.

* * *

Regina returned to Rolling Meadows, but not to the independent-living quarters. She was placed in a special unit on the other side of the grounds for Alzheimer’s patients, even though she hadn’t been diagnosed with the disease. After “the incident,” the powers that be (mostly benevolent, but by no means infinitely tolerant) had made the decision that she could not be trusted. She had to be watched. My mother and I found her sitting in a small bare room — nearly identical to my own hospital room at Payne Whitney but with no view of the East River — on a grim cot with a blue cover, her beautiful long white hair disheveled and hanging around her face. When my mother walked through the door, Regina cried out, “Laura!” and stretched her arms out for her friend. The two hugged each other and then, still in the embrace, rocked back and forth for a minute or so. When they separated, Regina looked at me as if she were searching, and I realized that the fallen Swan had forgotten my name, possibly my entire being, but my mother rescued her comrade by identifying me as soon as she understood that I was missing from Regina’s mental storehouse.

The two women talked, but Regina talked more. She chattered about her ordeal — the tests, the kind doctor and the nasty one, the endless questions about presidents and the time of year and could she feel this pinprick and on and on. She broke down and blubbered but recovered quickly and within seconds began to wax nostalgic. Hadn’t it been wonderful on the other side, in Independent? She had her apartment there with all her “lovely things,” and they had been only a short walk away from each other, and oh my dear, the spider plant, had anyone watered it? And now look at her, in exile with “the crazies” and the people who “drooled and peed and dirtied their pants.” If only she could get back to the other side. I saw my mother open her mouth and then close it. If Regina wanted to remember the “home” she had detested as a paradise, who was she to destroy the illusion? As we were leaving, the old woman lifted her head, tossed back her messy locks, and beamed. She blew kisses to us and sang out in a high brittle voice, “Come back, Laura. Won’t you? I’ve missed you terribly. You will remember to come back.”

Just before I closed the door, I took a last glance at Regina. She looked deflated, as if the theatrical good-bye had taken all the air out of her.

Outside in the hallway, my mother stopped. She pressed both hands to her chest, closed her eyes, and said under her breath, “It’s so bitter.”

“What, Mama?”

“Old age.”

* * *

The Lola, Pete, Flora, and Simon soap opera had been one of repetition without much difference, as Lola herself had acknowledged, but now circumstances conspired to make some difference, and the difference was money. As much as I liked my Chrysler Buildings and had indulged Lola by listening to her business plans, I hadn’t been optimistic. The poor young woman had had little time to devote to her jewelry and, all in all, the prospects for success had seemed poor. And then, out of the blue, just as it happens in novels, especially eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, Lola’s godmother, a single, frugal lady who had worked as a bursar at St. Joseph’s College for fifty years, died, and this elderly deus ex machina left her goddaughter a complete set of Wedgwood china and a hundred thousand dollars. (Let us be fair: This happens all the time in twentieth- and twenty-first-century LIFE; it just happens less often in twentieth- and twenty-first-century NOVELS.)

And so, at least for a while, Lola was flush, and more important, the money was hers, not Pete’s. In the same week, a small store in Minneapolis agreed to sell Lola’s creations. They were partial to the architectural earrings, especially the Leaning Towers of Pisa. Joy was abroad at the neighbors’. We celebrated Friday night after a hard week with the witches. (I will report on that later. Chronology is sometimes overrated as a narrative device.) My mother, Peg, Lola, and the two poppets were in attendance. I invited Abigail, but she was too weak, she said, to make the journey, even though we offered to drive her the few yards to the Burdas’.

Lola wore pink. My mother wore Simon most of the evening, and the two had a high time. The little man was singing. When my mother sang to him, he sang back, admittedly in tones that were unconventional, possibly even bizarre, but he sang nevertheless, and his flutelike emissions were the source of much hilarity. Flora ran wild and wigless and whispered to Moki and stuffed cake into her mouth. I was careful to fawn and crow over her so she would not feel that her infant brother won every cuteness battle. Peg shone brightly. At a family gathering, she was in her element, and her presence added sugar to what was already a sweet occasion.

