Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

Deputy Kerry unlocked my handcuffs by the car but still clutched my elbow, pushing me along in front of him like a little cart. It was a long march during which I understood that, for all the unusualness in their lives, all my parents had ever wanted was to be average, normal, useful, ordinary. They could not bear the full force and chaos of their own eccentricity, could not bear the full life of it, the complete course, all the stuff and ramifications. To see something out of line in their own children must have reminded them of all that they were and could not hide from. It must have reminded them of the deep and sorrowful loneliness of themselves, which they had tried so desperately not to suffer.

Deputy Kerry handed me my hat.

“Go to your room,” my mother said coldly, and I stepped obediently into the house, staring down at my own steps as I took them, like a cartoon of a shamed person.

“Whoa,” said Claude, from inside the kitchen, seeing me. He was making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “What did you do?” he asked.

“Just — shush,” I said miserably. I went into my room and flopped on my bed. I dashed the straw hat to the floor.

Claude came to the bedroom doorway. He bit into his sandwich. “Don’t worry,” he said with his mouth full. “I’ll spy for you; I’ll let you know what’s going on. I can check it all out from the front porch.”

“Great,” I said indifferently.

LaRoue came up from the cellar. “Tsk, tsk,” she said at my doorway. And then added, more consolingly, “Don’t worry.” She looked sorry for me, for the first time in her life. “Don’t worry. I heard them talking. They’ve decided not to yell.”

What they’d decided to do was to send me to church camp for the rest of the summer. They told me this after they’d thanked Deputy Kerry and shaken his hand (for a job well done?), and after they’d suddenly, briefly entertained a visit from Frank Morenton himself, who, Claude later told me, came flying up in his white convertible, leaping out to apologize to my parents for the public display at Storyland. He was also bearing my rope purse, which I had left at the Lakeside entrance. (How strange to imagine him with my purse!) “Let’s keep this whole thing with your daughter just between us. Here, this belongs to her.” He thrust the purse at my mother. “The park’s a nice family place,” he added. “I’m getting to be an old man. I’ve seen a lot. I came to this country with no money, and I worked too hard now to have my efforts be the site of scandal and commotion. I believe in America.” I was being treated with the same anxious hands as the Lost Mine crash. I was the Lost Mine crash. I was the same thing. All that is mine won’t be lost.

Saved by America.

“What country do you think he’s from?” I asked Claude.

“Indonesia,” Claude replied. “Or maybe France. How should I know?”

Later I heard that Frank Morenton had fired Isabelle for her bad judgment, only to hire her back again the next day; I also heard she still got her car and her Christmas trip to Florida and that he bought Gloria Deb a bright red moped.

“Your daughter, of course, is fired,” he said to my parents. “But as for the money, let’s just call it even-steven.” Horsehearts was the sort of place where even a person of prominence might say things like “even-steven.” It was the sort of place where if you stayed too long, you might add or subtract syllables; you might ask for “ham burgs” or “cheese burgs” or “cream de mint.” After twenty years, you could end up saying “bingo” for “yes.”

“We greatly appreciate that,” murmured my father.

“Would you care to come in for some ice tea?” asked my mother.

“No, thanks,” said Frank Morenton. “I just wanted to hurry down here and tidy up, let you know that although I could, I’m not going to prosecute. Now we can just move on, put things behind us.”

“Yes,” said my mother.

“I hope you will do as I intend to do and not mention this to people.”

After that my parents said nothing Claude could discern.

“Now I’ve got to get back,” Morenton announced, and then he was gone, fast in his beautiful car, like a shiny, shiny god.

That’s how Claude described it later. I’d stayed in my room, as told. I’d stared at my Desiderata poster. Go placidly amid the noise and the haste.…

Go placidly.

What a crock.

The camp was a Baptist one a hundred miles away in the mountains on Lake Panawauc, said my parents, standing in my bedroom not long after Frank Morenton had left. I would be sent there until the end of August. Then I’d come back and pack for fall and winter. They were sending me away to boarding school.

“A military academy?” I asked, and no one in the room, myself included, knew whether I was joking.

“The Mount Brookfield School,” said my father. I was astonished that in my fifteen-minute ride from the lake to Horsehearts they had planned my future so specifically. “The financial arrangements we may have to work out with your grandmother. It would behoove you to pay her a visit and explain yourself.”

“Yup,” I said drily, “I guess it would.” We were all standing in my pink and purple room, with the Desiderata poster and the beehive shade and the records and the makeup mirror. I started playing with the dangling string of the light switch, turning it on and off, watching the beehive shade fill up with pink, and then empty again to white, watching the pink when it threw itself across my parents’ faces like a veil of embarrassment, then vanishing again like a passing fever, or the patrolling light from a squad car.

“What is wrong with you?” asked my father in a disgusted way, and I started to cry again because I didn’t know.

He turned angrily and walked out of the room, and my mother hesitated, then followed, though she cast me back a look that in another story might have turned me to salt or caused me to disappear entirely. Instead, in this one, it just left me there with the pink light, a large black moth banging at the screen, the sound of the Naval Reserve officers unit during the supper hour marching down the street, performing their summer exercises with low hums and scuffs and heps, to save our country, our world, our freedom! I threw myself on the bed, weeping. I dreamed a disinformation dream of Cuba.

That August the Republican convention renominated Nixon; he was “winding down the war,” like a kind of path.

Watergate was breaking.

Patty Duke got married.

A storm on the sun briefly remagnetized the earth.

I heard about these only in faint broadcasts from my counselor’s radio during rest hour. I lay in the bunk above Monica Hyde, a fourteen-year-old from North Syracuse. When I couldn’t hear the radio, I talked to her. Her biggest sin, she said, had been tearing the zipper off the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album cover so she could see what was underneath.

“Oh, I did that,” I said. “You were supposed to do that.”

“No, you weren’t,” she said. And I would contemplate my tanned arms, or the previous night’s vespers held in the cricket-chorused chapel (a cleared area of shore with log benches and Lake Panawauc itself as the pulpit). I passed the time being alternately bored and outraged by boredom, seeking new means of self-forgiveness and penance for my crimes. I fell slightly in love with the camp director’s son, a boy my age named Hayden Filo who had been a thalidomide child and who had only three fingers and six toes. After vespers we would sometimes walk through the woods together and he would talk about God, never Jesus, never the Son! Just God, and what God wanted — in ways that sometimes made God seem as gorgeous and enveloping as the violet dusk in which we roamed, and other times like a spoiled and faraway child vexing all his relations.

