You Are Not a Stranger Here

I

THE BOY HAS given her hope, a hope Elizabeth never imagined she’d have again. Seven weeks in a row he has come to visit her. An awkward teenager, lonely she suspects, curious in ways that will not help him defeat others in the competition for success. He comes with a pad and pencils and asks her what she would like him to draw. Her walls are decorated with his work: sketches of the woods behind his house, the view from this window, but mostly self-portraits, conventional at the outset by the mirror, growing more expressive as they progress across the wall, his eyes growing small, his forehead larger, the pencil’s lead smudged to blur the lines.

His visits have given her weeks a purpose. She spends hours imagining their conversation, thinking of questions she wants to ask, and then like a nervous mother forgets them when he arrives.

From her window, Elizabeth watches the day ending out in the harbor. Cloud is filling the sky from the east, tarnishing the blue waves, leaving only a pale strip of light fading across the Atlantic horizon. Soon it will be time to eat. She will walk the tiled corridor, past the rooms of her fellow residents, into the dining hall, where Marsha, the cook, will wave to her, and she will take her seat at the table and consume the starchy food. If there is such a thing as a placid bell, then it is the bell that rings for supper at the Plymouth Brewster Structured Living Facility at five-thirty every day of the year. Hearing its soft chime, Elizabeth turns back into the room, and putting on her cardigan and slippers, commences her daily journey. Later, on her return, she sees the Primidone tablets waiting in their white paper cup on her bedside table, placed there as always by Judith, the staff nurse. For more than two decades, Elizabeth Maynard has done exactly as she is told and the voice of Hester, which has cost her so much, comes only quietly and intermittently. It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off. These last few weeks, try though she has, there have been moments during Ted’s visits when Elizabeth got stuck in the medication’s sludge, patches of time slowing to a halt. The boy has reminded her of what there is to miss. She only wants to know him as a person would. In her heart, she can’t believe this is too much to ask. It might do her good to have a little break, she muses to herself, placing the tablets at the back of her dresser drawer.

“STOP FUCKING TRYING would you!” his brother yells from downstairs as Ted stands at their mother’s bedroom door calling softly, “Are you awake?”

“If you’re not in my car in twenty seconds you’re walking!”

John shouts from the kitchen. Ted tries the handle, but as usual it’s locked. He wants to see if she’s okay, but there’s no time now so he grabs his book bag from his room and skips down the stairs.

In the car, his brother plays Rage Against the Machine loud enough to make the seats vibrate. He runs two stop signs and doesn’t speak the whole way to school. Finally, in the parking lot, Ted slips on his headset and a British rock star’s lilting voice sweeps everything from his mind: She walks in beauty like the night, ba ba ba ba ba da da, followed, as he climbs the front steps, by words he can never make out, Marilyn something, and then at last, as he turns into the corridor, the part he’s been waiting for, I’m aaaaching to see my heroine, I’m aaaaching to see my heroine, his head swooning to the rise of the vocal line, a line of bliss, followed by a tap on the shoulder—Mr. Ananian’s lips saying, “Turn that thing off.”

The stop button clicks in his ears.

“I’m not telling you again.”

Twenty-odd students slumped on their tan Formica desks, forty-five minutes of advanced algebra, not a hope of seeing Lauren Jencks. He feels ill.

“Oh my God,” he says, working a quizzical expression,

“I totally forgot my notebook—I’ll be right back,” and he turns into the hall, walking quickly away, the door slamming behind him.

“Way to go,” Stevie Piper says, giving him a thumbs-up as he darts out of a chemistry class. “You got to come tonight, man—Phoebe Davidson’s parents are outta town.”