I asked Lola if Pete was traveling, but no, her husband had stayed home. He had felt uncomfortable, she said, as the only man, and he had urged her to go alone and have fun. While Peg and my mother occupied her children, Lola and I stepped into the bedroom where we had all spent the night in the king, and she told me that having the money made her feel different. “I didn’t do anything to earn it,” she said, “but now that it’s mine, I feel more important, somehow, freer, and Pete’s happier. It’s like he can breathe a little and not worry so much. And then there’s the Artisans’ Barn, and suddenly they like my stuff, so he doesn’t think my jewelry is just useless tinkering.”

We stood together and looked out the window. I had become attached to the view and to the summer sky, especially when the sun fell and colored it in blues ttle. Peg avenders and pinks, and I could watch the cloud formations above the field and the copse of trees and barn and silo that grew black and flat as the evening progressed. A study in repetition. A study in mutability. And Lola said she would miss me when I went home, and I said I would miss her. She wondered what I was going to do about Boris, and I told her about the wooing, and she smiled. From the other room, I heard the women laugh and Flora squeal and, after a few seconds, the noise of Simon crying.

Lola and I stayed put, however, for another few seconds, just looking out the window in silence before she made her way back to the party to comfort her baby boy.

* * *

Homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man. I found the sentence in a work by that grand old pessimist Sigmund Freud, but it apparently comes from Plautus. Sad but true. Look around you. Look even at the little girls, at their grasping for status and admiration, at their ruthless tactics, at their aggressive joys. As their “I”s continued to revolve from one child to the other during the week, I sometimes lost track of which person was playing whom, but they had no such problems with identification. Although there were few further revelations, the story I had entitled “The Coven” began to take shape. Ashley had been toppled. She fell with her lie. I doubt whether she would have felt any genuine remorse had she not been caught, but she suffered her loss of power keenly. She was a survivor, however, and began to adjust to her new role in the group: On Wednesday she made a formal apology to her victim, and this, whether sincere or not, helped lift her reputation among the others. Emma had been jogged hard by the mention of her ill sister, but the sympathy the girls felt for her lot as the healthy but ignored sibling softened her considerably, and she volunteered amendments to the story and her role in it that I thought were brave: “It made me happy when Alice cried.” Jessie’s narcissistic platitudes had taken a beating. She understood that she had believed in herself too much. She’d fallen for the wicked plot with hardly a thought. As the week went on, Peyton cried less and less and relished her roles as the other girls more and more. The catharsis of theater. In fact, by Thursday it was obvious that a tacit script had already been written, and the children had thrown themselves into their own melodrama with gusto. Alice lost something of her stature as romantic heroine, but her suffering was acknowledged by all, and she entered the lives of her tormentors with such zeal that by Friday, Nikki cried out, “Oh my God, Alice, you like being the mean one!” Joan, of course, agreed.

The story they all took home on Friday was not true; it was a version they could all live with, very much like national histories that blur and hide and distort the movements of people and events in order to preserve an idea. The girls did not want to hate themselves and, although self-hatred is not at all uncommon, the consensus they reached about what had happened among them was considerably softer than the one advanced by the Viennese doctor I quoted earlier. As for me, by the end, I felt my encounter with the Coven had done me good. I was hugged by all seven, my praises were sung, and I was presented with a gift: a violet box filled with an odiferous soap, hand lotion in a bottle of an undulating shape, and a container of large crystals for the bath tied up in a lilac bow. What more could anyone ask for?

* * *

And then my Daisy blew into town. This tired expression, with its Wild West connotations, nevertheless suits the beloved offspring. The girl has a windy quality, an ability to stir things up without really doing much. When she jumped out of the cab, large leather bag over her shoulder, its zipper gaping open to reveal messy contents, attired in tiny T-shirt, man’s vest, cut-off jeans, boots, a straw fedora, and enormous sunglasses, she seemed to embody agitation, excitement — in short: a small tornado. She’s a beauty, too. How Boris and I produced her is a puzzle, but the genetic dice fall every which way. Neither of us is homely, and my mother, as you know, believes me still to be beautiful, but Daisy is the real thing, and it’s hard not to look at the child when she’s around.

She’s an affectionate little devil, too, always has been, a hugger and a kisser and a nose rubber and a stroker, and when we got our arms around each other on the doorstep, we hugged, kissed, nose-rubbed, and stroked for a couple of minutes before we let go. And, as it sometimes happens, it wasn’t until that moment that I understood how much I had missed her, how I had pined for my daughter, but I did not, you will be happy to know, burst into tears. There may have been a touch of wetness in the vicinity of my ducts, but nothing more.