Sometimes we stopped, by trees and rocks and forks in the path, and kissed. Tree crickets and katydids sang with the ceaseless squawk of a clothesline pulley, all that endless hanging of laundry in the night. Please! We don’t want to hear about it! We lifted our hands and held each other’s faces. We closed our eyes, then oddly, without warning, opened them again. We stayed up late and watched for the northern lights, which came a lot now because of the storm on the sun. They looked like car headlights flashed across the sky, and sometimes failed to impress us. Other times they seemed as miraculous as the angels and we could feel ourselves under their spell and full of kindness and light, our dark, accidental pasts far away.

I won a sword drill competition. I knew the Bible like my own closet (Leviticus 14:10! Green knit crochet vest!). Somehow it was all the same, all paraphernalia my brain had seized and catalogued in a kind of heartless, automatic way. My brain sought always to make the strange familiar, available, not scary. It built railings, ways to get around, maps and roads. It farmed and planted with a panicked, compulsive, mechanical energy. And so I won the Bible drills.

I came in second in a back-dive contest.

I sang “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” in a solo, in front of everyone, at Sunday service. At the end no one clapped, but you didn’t at a church service. That was one of the things that was too bad about church.

I wrote long letters to Sils, making up grotesque but harmless accounts of the other girls in my tent—“They eat dirt!”—but not telling her about the three-fingered boy I was kissing in the woods. At vespers I actually prayed hard to God and on several occasions believed I felt the Holy Spirit enter me then silently cry out and flee. One day after lunch I made an appointment to see Reverend Filo, the camp director. I sat in his office in the back of the main lodge and regarded him steadily. “I want to be baptized,” I explained. I didn’t know whether he knew about the walks I was taking with his son.

“You haven’t been baptized before?”

“No,” I lied. It was the last lie, the necessary lie, the great lie to end all lies; the Jesus lie, lying for the sins of all the other lies.

Reverend Filo looked at me. I had no idea what my parents had told him. “You weren’t baptized when you were twelve like everyone else?”

“I had mono,” I said. The deputy lie. The good-thief-on-the-cross lie. I had been baptized when it meant nothing to me. Now I needed the public atonement—“At-One-ment,” as they said here at Camp Panawauc over bug juice and guitar-strummed hymns. I needed the ritual and spectacle. I needed to fall back against a religious man’s arms, to be blessed and taken up into the clouds briefly, feel Jesus seize my heart and stay there not shriek and fly off. That hadn’t happened the first time. The first time my head had been full of thoughts of breakfast and about how under my baptismal gown, in front of the entire congregation, I wasn’t wearing any underwear. Afterward, I’d gleefully eaten donuts and hot chocolate with the other baptismal “candidates,” as they were called, while the church ladies dried our hair with towels and a bonnet dryer.

“Well, we should get you baptized, then,” said Reverend Filo, as if he were a doctor and this were a perfunctory, snip-and-cut kind of surgery.

Somehow I didn’t think I’d be the only one who would be baptized that day, but I was. There were no robes. I wore my bathing suit and a blue linen cape tied in a knot at my throat. I stood with Reverend Filo in waist-high water, a few feet from the dock, little plastic buoys along the side, the lake warm and still and brown in the stagnant way of late summer. There were soft tall weeds growing up from the lake bottom, and they would do a charming kind of hula and then wind around your legs in a death grip.

On shore there was only my counselor, Sandy; Monica Hyde; and Hayden Filo, who smiled at me beneficently. Now I was truly taking his religion and could marry him. Perhaps that’s what was crossing his mind. It crossed mine.

“Do you, Benoîte-Marie Carr, accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”

These were vows. I summoned forth all the force and promise and devotion I knew I had within me. It formed a large dense mass beneath my ribs. My toes began to cramp and cross. I saw it now: There was only Jesus; everything else was nothing. Everything else was squat. The blue of the sky was endless and beckoning and true. There was Goodness. There was The Way. The mountains across the lake were the apostles, and the trees were witnesses descended from on high. The plastic buoys against the dock were the doves of the Holy Spirit.

“Yes,” I said, “I do.” Reverend Filo said something else, but I didn’t really hear. There were pains and spasms in my feet and legs, and then the Reverend’s arm came round the small of my back and he whispered, “Lean back, my dear.” I thought of my back dives, squinted my eyes and pushed off with my feet. But I pushed too hard, as if I were doing a real dive, and the leap back brought Reverend Filo staggering back with me. I opened my mouth wide for air, but water rushed in instead, and the weeds wound malignantly around my legs, paralyzing me. My arms clutched and thrashed. I had never been a good swimmer — I could dive but I couldn’t swim well; during Swimming at school, with its bathing suits color-coded to everyone’s bust size, I had pretended to have my period or else early in the morning I’d bang my finger with a hammer until it swelled and I could arrive at the nurse’s office, requesting a splint. So, now, half-drowning, and bringing a man of God down with me — his head floundering next to mine in the water — I was incapable of saving myself or anyone. My blue cape billowed out to one side of me, its knotted ties twisting and tightening around my neck. I waited for the Holy Spirit to enter me and reside in my heart in peace, take me forever. I opened my eyes underwater, where things were silent but full of motion, muddy shapes and bubbles. I looked up toward the sky and out for God, but all I saw up through the water was the bright storm on the sun, and then Sils in her tiara calling my name, and then, finally, the large looming figure of Frank Morenton, clutching my rope purse — so funny, with my purse! — and looking down from the clouds, which roiled gassily about his feet and ankles like large fuzzy slippers. He looked as if he were scouting out the place, visualizing a turnstile or two and some rides. There wasn’t anything that couldn’t use a turnstile! There wasn’t anything that couldn’t benefit and prosper from Mr. Amusement! Mr. Morenton, Mr. Morenton, I said underwater. I’m very sorry, Mr. Morenton. I was near a great and peaceful death. I felt my soul leave my body yet still retain the skills of the body, so that I could actually see myself leave, waving, floating off like a balloon.

And then I was lifted up, coughing, by Reverend Filo and my counselor, Sandy. “Dear girl!” exclaimed the Reverend, who was also coughing, his hair sopping. “You just lifted off like a rocket!”

I sat on the shore in my wet cape, and let the sand cake on it. I coughed some more and spit onto the beach. Monica Hyde placed towels around me, and Sandy went to get me a can of soda. Hayden Filo sat next to me, looking disappointed, looking as if that were the most graceless, foolish baptism he’d ever seen.

“Perhaps I can try it again sometime,” I croaked.

“Perhaps,” he said distantly.

“Let’s sing a song, shall we?” said Reverend Filo. And we joined hands in a circle and sang “Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley.” When we got to the last “He had to walk it by himself,” Sandy arrived with the soda, and I stepped out of the circle and drank.