“Sure,” Ted says, hurrying down the hall toward the art wing, where Lauren has life drawing. He’s nervous already about her spotting him at the door of the classroom, though he knows she knows he’s been looking at her for weeks, even months, ever since she arrived at school the beginning of term. Mrs. Theodopoulos has a photograph of a dog set on an easel at the front of the class and she’s using a pointer to direct her students’ attention to the dog’s ear. The kids, their backs to Ted, smudge charcoal on drawing paper, doing ears. Lauren’s in the second row: faded orange cardigan with the pockets stretched open, a bar of sunlight slanting across her back, a patch of her short brown hair shining above her ear, no earring. He loves the fact she doesn’t wear rings or necklaces or makeup and how large her eyes are and how she seems about ten years older than he is, as though she’s traveled the world five times over and for some mysterious reason, bad karma or whatever, is being made to repeat life in high school. In his room at night, when he demurely puts his image of her aside to jack off to the cruder images on the Net, he thinks she must want to tell someone how that’s been, to have to return from such distant places. If on certain rare occasions he does let himself undress her, she’s always on top, her back arched, her eyes closed, this look on her face as though she’s remembering another time, but then as he’s about to come she opens her eyes and leans down and they stare at each other before he rises up to kiss her, exploding. From where he’s standing, hard now thinking about her, he can’t see her dog’s ear. He leans his head in against the glass, trying to catch a glimpse of the side of her face, her hand, the drawing, leaving out of his field of vision the approaching juggernaut of Mrs. Theodopoulos storming the aisle, ballistic finger outstretched. She is halfway to the door when he sees her, the class turning now to watch, his heart thudding.

Giddy, he dodges and runs.

From the third floor walkway he can see across the courtyard, through the window, over Mrs. Theodopoulos’s shoulder, and into the first two rows of the art room. Since Lauren’s friends started laughing at the sight of him a few weeks back he’s known there is no point in playing it cool.

He stares at her without pretense. Bring it on, he thinks, bring on the ridicule, go ahead, call me pathetic and ugly and desperate, snicker at me, roll your eyes, say you’d never touch me in a mil ion years, that you’d all rather sleep with a monkey, go ahead, shout it.

No one seems to be watching him. They scrawl at their papers, minds still in bed, bodies drowsing through first period.

Then it happens. She looks up over her easel, and squinting, sees him. She smiles. He is sure of it. Lauren Jencks has identified him at thirty yards, and she’s smiling—at him or with him, he doesn’t dare to guess. He plays it cool, waves casually, starts walking away. It is decided then, he will take his tray to her table today, giggling friends be damned. He knows he must calm himself before they meet. In the bathroom stall he tries reading a page on the battle of Shiloh but gives up and hurriedly imagines four blond girls licking his naked body, chiding himself as he goes for his lack of originality, but relieved, when he is done, to breathe deeply for the first time that morning.

ELIZABETH WAKES TO colors more vivid: the Oriental carpet’s swirls of burgundy and gold; dawn kindling the sky an immaculate blue. She puts on her bathrobe and moves to her spot by the window. Planes of the rising sun sparkle in the courtyard’s frosted grass. It is the washed light of autumn that shone on the lawn of the hospital down on the Connecticut coast, the hospital where Elizabeth stayed a month the year before she and Will were married—this memory arriving now with unaccustomed ease.

He would come down from Cambridge on Sundays in his father’s old Lincoln Town Car. They’d take walks on the cliffs overlooking Long Island Sound. He was a bookish man, nervous. Like Elizabeth, he’d grown up in New England in a house of lapsed Episcopalians, raised like her on a liberal conscience, parents sighing resignedly over the New York Times, salvation—if there were such a thing—a promise of reform rather than redemption. Together she and Will managed hours of politeness with no mention of Elizabeth’s reasons for being in an institution—her little confusions, as her parents called them—the occasional trouble remembering where she was, the rarer sense she was being spoken to. Will was completing his doctorate in sociology at Harvard and they spoke of that. They’d met in his discussion section the semester before she’d taken a leave from Radcliffe, a school her parents still hoped back then she might return to.

Toward the end of her stay, Will had an appointment alone with her psychiatrist. Elizabeth behaved badly, listening at the door. “A mild imbalance,” the man said. She has never known if he was merely a sexist who thought her hysterical or a kind man who understood what Will meant to her, perhaps even a man who let his kindness supervene his judgment.

When Will asked him if they should still get married, the doctor asked if he loved his fiancée. Elizabeth never felt as safe as she did when she heard Will say, “Yes,” without stopping to consider. “Then you should marry her,” the doctor replied. After the wedding, they took her parents’ summer home in the town next to Plymouth, an old saltbox by the river, where her grandparents had lived all their lives. Just for a year, it was said, while Will finished his degree. No rent for them to pay, and he only needed to be in Cambridge twice a week. She can remember her dislike of the idea of living, however briefly, in that house, away from the city, in a place she’d spent months of her childhood, a house one branch or another of her family had lived in or owned for more than three centuries. The weight of the past felt so heavy there, it was hard to imagine a future. Will set his desk up in the parlor, next to the four-foot-high mahogany radio in whose bottom cabinets the old 78s of Beethoven and Mahler gathered their dust. Trying to read a book on the sofa in the afternoon, she had to work hard to forget the sight of her grandmother sitting in the chair opposite, napping through a summer rainstorm.