We spent the evening at my mother’s and, although I remember only bits of what we said, I do remember the animation in my mother’s face as she listened to Daisy tell us stories about the theater and Muriel and her nights trailing her father and how he hadn’t discovered his “tail” until she confronted him outside the Roosevelt with the words “What the hell is going on, Dad?” And I recall that my mother had more news of Regina. She had been rescued by one of her daughters. Letty had arrived and was making arrangements to move her mother to Cincinnati, where there was a “home” very close to Letty and her family. My mother confessed to not knowing how that would all go, but it was certainly preferable to the “horrible jail cell” in the Alzheimer’s unit.

* * *

The very next day, we were told that Abigail had had a massive stroke. She was alive, but the woman we had known had vanished. She did not know where she was or who she was. The alarm clock had gone off. The very old languish and die. We know that, but the very old know it far better than the rest of us. They live in a world of continual loss and this, as my mother had said, is bitter.

* * *

I saw her for a few minutes over in Care two days later. My mother did not want to come. I understood why; the specter of losing every faculty that made life life was too close to her. Abigail was lying on her side; her curved spine meant that her head was near her knees, so she occupied only a small part of the bed. Her eyes flickered open every now and again, but their irises and pupils were empty of all thoughts, and when she breathed she rasped loudly. My friend’s thin gray hair looked a little greasy and uncombed, and she was wearing a flowered hospital gown she would have detested. I smoothed her hair back. I talked to her, told her I remembered everything, would get the will from the drawer when it was time and would do everything in the world to get the secret amusements into a gallery somewhere. And before I left, I leaned over and sang into her ear very softly, the way I used to sing to Daisy, a lullaby, not Brahms, another one. A nurse startled me when she came through the door behind me, and I lurched back, embarrassed, but she was cheerful, matter-of-fact, and said it would be fine to stay, though somehow then I couldn’t. Two days later, Abigail was dead and I was glad.

* * *

I wrote to Nobody about her, about her works and the long-ago love affair. I don’t know why I told him. Maybe I wanted an answer of some grandeur. I got it.

Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void. Who would deny us the mere pantomime of frenzy? We, the actors who pace back and forth on a stage no one watches, our guts heaving and our fists flying? Your friend was one of us, the never anointed, the unchosen, misshapen by life, by sex, cursed by fate but still industrious under the covers where only the happy few venture, sewing apace for years, sewing her heartbreak and her spite and spleen and why not? Why? Why not? Why? Why not?

In all his bleakness, he made me feel better, strangely better. Why? Although for the first time I wondered if Mr. Nobody couldn’t just as well be Mrs. Nobody. Who knew? I wasn’t so sure he was Leonard anymore. But I realized I didn’t care. He or she was my voice from Neverland, from neverness, from Why, not Where, and I liked it that way.

If I ever do anything really stupid again, nail me to the wall.

Your Boris

* * *

Daisy was standing behind me when I read this message on the screen, and I felt her hands on my shoulders. “What’re you going to say, Mom? Tell me, Mom.”

“I’ll have my staple gun ready.”

“Oh, Mom,” she groaned. “He’s trying, caand you see? He feels bad.”

My daughter rolled back the desk chair I was sitting in, jumped into my lap, and began cajoling and wheedling me to say something encouraging back to dear old Pa. She pulled at my earlobes and pinched my nose and used various accents — Korean, Irish, Russian, and French — to plead with me. She leapt off my lap and soft-shoed and shuffle-ball-changed and waved her arms and wished loudly for the reunion of the aging couple, one Mommy and one Daddy, Sun and Moon or Moon and Sun, the double orbs in her childhood sky.

* * *

On the day of Abigail’s funeral, it rained, and I thought it was right that it should rain. The rain came down on the mown grass, and I remembered the words she had stitched in needlepoint: O remember that my life is wind. Rolling Meadows was heavily represented in the pews that afternoon, which meant there were a lot of women, since women were the ones who lived there, mostly, anyway, although the lecherous Busley showed up on his Mobility Scooter, which he parked in the aisle, toward the back. I saw the niece, who looked old, but then she was probably in her seventies. My mother had been asked to speak. She clasped her speech tightly in her lap, and I sensed she was nervous. She had tried on several black outfits before we left, worrying about collars and pressing and what may or may not have been a spot on a skirt, and she finally decided on a tailored cotton jacket and pants with a blue blouse that Abigail had always admired. The minister, a man with little hair and a suitably grave demeanor, could not have known our mutual friend very well because he uttered falsehoods that made my mother stiffen beside me: “A loyal member of our congregation with a generous and gentle spirit.”