At the end of August, before I was sent to the Mount Brookfield School, my mother picked me up at camp to take me home. Getting ready to sit beside her in the car, I had a great desire to be good, a nice girl, like Monica Hyde. But it was when functioning from this desire that I felt most anxious and odd, for what I had was only a desire, not a knack. My mother did not hug me. She asked me if I had everything, and then we got in and stopped first at the nearest gas station, a Sinclair station, its bright green brontosaurus like some reptilian Baby Huey; a puffy, inverted dollar sign. She signaled to the attendant, who was on my side of the car, and as she did I noticed the swaying flesh beneath her bicep and the greenish, black-stubbled oval of her half-shaved underarm — like the prickly, peppery seeds of a tropical fruit. I had to try not to feel repelled by her. I had to remember not her frosty, scolding self, or all the sad, injured love between us, but her niceness, the bursts of energy and originality which she had sometimes bestowed upon me when I was little: sewing new, striped clothes for all my dolls, then arranging them around the room before I woke on Easter; the cakes and breads and frosting bowls she’d leave out for snacks; a dance she once did in my room one night, all by herself, when I was sick in bed and bored. The dance had ended with one of her feet propped on a chair, arms thrust skyward and held like that, her hands clutching two aluminum pie pans. She did have a sense of theater, of costume and set design, and she could make things out of nothing: hats out of rags, doormats out of bottle caps. There were times she fascinated me. But we had never been close, and it was hard for me, ever, to feel I knew her. To know something you had to be able to go inside and feel, then step outside and look, and then do that again: go inside, feel, then outside and look. You had to do it twice. That was knowledge. Two in a row. But with my mother I could only do it once. I’d do it once, the first time, then run.

“Do you feel you learned things at camp?” my mother asked suddenly, after she’d paid the station attendant and pulled away, down the road. She seemed anxious to exude something, some affection; she seemed possessed of some inarticulate goodwill — I could see it surging and flickering in her face, in a kind of confusion.

“Yes,” I said.

“Really? That’s good. What did you learn?”

What I’d learned at camp, from all the vesper readings, mostly, was that you didn’t give back to the same people who gave to you. “Let’s see,” I said, stalling. You didn’t give back to the same people at all. You gave to different people. And they, in turn, gave to someone else entirely. Not you. That was the sloppy economy of gift and love. But that was living as a Christian — a practical Christian, but a Christian nonetheless. This, I realized, my parents already understood. Though it was probably not what they’d hoped I’d learn. “I learned that God is eternal benevolence,” I said finally, a little breathlessly.

My mother looked at me with alarm, then became quiet, watching the road. For about forty miles she said nothing, and then suddenly she started in. “Your grandmother’s looking forward to seeing you,” she said.

“I’ll visit her,” I promised.

“Silsby called to find out when you were coming home. I didn’t tell her exactly.”

“You didn’t?”

“She’s not a good influence on you, Berie. She never has been.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s too much strain in her family, the situation with her parents and all. I always felt you spent too much time over there. You should have other friends. Her family has enough to worry about.”

“There’s strain in every family. Besides, they’re not worried about me. I’m not getting in the way.”

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t see her too much right away. Take a break from the friendship.”

“I’ve had a break.”

“Silsby and I spoke for a little bit, and I told her the same thing.”

“You did what?”

“She said she wasn’t going to be around for a week anyway. She was going camping with her boyfriend, Mike, so she wanted me to tell you that and to wish you all the best at school, since it looked like she wouldn’t be able to see you.”

“Wouldn’t be able to see me?” Something stung and ached before my eyes: a picture of Sils, peeling along the lake roads on the back of the new bike Mike would surely by now have bought with the insurance money. “The crowd goes crazy!” he would shout and laugh, whipping dangerously around the curves. They’d go to the State Park campground, and in a blue pup tent lie listening to “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl” on Mike’s transistor, slapping the beat on Mike’s thighs. I felt bludgeoned and bleak and abandoned. “Mom, why did you have to say all that?” I bleated mournfully. “You didn’t have to say all that!”

“Berie,” she said, trying to sound gentle, “you needn’t make a tragic caricature of every small emotion.” And then we said nothing else, staring straight ahead at the road, or off to the side, where miles of trees had burned in a recent fire — stanch and starch the mush! — and where now toadstools were sprouting through the charred ground.

Back in Horsehearts I went over by myself, on my bicycle, to visit my Grandmother Carr. I had phoned beforehand, and she had suggested the time: two-fifteen.

The weather was cool for August, but I was warm from my bike ride. I climbed wearily up the stairs of her front porch. The door was open, and so I called through the screen. She appeared, wearing a light summer suit, her gray hair curled up in back in a twist. She showed me into her book-lined sitting room, where I had two davenports and a chesterfield to choose from. All her furniture was shadowy and hulking, like an indentured household staff. I chose the chesterfield. She brought me a cup of tea. Then she sat down across from me and sipped from her own cup. I looked down at the floor, pretending to study the busy patterns of the Persian rug. I had seldom visited her — I could have counted the times on one hand: the time when I was five and had stood in her kitchen and asked, “Grandma Carr, who is older, you or Daddy?” And she had scowled. Idiot child! Or the time when I was seven, and Claude and I brought her a gift — an old jack-in-the-box we didn’t want anymore. Or the time when I was ten and brought Sils along, and we sat at the dining table and asked for cookies. My grandmother had fetched us some graham crackers, a little mechanically. “Can we have some juice, too?” I’d asked, and after we departed, full of snacks, she phoned my mother to tell her of our rudeness and demands. When I got home, as punishment, my mother took out all the guest towels and made me iron them.

“Your father tells me you’ve been in some trouble,” my grandmother said now.

I was silent. “A little,” I said finally.

“And now they want me to send you to the Mount Brookfield School.”

“Yes,” I said. I’d forgotten my grandmother would be footing the bill. “I guess.”

She looked at me in a vaguely interested way. “Did you enjoy camp?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“Did you?” She looked amused.

“It was interesting to meet all kinds of people from all over the state,” I said, like a walking, talking application essay.

She nodded. “We sent your father to camp once,” she said. “He was only five years old. At the time he was a little chatterbox, very cute but a chatterbox, and your grandfather and I wanted a vacation alone in Europe.” She pursed her mouth and sipped some more tea; I waited to hear a slurp but there wasn’t one. “We sent your father to a German summer camp in New Hampshire called Kinder Koop. When he came back, he was stone quiet.” She stopped for effect. “He’d become, as he would remain for the rest of his life, a shy person.”

The wordless moment now between us was long, low, sonorous as a cello note — a mix of catgut and wood, of animal and plant. “Of course, it was a mistake,” she said finally. “It was a terrible, lonely thing we did to such a tiny boy.”

Pity pooled in my throat. Dad! I drank more tea. I swallowed and coughed.