Before they were married they had talked about having children; they both wanted them. A bit of a strain, don’t you think? her mother said when she brought up the idea, their life together having just begun, no job for Will yet. But Will didn’t see any reason to wait. They were happy when she got pregnant. More than the wedding vows this meant permanence—a future they could predict.

“Beautiful morning,” Mrs. Johnson says, poking her head in the door. She has been the director of Plymouth Brewster all the years Elizabeth has been here. A gentle redheaded woman who sits with Elizabeth and discusses the books she is reading. “Don’t forget you’ve got a visitor this afternoon.”

Elizabeth smiles and Mrs. Johnson passes on and Elizabeth gazes again over the harbor. She sees people, tiny at this distance, heading out along the breakwater, leaning into the wind as they go. Yachts bob in the marina, their chrome masts ticking back and forth like the arms of metronomes.

Sun glistens on the water. The scene is alive with motion.

Nearly four hundred years since our family arrived on this shore, Hester begins, her voice cleaner and more vibrant this morning.

“Here we go,” Elizabeth says, taking a seat in her chair, “sing your little song.” It’s better when she’s able to affect nonchalance. Signs of care are like flesh exposed to her companion’s arrows. And what a beautiful season of suffering it has been. What principled wars. What tidy profit.

And the machines, they are enough to take your breath away. And all the limbs and eyes and organs of the children bled and severed for progress. And the raped slaves and the heads of boy soldiers crushed like eggs. Why, the minister might even allow us a dance. Perhaps to celebrate you, Elizabeth, a flower grown from the seed of all this. What have you done to correct it? Do you suppose the divines would have liked your country club, Daddy coming down the back nine, dark hands fixing Mommy a cocktail? Jitterbug.

“Lousy historian,” Elizabeth mutters, trying to maintain the dismissive upper hand. “You’re confusing all sorts of things.”

It’s been years since she’s had to argue like this. She has the energy, for now.

I’d forgotten, Hester says. You always believed books and their facts could save you. Haven’t done so well by them, have you?

Elizabeth laughs. “If I’d only known what a harsh woman you were.”

What? You would have refused my help?

“Is that what you gave me?”

And then the memory is there, the morning her contractions began: second day of the blizzard, 1978, the roads covered in ice and buried, the police saying no one was to drive, the hospital telling them they weren’t sure when they could send an ambulance. She lay upstairs in her grandparents’ old room, in the front of the house.

For hours she did her breathing as best she could, laboring there on the high bed, clutching Will’s hand. When the contractions got worse, her mother tended her, told her she had to be brave. Elizabeth begged for the doctor or drugs—something to blunt the vicious pain in her abdomen. In the moments of reprieve, she’d open her eyes and from the walls of the bedroom see the dead generations staring down at her: daguerreotypes of gaunt women and simian-faced men, stiff as iron in Sunday black, posed as if to meet their maker. As children visiting their grandparents, Elizabeth and her brother scared each other telling stories of the people who’d died in these rooms. The pictures seemed alive now, the ancestors’ rectitude offended by her abjection. She bit her pillow and sweated. Hours passed and still no doctor.

She heard Will land her parents whispering in the other room, saying, how could they move her now that she was so far along and the roads so dangerous? At six the power went out, leaving the house in darkness. For a few minutes, all that remained of the world was the seizing pain and the rush of the wind lashing the trees in the front yard. Her father lit candles, put batteries in the radio. It kept snowing. From downstairs, she could hear the news saying hundreds of people were stranded in cars on the highway and then the voice of the announcer telling citizens to remain in their homes.

Her mother gave her water and wiped down her face and chest. The pictures flickered in the shadows. Past one in the morning, in the fifteenth hour, long after she’d started to push, her mother left for a moment to find more towels.