My small, elegant mother took the steps to the pulpit carefully but without difficulty, and once she had adjusted her feet and reading glasses, she leaned toward her listeners. “Abigail was many things,” she said, her voice quavering, hoarse, emphatic. “But she was not a generous and gentle spirit. She was funny, outspoken, smart, and if the truth be told, angry and irritable a lot of the time.” I heard a couple of women laugh behind me. My mother went on and with each sentence I could feel her warming to her subject. They had met in the book club the day Abigail shocked her fellow members by denouncing a novel they were reading that had won the PULITZER Prize as “a complete load of stinking crap,” a verdict my mother had not opposed but would have worded differently, and she went on to praise Abigail’s creative ability and the many works of art she had produced over the years. She called what Abigail had made art, and she called Abigail an artist, and Daisy and I were proud to have such a grandmother and such a mother. I knew Mama wouldn’t weep for Abigail. I don’t think she wept for Father. She was a true stoic; if there’s nothing to be done about it, away with it. The Swans were dying, one by one. We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can’t wash it off. There is nothing we can do about it except perhaps burst into song.

We must leave us for a while, leave me and Daisy and the brght Peg, too, sitting beside Daisy, leave my mother as she stands there giving testimony to her friend. We are going to leave her even though she shone that day and later she was congratulated heartily by many for telling what was generally agreed to be something true because it is well known that the dead often go to their graves wrapped up in lies. But we are going to leave us there at a funeral as it rains hard beyond the stained glass windows, and we’ll let it unfold just as it did then, but without mention.

Time confounds us, doesn’t it? The physicists know how to play with it, but the rest of us must make due with a speeding present that becomes an uncertain past and, however jumbled that past may be in our heads, we are always moving inexorably toward an end. In our minds, however, while we are still alive and our brains can still make connections, we may leap from childhood to middle age and back again and loot from any time we choose, a savory tidbit here and a sour one there. It can never return as it was, only as a later incarnation. What once was the future is now the past, but the past comes back as a present memory, is here and now in the time of writing. Again, I am writing myself elsewhere. Nothing prevents that from happening, does it?

Bea and I have been skating on the rink over by Lincoln school, and we are waiting for our father to pick us up, and we see him coming in the green station wagon. On the way home, he whistles “The Erie Canal,” and Bea and I smile at each other in the back seat. At home, Mama is lying on the bed reading a book in French. We jump on the bed, and she feels our feet. They are so cold. Ice, she says the word ice. Then she strips off our four socks and takes our naked skating feet and puts them under her sweater on the warm skin of her stomach. Paradise Found.

Stefan is sitting on the sofa, gesticulating as he makes his points. As I look at him, I worry. He is too alive. His thoughts are pressing ahead too quickly, and yet I am ignorant then of what will happen. I am innocent of the future, and that state, that cloud of unknowing, is impossible for me to retrieve.

Dr. F. tells me to push. Push now! And I push with all my might and later I discover I have broken blood vessels all over my face, but what do I know about it then, nothing, and I push, and I feel her head, and then voices cry out that her head is coming out of me, and it does, and there is the sudden slide of her body from mine, me/she, two in one, and between my open legs I see a red, slimy foreigner, with a little bit of black hair, my daughter. I remember nothing of the umbilical cord, do I? Nothing of the cutting. Boris is there, and he is weeping. I don’t shed a tear. He does. Now I remember! I said that he had never bawled in real life, but that’s wrong. I had forgotten! He is standing there right now in my mind crying after his daughter is born.

I am walking into the AIM gallery, a women’s cooperative in Brooklyn, to attend the opening of a show called The Secret Amusements.

I am standing beside Boris in our apartment on Tompkins Place. Do you promise to love him, comfort him, honor and keep him in sickness and in health; and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, as long as ye both shall live?

Well, do you? Speak up, you redheaded numbskull. That was then. I said yes. I said, I do. I said something in the affirmative.