She now rose from her seat, in a change of subject, and walked dramatically around the room, as if she were in a play. My eyes followed her, and in so doing, I realized that she had no pictures of us — her children or her grandchildren — anywhere in this room. Nor did she have any elsewhere in the house, that I knew of. “When I was at conservatory,” she said, “I’d gone there after much turmoil in my life. To go from turmoil to tranquillity is excellent for music. To go from an iniquitous den to a practice room is a respite given to us by God.” She stopped and stared at me. “It is to grow wings. I hope you will find something similar for yourself at the Mount Brookfield School.”

“I hope so, too,” I said. “I mean, I don’t see why not.”

“Well, my dear …” She was still standing; she had already put her teacup down. Now she looked at her watch. “I realize you have many things to do. But I wish you all the best.” I stood up, as I guessed I was supposed to, though I still had half a cup of tea. She shook my hand and kissed me on the cheek. Suddenly I loved her very much.

“Thank you,” I said. I threw my arms around her waist and hugged her tightly. I pressed my right cheek against the pale lapels of her suit and closed my eyes. “I hope I’ll have a musical moment like that, too,” I said awkwardly, and she made a light, humming sound like a laugh and patted me on the head.

At the Mount Brookfield School I wrote to everyone: to Hayden Filo, to Claude, to my parents. I wrote to my grandmother. “Hey, Grams,” I began one letter, but then crossed it out and wrote “Dear Grandmother Carr.” By the cross-out I drew an arrow and wrote “picture of me in a new hat.” She never wrote back.

But my parents did. They said they had given my room to a Japanese foreign student and weren’t sure whether there’d be room for me to come home either fall break or Thanksgiving, though Christmas was fine.

To Sils I wrote long descriptions of the “precious, pukey campus,” of all my difficult schoolwork, of the dining hall where dogs were allowed and there was unlimited ice cream (the eccentric demands of some benefactor). I described the native attire, the preppie Scottish sweaters I refused to buy, though once I almost hocked one in town but put it back.

I dressed in what I thought was glamorous — black and gold things. Sometimes a cape or a hat or a scarf that sparkled. I arranged my face and hair in a fever of private notions: a theater of one. I wasn’t looking around. I wasn’t costuming myself in any context that was real. If I pushed it too far, if it got too glittery or tacky, I’d say to people, “Hey, at Horsehearts High this is chic.” I’d send it all up as a joke, a put-on. But if it seemed to work, if people liked it, I would say, “Thank you,” in an earnest, whispered way. I became exotic among the preppies. I hung out with the wisecracking boys.

I got my period. The torrent of it, the bodily upheaval, filled me with happiness and dread. In drugstores I stared at the Modess and Kotex and belts and equipment, obsessed with the paraphernalia. I made directly for the back aisles and hovered there, like a robber, waiting for a slow moment in the store. I remained there in a kind of hypnosis, until something would snap me out of it, and I would wander back out, via the perfume counter, where I would spray all the testers — on my wrists, behind my ears — then step outside and get attacked by bees.

I got good grades. I learned to use the words “nebulous” and “juxtaposition,” and tried to use them as often as I could: in essay tests, or just standing in line at the dining hall.

I won an academic prize.

I developed breasts.

For a while I was still telling my flat-chested jokes. But as my own breasts grew larger, so did the disjunction between my body and my jokes, and when I would tell jokes to people, they would look at me funny. I was in a time warp. My breasts had become larger — they were large! — and I was still referring to them as mosquito bites. For a semester, an embarrassing, amphibious semester when I didn’t know who I was, what I looked like, what jokes to tell, moving from water to land, I tried to stop telling any jokes at all. I waited until I’d accumulated enough amusing lines about having big breasts, armed myself with enough invented descriptions, amassed enough self-deprecating remarks about top-heaviness — knockers, blimps, hooters, bazooms — to get me through a party, and then I told those. Getting stuck in elevators, toppling forward, not being able to see the forest for the cleavage. Alienated in a grotesque way, I would stagger forward in a kind of list, then rest my breasts on the nearest bookcase. I was doing sight gags. I didn’t care. In not caring, I became the same as everyone else: I was waiting to go far away to a big university, away from this woodsy dumping ground for half-loved kids, off to a big university that would be Relevant and Real.

But then I got my first boyfriend, a boy named Howie March. I’d met him in the Linen Service line, where we were waiting together to pick up our neat little papered bundles and drop off our old sheets like invalids or mental patients or old people in a home. Howie was on the wrestling team — passionate and obsessive and sweet. He liked me. I would go to his matches and tournaments wearing my funny little black-and-gold hats and smoking my cigarettes outside in the hallway, and afterward he would give me his trophies, little metal men with arms protruding in a starting stance, and I would take them back to my dorm room and hang my jewelry on them. I loved him fiercely, like an orphan, with every newly banished, bereaved, and sexual part of me. I had no idea who either of us was; there was just the thick fog of love and bodies and whispered promises. We were child bride, child groom, each seeking the other’s animal heart. He would make love to me slow, fast, against the wall, standing up. His naked body — its power and vulnerability, the steely arms, his penis with its delicate veins like the veins of a wrist, its rubbery eye like the tip of a mucilage bottle — obsessed me. I developed a blush. Before then, I had never blushed. I didn’t have the body fat, the heat, the hormones, the awareness of myself, the belief in my own visibility that would have created a blush. But now I’d become a sexual creature with all its experience of shame and being watched. The dark, sallow circles beneath my eyes disappeared in a pale bloat, my glance was less direct, and I began to blush easily, daily. I blushed for years.

In letters to Sils I would write “I miss you!” “How are you, schweetie?” and then I would tell her about Howie: a dunk, half dork, half hunk. “He keeps me busy!” I would write. “Wink, wink.” And then I’d draw a picture of a wink.

The few times I went home on vacations, I would see Sils, but we were strangely awkward with each other. We looked different. She had layered her hair in a long wavy shag and was wearing a big leather jacket and palazzo pants. I had grown rounded and tall. We would sing in her room, but at the end of a song she’d strum the chords and we’d retreat shyly into silence. We didn’t reprise our repertoire, all the songs we’d learned with Miss Field in Girls’ Choir, or from the car radio, or her brothers’ band. Instead we struggled with talk, though it all seemed to separate us. She had broken up with Mike and was now seeing a boy named Doug, who sold mobile homes. Months before, her brothers had once again fled, with their band, to Canada. Was I going to college? She thought she might not, but might just stay in town and work for the post office or something. Someday she hoped to move to Boston or Hawaii or Santa Fe.

“Oh,” I said. I’d somehow always thought we’d go to college together, to the same place; I couldn’t imagine being totally without her.

“There’s just no money,” she said. But she smiled at me encouragingly, like an older sister.

“No prob,” I said. “No biggie. I can get the cash. I can do this thing with ticket stubs.” I hoped she would laugh. Instead she smiled weakly and ran her fingers through her new hair. She seemed tired and sad and it made me want to run, to be gone, to be back at Mount Brookfield with Howie.

I was Howie’s girlfriend for a year, before he left, graduated from Mount Brookfield ahead of me, and bucking his parents, set out with two buddies for the Alaskan pipeline, where after three months, I was told later by his mother, he disappeared in the snow, came down with the snow madness that caused men to get into their tractors and just drive off into the blinding white horizon, never coming back.

I forced myself to go on to someone else after that, then someone else again, never attaching in quite the same ferocious, virginal way, never with that enthralled and orphaned heart, not quite like that, and I missed him for years, years into college. By then my parents had moved from Horsehearts to the east coast of Florida with my grandmother, who, when I visited, stared at me with the staggering, arrogant stare of the dying, the wise vapidity of the already gone; she refused to occupy the features of her face. The living didn’t interest her; she grew bored when anyone spoke. In her yawn I could see the black-and-white dice of her filled teeth, the quiet snap of her spit, all gathered in a painting of departure. It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really.

——

AFTER COLLEGE, I did go back to Horsehearts, for a class reunion. Ten years. I was invited despite the Mount Brookfield diploma—“a mere technicality,” wrote Susie Vito, the class secretary, who had been in kindergarten with me. Sils wrote me a note: “If you go, I’ll go,” she said. “The reunion’s at a motel. But please stay with me at my house. I’ve got room.” She was still in Horsehearts, renting cheaply, working as a letter carrier and putting in requests for transfers. Her handwriting was exactly the same, jazzy and elegant, with fs that looked like G clefs. Ss like flowers.

Like so many others, I arrived by car, still smoking cigarettes, my hair shorn, some money and credit cards in my purse. How simple and sweet and nice Sils seemed then, at that befuddled gathering! She ran toward me and hugged me so long I felt abandoned when she let go. Her face was slightly lined — there were deeper folds by her mouth — but otherwise she looked the same. It was her! “Your hair looks great,” she said, and took my hand. How kind she was! She was a lovely and gentle person, and I’d almost forgotten. I had gone out into the world and in it imagined myself sweet and good compared to the jagged acrimony I met everywhere. “I’m just a girl from Horsehearts, what can I say?” I’d murmur, and men would touch my face; New Yorkers, Bostonians, Parisians would smile. But now, returning to Horsehearts, I realized, I no longer knew what sweetness was. By comparison to what I found there, I had become sour, mean, sophisticated. I no longer knew from niceness, was no longer on a daily basis with it. I didn’t meet nice people. I met witty, hard, capable, successful, dramatic. Some vulnerable. Some insecure. But not nice, the way Sils was nice. She was nice the way I had long imagined I still was, but then on seeing her again — strangely shy before me but illumined and grinning, as ever, her voice in gentle girlish tones I never heard anymore — instantly, completely, knew I was no longer.

We jumped into the motel pool, with our clothes on, laughing and practically drowning. We swam together to the shallow end, and when she stepped out of it, gleaming, her clothes wet and tight as leather, her hair streaming down her back, everyone looked. Though there was weariness in her walk, she was still slender and bold; I could see she was still some kind of sexual centerpiece here. All the Horsehearts boys who had stayed in town, become managers of stores or cinemas or the roller rink, still thought of her at night. In this neck of the woods, she was the neck of the woods.

We sat in lawn chairs, drying in the sun, and smoked quietly, with Randi, who seemed just the same as always except that, recovered from her Mary Kay days, she had changed her name to Travis, which she’d written on her name tag, with Randi in parentheses underneath. (Could one do that? Could one put one’s whole past, the fact of its boring turbulence, in parentheses like that?) We murmured about how bald all the boys were. “They look exactly like they did in high school,” said Sils, “except that now their hair’s gone and in their wallets instead of condoms they carry before-and-after photos of their home renovations. Welcome back to Horsehearts.” As she held her cigarette, and blew smoke away from me, I looked for the men from U.N.C.L.E. in her toenails but could not find them.

After the afternoon reception and buffet, we left, went to go drink in a new local restaurant, what Sils called “an-all-you-will-have-eaten place.” There was a long salad bar and a big open grill. One was supposed to cook one’s own steak. “Cook your own mistake,” she called it. I smiled in a way that I hoped wouldn’t seem distant. What did it mean that she had stayed here, in Horsehearts, in one place, like a tree? Though I knew one’s roots grew deep and steady that way, still, one’s lower limbs could fuse, or die, killed off by one’s own stalwart shade. “It’s the coleslaw here,” she said. “I just can’t get enough of it. Sometimes I think that, you know, watch: the slaw alone will keep me in this town forever.”

Later, she drove me around the village, to show me it again. The yards seemed emptier and larger than I remembered, the houses farther apart and glum, though pretty. A couple of times we got out and walked. There was no one on the street. The old sidewalks sparkled with quartz until we hit a part that had been repaired or replaced with newer clayey squares. When we drove by my old house, it seemed ungainly and obscene in its strangeness; in my mind the proportions of the house were warmer, different; in my mind it wasn’t this. It seemed alien. It seemed confiscated. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. The roads were country roads, still wooded and full of longing and despair and that search for something, anything going on; they were roads of rumor — curvy, restless roads that seemed for moments to stretch forward but then just turned back in on themselves, like snakes snacking on their own tails.

Back at her house, in the cool snap of the Adirondack night, Sils and I got into pajamas and collapsed sleepily on her water bed, which was heated and huge, a thing I might have found tasteless somewhere else but here was some perfection of calm and form, a dead man’s float on still water, while she spoke of getting a postal route in Hawaii.

“You can do that?” I asked.

“Sure.” She spoke some more of her life here, its trapped routines. Her mother had died. “She slaved away at that motel, and then she just died, without ever even a postcard from my dad.” Her brothers had moved to Texas and formed a band called the Jackhammer Hamsters. “Ever heard of them?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“They’re getting a little old,” she whispered, and offered up a gentle wince.

She loved Hawaii. She’d been there once — with a guy named Mel — and had bought a big coffee-table book called Hawaiian Song in the airport. She got up from the bed to fetch it, spread it out on the billowing quilt, showed me some of the photographs: bright beaches and skies. Not an Adirondack in sight. “I’ve been on a postal transfer list for three years,” she said.

“It’s just a matter of time, then.”

“Probably.”

“Gee.” I sighed.

“Yeah.” She smiled in a bittersweet way.

I browsed through my mind, thinking about all the things I wanted to say, might say, could say. “Guess what?”

“What? I don’t know!”

“I’m engaged.”

“Get out of town! You are?” she exclaimed eagerly. “Where’s your ring!”

“We’re doing a cheap and easy minimalist thing: no rings, no wedding. Just — marriage.” I sighed.