My mother has turned ninety, and we are celebrating in Bonden. Her knees are giving her problems, but she is lucid and doesn’t use a walker. Peg is there, and my mother introduces me to Irene. I have heard a lot about Irene on the telephone lately, and I pump her hand to show my enthusiasm. She is ninety-five. “Your mother and I,” she tells me, “have had some really fun times together.”

Mama Mia is writing poems at the kitchen table. The little Daisy girl is stirring in her crib.

Mia is in the hospital now, diagnosed with a brief psychosis, a transitory alienation of her reason, a brain glitch. She is officially une folle. She is writing in the notebook BRAIN SHARDS.

7.

An insistent thing—

but speechless,

not identity,

a waking dream that leaves no image,

only agonies. I need a name.

I need a word in this white world.

I need to call it something, not nothing.

Choose a picture from nowhere,

from a hole in a mind

and look, there on the ledge:

A flowering bone.

11.

I blibe and bleeb on rovsty hobe

With Sentecrate, Bilt, and Frobe,

My buddles down from Iberbean,

The durkerst toon in Freen.

21.

Once over easy, love,

Twice over tough,

Piss and vinegar.

Turds and stout.

What’s this all about?

She is sane again, and she is in the Burdas’ living room reading a biography of that coy but passionate genius, the Danish philosopher who has been irking and unsettling and bewildering her for years. The date is August 19, 2009.

* * *

I have come round to myself, as you can see. Only a few days have passed since the funeral. I have come round to who I was then, during that summer I spent with my mother and the Swans and Lola and Flora and Simon and the young witches of Bonden. Abigail is lying in her grave on the outskirts of town. There is no stone yet. That will come later. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, and my memory of that time is sharp. Daisy was still with me. In the days previous, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth, Boris Izcovich had been wooing me in a steady, earnest manner and had even sent me an egregious but touching poem that began: “I knew a girl named Mia / who knew her rhyme and meter / And onomatopoeia.” It fell off badly after that, but what can one expect from a world-renowned neuroscientist? The sentiment expressed after those introductory lines was, as described by Daisy, “total mush.” That said, only the most hard-hearted among us have no use for mush or blarney or those old ballads about lost and dead lovers, and only bona fide dunces are unable to take pleasure in the stories of ghostly figures who wander across moors or fields or out in the open air. And who among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings or insist that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne should not get back together at the end of The Awful Truth? There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren’t there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.

And I will tell you in all confidence, old friend, for that is what you are by now, Stalwart Reader, tested and true and so dear to me. I will tell you that the old man had been making inroads, as they say, and tromping closer and closer to whatever it was in there, in me, and the explanation was time, quite simply, time, all the time spent, and the daughter, who was born and loved and grew up into the kooky, kind, and gifted darling that she is, and all the talking and the fighting and the sex, too, between me and the big B., the memories of Sidney and my own Celia, who didn’t need to be discovered by Columbus, I can vouch for that. And in my secret heart of hearts, I admit there was some old mush that hadn’t been scooped out of me by hardship and insanity. But there was also the story itself, the story Boris and I had written together, and in that story, our bodies and thoughts and memories had gotten thelves so tangled up that it was hard to see where one person’s ended and the other’s began.

But back to the nineteenth of August 2009, late afternoon, around five o’clock. Flora was visiting with Moki, and Daisy was entertaining the two of them with a song-and-dance number. Flora was clapping wildly and encouraging Moki to do so as well. The weather was not good, a swamp of a day if ever there was one, ninety-five and bleary, mosquitoes on the loose after the rains. I was having some difficulty concentrating on my book, what with all the commotion, but I had finally come to Kierkegaard’s broken engagement. He loved her. She loved him, and he BREAKS it off, only to suffer grotesque and exquisite mental tortures. What a sad and perverse adventure that was. When I noticed that Daisy had stopped singing, I looked up. She had turned toward the window.

“A car’s coming up the driveway.” She leaned toward the glass. “I can’t see who it is. You’re not expecting anybody, are you? Good Lord, he’s getting out of the car. He’s walking toward the steps. He’s up the steps. He’s ringing the bell.” I heard the bell. “It’s Dad, Mom. It’s Dad! Well, well, aren’t you going to answer it? What’s the matter with you?”

Flora grabbed Daisy around the thighs and began to bounce up and down in anticipation. “Well?” she crowed. “Well?”

“You get it,” I said. “Let him come to me.”

FADE TO BLACK