“How Modern!”

“Yeah. Instead of saying ‘I do,’ we’re just going to say ‘Here.’ ”

“And what’s Mr. Here’s name?” “Daniel Hiawatha Bergman.”

“That’s his real name? Get out!”

“I swear to God.”

“Is he a good guy?”

A good guy. It sounded so Martha and the Vandellas. But it was Horsehearts. That was the way Horsehearts sounded. “Yeah. He’s a good guy.”

“Great, Berie, I’m so happy for you. You deserve a good guy.” Now she sighed. “And I always knew you’d get one. I always thought you’d end up with the best husband of all of us.”

“You did?”

“Of course. You had no idea. But of course.”

For a fleeting moment, as anyone can, I imagined I felt the poverty of my future, all its unholdable surfaces; I felt inexplicably ungrateful and sad. It was a moment of stillness in which one looks around and ruefully sees only the rocks and searing sun and cheap metal. “You wanted an adventure and instead you got Adventureland,” Sils herself used to say. I longed for a feeling again, a particular one: the one of approaching a room but of not yet having entered it. Being engaged to marry, it should have been what I felt. But instead I associated the feeling with another part of my life: that anteroom of girlhood, with its laughter as yet only affianced to the world, anticipation playing in the heart like an orchestra tuning and warming, the notes unwed and fabulous and crazed — I wanted it back! — those beginning sounds, so much more interesting than the piece itself.

Pièce—French for room, I remembered, the strangeness of night and this one upon me like a drug.

“You guys going to have kids?” asked Sils. She wriggled her way under the covers.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

“That’s great,” she said. But something haggard suddenly entered her face. “That’s great.” She gave a yawn. “I suppose we should go to sleep.”

“It’s been a long day.”

“Good night, Berie,” she said, turning out the light. In the dark she added, “Congratulations! Thank you. I love you.” She paused. “Is there anything I missed?”

“Good luck,” I said. “Drive safely. Wipe your feet. Happy Birthday and Have a Nice Life. There’s a lot you forgot.”

“Many happy returns,” she said sleepily. “And Good Fate. That’s the real one.” She turned with the sheet clutched to her breastbone, the water beneath us rolling gently. I lay in the dark next to her, feeling like a creature that had entered through a damp cranny or a bad shingle in the roof: a bat that could swoop silently about in her house. Why not? Bats, I knew, were sentimental. They returned to where they once lived, even when shut out; they sought their own smell. I couldn’t sleep. I was lying on top of the covers, which made it easy to get up. I rolled out of bed, stepped ashore, out into her house, and roamed through the rooms, touching things. I couldn’t really see what they were, but I could feel them: a needlepoint pillow, a pile of newsprint shoppers, little ceramic statues of cats — discovering these cats, I felt less shocked than puzzled and disappointed — a large, foil-wrapped chocolate egg, a basket of hair ties and barrettes.

I went into the bathroom. I touched the towels and towel bars and washcloths. I flicked on the light and opened the medicine cabinet: Q-Tips, nail files, and dark beeswax soaps. I opened the pill bottles and took an aspirin and a Tylenol. I dabbed cologne on my wrists, stripped naked, then got into the shower, where I washed my hair with her shampoo — an apricot-walnut one that smelled like her. I stayed there for a long time — used her back scrub brush and her creme rinse and let the bathroom fog up with steam. I lathered myself with a muddy scrap of beeswax soap I clawed out of the shower caddy. I felt close to her, in a larcenous way, as if here in the shower, using her things, all the new toiletries she now owned, I could know better the person she’d become. All evening I’d been full of reminiscences, but she had seldom joined in. Instead she was full of kindnesses — draping her own sweater around my shoulders, bringing me tea. How could I know or hope that she contained within her all our shared life, that she had not set it aside to make room for other days and affections and things that now had all made their residence and marks within her? Of course, I knew there were no reassurances. Or, there were only reassurances. She had offered them. “This place is just not the same without you,” she had said twice that afternoon. But I was greedy. Three was the magic number. I’d wanted her to say it one more time.

I got out, wrapped a towel around me, and went back to bed, where she lay still asleep, curved in a pale paisley, the sheet about her like an old tricot curtain. I slipped quietly under the covers, my hair wet, feeling the water bed give slightly beneath me like something gelatinous and alive.

“Did you just take a shower?” Sils suddenly murmured, surprising me.

“Yeah, I did.”

She kept her eyes closed, and simply readjusted her pillow for sleep. “You were always a weird girl,” she said dreamily.

“I was?” I said. “I was not.”

She gave a lazy laugh. “You should invite me to where you live someday and see all the wacky things I’m going to do.”

“I will,” I said. “I will.” Though I already imagined that by the time I got back to my new job and life, with all its distractions and busynesses, that I wouldn’t know how. Or why. Despite all my curatorial impulses and training, my priestly harborings and professional, courtly suit of the past, I never knew what to do with all those years of one’s life: trot around in them forever like old boots — or sever them, let them fly free?

Of course, one couldn’t really do either. But there was always the trying, and pretending. And then there was finally someplace in between, where one lived.

I curled next to Sils and closed my eyes. I slept the light, watery sleep of a sick person who has already slept off the day and then awakened to night, not knowing what to do.

In the morning, she brought me coffee. She brought me a salad.

“This is the best salad I’ve ever had,” I said. For a brief moment, I decided, I would defeat nostalgia with caffeine. “This is better than all the others. This is the best salad of my entire life.”

“It’s the dressing,” she said. “A kind of breakfast recipe: it actually has bacon and eggs in it.” She shrugged and smiled.

I set my coffee aside. “Do you play the guitar anymore?” I asked.

“Only some,” she said.

“Do you still paint?”

“Naw.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Well, oh, I painted one thing,” she said, and she went out on the sunporch and brought back a small canvas on which she’d painted a bowl of fruit. In the painting of the bowl, which was silver, she’d included a reflection of a tiny figure of a woman, head into the wind, hair blown back. “That’s me getting ready to face middle age,” she said. And we both laughed in a loud, delirious way.

She was, probably, the nicest person I had ever known. Yet in the years following, for myself, I abandoned even believing in niceness or being nice. I could scarcely control myself, wherever I was, from telling everyone, anyone, what I thought of them. It was an urge, a compulsion, my tongue bitten a futile blue. That’s a ridiculous thing to say. You must have been spoiled as a child. I couldn’t stop myself. You are ungenerous. You parcel yourself out like an expensive spice. You idealize things; you’re a narcissist. You seek only to etch impressions of yourself on someone else’s face. It’s a form of cheapness. You’re cheap. You’re patronizing. You’re a fascist. You’re a bully. I’ve always hated bullies. You look awful in that color. It was as if I’d been hit on the head.

I left before noon. Sils walked me out to my car and gave me a long hug. “Aw, Berie,” she said, “how’d we get so old and far away,” and then she stepped backward, turning, and walked to the front porch, from where she turned again and waved. “I’m going to get a dog,” she said; certainly that was all that was needed to complete the scene.

“Sounds good,” I said stupidly. I started the car.

“Good luck with the Historical Society — whatever the hell it is you do there,” she called out.

“Photography curator. I organize old pictures,” I called back.

“That’s right,” she said. “Well, organize those pictures, girl!” She shook a fist and laughed. Then she brushed some hair off her brow and folded her arms across her chest. Her smile was broad at first, then tightened into something perfunctory. Perhaps she was suddenly embarrassed, as a woman, of what we had been to each other as girls. I waved again and honked my horn loudly, all the way down the street, under the canopy of summer trees and out into the main streets of Horsehearts.

• • •

I drove west five miles to a restaurant called the Horsehearts Country Restaurant. I was supposed to have lunch with LaRoue. “Go see LaRoue,” my mother had said. “She’s been depressed and calling us for money.” She had not moved to Florida with my parents, but had stayed north to work grooming fillies at the racetrack. She also worked sometimes as a janitor for a restaurant. Just for today she would get the owner of the restaurant to pay her in food. “A meal for me and my sister!” she’d exclaimed on the phone in a way that alarmed me. Her teeth had fallen out, and her dentures hurt her, so she didn’t wear them, she said, warning me in advance on the phone.

She was waiting for me in the restaurant foyer. She’d grown even heavier and her smile was more tentative but also wilder in its red, toothless spread. Her short, corn-colored hair sat like a cap on her head, but it seemed patchy, and was shaved at the nape. She came forward and hugged me, and with one thick arm still around me, she showed me to our table. Her nails, I noticed, had been bitten so low they looked like ragged bits of shell inlaid in her fingers. Her cuticles were grimy and frayed.

“So how’ve you been!” she kept saying when we were seated. “Order anything you want!”

Creamed chicken specials, plates of fried vegetables, cheese sandwiches with soup. It was hard to think of all the ways you’d never come through for people, closed them out, never loved them, and still order lunch. “It’s difficult to decide,” I said.

“Order anything! I’ve got this. I’ve got this taken care of.” She smiled.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course! I’ve been really looking forward to this!”

“You have? That’s really nice.”

“Honest to God, Berie. It’s true; I’ve missed you. I think of you and say, ‘What is that girl up to? I need to buy her lunch. I need to buy her anything she wants off the menu.’ ”

When, three years later, LaRoue hung herself in the county hospital psychiatric ward, the nurses arriving too late to cut her down, I would remember this exuberance, the hollow nervousness and yet the genuine sororal note, rattling around there, trying to get out.

Probably I was a little formal. “Well, thanks,” I said. Though I longed to do something now, as her foster sister, I had done nothing for LaRoue, ever. All I’d ever wanted was to be with Sils. An act of substitution, as maybe love always was. The world with its thinkers and refugees and difficult news had come to my doorstep, as best it could, for short visits — Mr. Sabeke from the Congo, say, or José Meyers from Argentina — they had all come to our house, people just out of prison (a fellow or a felon? I’d asked a man named Ed Stedson, when I was ten, and he had laughed uproariously from his Hide-A-Bed), people came to us, orphaned and in need, like LaRoue, but all I’d wanted was my friend Sils, who would stay with me in my room and smile and smoke, keep the busy, roaring strange-tongued world at bay. In this, even if this were all, she could never become boring. If she lived where I lived then, at the moment, that was enough. If we spoke on the phone every night. If no one else came along, a visitor with snake oil and demands, to complicate our girlhood, it might stretch before us like a lovely beach. I’d wanted no other constructions. Only the simple, purgatorial life we had.

For LaRoue, I’d done nothing.

“I hope you don’t ever hold anything against me from when we were kids,” LaRoue said now. It shocked me.

“What things?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. I look back, and it seems I was pretty mean to you and Claude.”

“You weren’t mean.”

“Well, thanks for saying that,” she said.

“No. I mean it.”

“You weren’t mean. I mean it,” she chanted, and started laughing nervously. “See that table over there? I had to vacuum under it this morning and guess what I found?”

“What?”

“Money,” she said, as if this were a secret I especially would appreciate.

“Good,” I said. “How much?”

“A five.”

“Great,” I said, though I wished for her sake it had been a twenty.

I ordered chicken salad, and she ordered soup and a soft muffin. We talked about my parents, about Claude doing so well with his computer business in Baltimore, about dogs and fillies and jockeys. We talked about Horsehearts and how the place was fifteen years ago. “You and Silsby Chaussée,” she said. “You guys were inseparable; it was the talk of the town.”

“It was?”

“Well, sort of. Now it would take a lot more than that to get the town talking.”

I smiled, tried to enjoy myself. “Yeah, like what?”

“Like a convention center,” she said, and we both laughed loudly.

When we finished eating, the check never came to the table. We waited, then got up, walked out of the dining room, and in the lobby she introduced me to the owner of the restaurant, a big, hale and hearty type who put his arm around LaRoue in an affectionate way. It seemed nice, the way he was with her, and at that moment, for a split second, she seemed happy.

“You were up here for your class reunion?” he asked me.

“That, and to see LaRoue,” I said. I lied.

“Those can be something, those reunions,” he said.

“You’re on your hundredth,” LaRoue said, flirting with him in this provincial, teasing way.

“Hundred and fiftieth!” he exclaimed. “Reunions,” he mused. “They just keep coming at you, and what can you do?”

“That’s true,” I said. “What can you do?”

“Well, it was a pleasure to meet you,” he replied, and shook my hand. He patted LaRoue on the back. “Lunch is on me.” When he left, I could see that she was worried about something.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“Yeah. Sure.”

I had three hundred miles of driving ahead. “It was good to see you, LaRoue,” I said. I kissed her, threw my arms around her, taking in the big, ugly helplessness of her. Then I got in the car.

“You take care,” she said. “You take care of yourself.”

Driving alone along the Northway, feeling more haunted than I really had the courage to be, I cried in the car the way one does when leaving someone in a bitter and unbearable way. I don’t know why I should have picked that time to grieve, to summon everything before me — my own monstrousness, my two-bit affections, three-bit, four. It could have been sooner, it could have been later, it could have been one of the hot, awkward funerals (my grandmother’s, LaRoue’s, my father who one morning in Vero Beach clutched his fiery arm and fell dead off his chair mouthing to my mother, “Help. Heart. I love you”—how every death makes the world a lonelier place), it could have been some other time when the sun wasn’t so bright, and there was no news on the radio, and my arms were not laced in a bird’s nest on the steering wheel, my life going well, I believed, pretty well. It could have been any other time. But it was then: I cried for Sils and LaRoue, all that devotion and remorse, stars streaming light a million years after dying; I cried for the boyfriends I was no longer with, the people and places I no longer knew very well, for my parents and grandmother ailing and stuck in Florida, their tough, unchanging forms conjured only in memory: a jewel box kept in a medicine cabinet in the attic of a house on the moon; that’s where their unchanging forms were kept. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.

The next reunion, after that, five years later, Sils didn’t come, but sent flowers from Hawaii instead: To the class of ’74. Much love, Sils Chaussée. And after that I, too, sent flowers, and a note, and didn’t show up anymore.

YOU CAN wake from one dream only to find yourself plunged into yet another, like some endless rosary of the mind. When that happens, it is hard to glimpse what is not dream; the waking, undreamed world flies by you, in rushing flashes of light and air, in loud, quick, dangerous spaces like those between the cars of a train. There is nothing you can do. You walk in the sleep of yourself and wait. You wait for the train to pass.

Daniel believes he is working something out, wrestling with his heart, his work. He wants me to bear with him. He speaks in a coded way of all that is tempting and bewildering him, all issues of moral drunkenness. “It’s like I’m on a ride,” he says. “I go up, up, and up, and then wheeeee.”

“Except then the keys fall out of your pocket,” I say sternly. “And then you can’t get back into the house.”

He tries to look bemused. “I had a dream last night that I rounded a corner and someone lifted a gun and shot me, the bullet slamming straight through my sternum.” He pauses. “Do you think that’s bad luck?” He sighs, then begins to whisper. “I’m afraid of one day turning into my father. When he was my age, he left my mother for a woman twenty years younger.”

I say nothing. I melt a whiskey truffle on my tongue. In my vision there are lines running through everything; even the fabric of the drapes and upholstery seem to be raining, like the clothes in a portrait by van Gogh.

Daniel looks sad, draws his large man’s hand down across his face; his voice constricts with sorrow. “My mother, of course, took it with the great good humor with which it was intended.”

“She lost her mind,” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “She lost her mind.”

Eating brains — their spongy circuitry reabsorbed — we pretend is an ecological act. But perhaps it is more like monsters in a science fiction movie. Brains! Brains! Brains! As if we have run out of our own. So far in our marriage we’ve fought fear with ineptitude, indifference with indifference; the world blows up here and there, and our lives feel staked out in the embers, pitched and huddled in tents. We course through the hairpin turns of denials and shouts — it’s the end, it can’t be the end — we are in the loveliest city in the world: the expensive coffees, the red chemical sunset, the bateaux mouches flashing by each sooty church, lighting it up like a stage. In salons de thé the waiters set the crêpes aflame with Bic Flics pulled brusquely from their shirt pockets. The gendarmes hassle the African men in the métro; the poodles defecate with impunity on the walks. You can’t name your child anything not on a national list — and this is the most civilized city on earth! The city of spring and songs and other compositions of the heart. We feel ourselves moving so minusculely against some process, some momentum, that we become inadvertently a part. We feel too small to fight. Desperation, laziness, horror — they all resemble one another in their flickering movements within us, the same thrashing shorthand. Ma chérie, is this our stop? We feel enslaved — is that what it is? — in some turning: of milk to rot to dirt and winds and then to what — to sleep? to stars? Time for another constellation!

My husband has that look again, the look of how difficult the world is, life is, how sometimes you just want to go back to your house with the bushes around it and stay inside.

“Home,” he says. The idea of it: its lovely cheat and evasion; its capitulation to longing and rest. “Home, home, home.”

Where, though I harbor secret wishes of its burning, our life in flames, the crazy, wicked freedom of it, our chipping house will still be standing, safe and whole, the previous owner’s rubber bands still wrapped around the doorknobs. The animals we’ve sealed in, in mending and patching — the mice and larks — will wake and cry within the walls, then go still. The season will be spring, but the squirrels will have eaten and rearranged the bulbs, so that only one lone daffodil — a trumpet solo! — will be shivering in the yard, the flowering quince not flowering, the ground still too muddy for grass but on a sunny day ticking with hatching flies. At the Citgo station around the corner the sparrows will once again build their nest in the paper towel dispenser. “Don’t you feel, you must, like going home?” Daniel asks in a voice of such ailing homesickness it makes me smile.

Everywhere life is full of heroism.

I lean warmly toward him, try to get closer, in empathy and companionship, to study his face, so moist and young in these rains, to match or approximate it. “Don’t be lorn, don’t be blue, it’s only morn, and I’m with you.” I sing this, but he stiffens, then tries not to stiffen, forces a smile but moves too quickly away. He does this often now. Something, someone, keeps him, is kept, in some other corner of his life. I can’t follow him there — where that is, a place of woundedness, we are too without each other. To meet there would be to step into the strange dark rage of strangers. But I’ve accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change. I can feel the jangle and money of it. I will wait for him, I think: let him go and sicken himself, confuse himself, dash through the bad woods of himself. Love is perennial as the grass! I’ll wait for him, my heart in epilogue, knit and reknit, perhaps as it always has been. I’ll wait until I just can’t wait anymore.

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

——

THERE WAS an April afternoon, when I was in the tenth grade, that the Girls’ Choir had to meet for its final rehearsal before the spring concert. The sun was pouring in through the gym windows, and when we took our places on the bleachers we were standing in it, like something celestial lowered in. Our director, Miss Field, began to wave her arms at us, and a strange spell came over our throats. Our nerves tightened and all the bones of our ears fell in line. It was Miss Field’s own arrangement of a Schubert rhapsody, and the notes, for once, took flight. I didn’t, couldn’t, catch Sils’s eye — she was standing over with the sopranos — but it didn’t matter, I didn’t have to, because this wasn’t personal, this singing, this light, this was girls, after weeks of rehearsal, celebrating the ethereal work of their voices, the bell-like, birdlike, child-sound they could still make so strongly in unison. Strung along the same wire of song, we lost ourselves; out of separate rose and lavender mouths we formed a single living thing, like a hyacinth. It seemed even then a valedictory chorus to our childhood and struck us deep in the brain and low in the spine, like a call, and in its wave and swell lifted us, I swear, to the ceiling in astonishment and bliss, we sounded that beautiful. All of us could hear it, aloft in the midst of it, no boys, no parents in the room, no one else to tell us, though we never managed to sound that beautiful again. In all my life as a woman — which began soon after and not unrichly — I have never known such a moment. Though sometimes in my brain I go back to that afternoon, to relive it, sail up there again toward the acoustic panels, the basketball hoops, and the old oak clock, the careful harmonies set loose from our voices so pure and exact and light we wondered later, packing up to leave, how high and fast and far they had gone.