Elizabeth lay on the soaked mattress alone, Will in the kitchen boiling water on the gas stove, her father yelling on the phone to the hospital, snow pressing against the glass, the flesh between her legs ripping. She felt blood leaking onto her thighs. Something started hammering at her temples. Her heart kicked. She thought she would die.

It was then she looked up in the candlelight and for the first time saw Hester standing in the far corner of that ancient, crooked, low-ceilinged room. She stood silent in her black dress and hooded cape, a woman of thirty with a face of fifty, plain featured, eyes of mild gray. Naive about nothing. A woman who had lain in this room on a winter night some centuries ago, Elizabeth understood, her husband at a trading post on the Connecticut River, her sister there to tend her, three younger children instructed not to cry, crying in the other room, twenty hours before she expired. A woman Elizabeth need give no explanation, her life reduced to a line in a letter written from one man to another. A line Elizabeth had always remembered from a summer past when her grandfather read them papers their ancestors had left in the house: Sad past words to report Hester has died giving me a boy. Elizabeth stared at the dark figure in the corner and would have cried out were it not for her worry that Will and her parents would think her crazy. Slowly and without a word, Hester walked to the bed. She placed a cold hand on Elizabeth’s brow. Elizabeth closed her eyes. She sensed Hester’s hands between her legs, holding the baby’s head.

She gave a final push. When she opened her eyes and strained upright, she saw the blue child. The umbilical cord had wrapped itself twice around his neck in her womb, pulling against his tiny throat, strangling him as he was born.

Will was the first to enter. In the instant before reason or compassion or duty retrieved him from the doubt of her sanity he must always have harbored, he stared at her as if at a murderer. In a rush, she explained how it happened, because what choice did she have then? How a woman had come and delivered the child, how the cord must have been coiled like that for weeks, and her parents wept and Will held his head in his hands. In the early morning, a nurse arrived and cut the boy loose.

“It’s not help you gave me,” Elizabeth says aloud from her chair by the window. “It’s not help you gave.”

She is thankful that for now there is no reply. Thankful too that the colors in her room beat once again with the pulse of life, the air and the blue ocean quickening to a new birth.

Sedation’s cloud is lifted. And Ted, Ted will be here soon.

THAT AFTERNOONS HE hears his voice coming up the stairwell from the front desk. Judith, the nurse, has bought her the Pepperidge Farm cookies she asked for and she’s saved juice from lunch along with two glasses.

Soon, he knocks on the open door. “Hey there, Mrs. Maynard.”

For years Mrs. Johnson has sent along the facility’s information to the high school volunteer program, inviting students to sign up for regular visits with an appropriate resident. Every autumn one or two come, but Elizabeth has never been lucky enough to have someone assigned to her.

Until now. He’s wearing a blue ski jacket she hasn’t seen on him before. His curly brown hair hangs down over the jacket’s high, puffy collar. The centers of his cheeks are red from the cold.

“You’re beautiful,” she says.

He glances back along the corridor, then down at the floor.

“That’s cool,” he mutters.

“I got us come cookies. Would you like one?”

He steps into the room, shrugging off his knapsack. She holds the plate up and he takes three Milanos.

“Wow,” he says, “you got a lot of my pictures up here. Did you have all these up last week?”

“I took down some of their dreadful watercolors so I have more room now. I like the portraits. They’re very good.”

“How was your week?” he asks.

Weirdly, the little brochure Ted got when he signed up for the volunteer program said this was the sort of question you weren’t supposed to ask the residents, because usually their weeks did not vary and it was best to focus on positive things. Ted has decided this is a crock of shit and figures this woman has lived through a week as sure as anyone else.

“Oh, it was just riveting, ” Elizabeth says with a big smile.

“Gladys Stein nearly expired in the midst of a bridge tournament. She was upset with Dickie Minter telling stories about Mussolini.”

He’s learned it’s okay to laugh at this stuff even if he doesn’t get it.

“And the food?” he asks.

“Factory fresh.”

They chuckle together, friends enjoying their joke.

“I kinda had this idea,” Ted says. “I was thinking instead of me drawing today, we could go for a drive. Would you be into that?”

Since her parents died, Elizabeth’s old friend Ginny is the only one who takes her out, down to Plymouth Harbor or for a walk on Duxbury Beach, no more than twice a year.

“That would be wonderful,” she says.

Donning the fur coat and hat her grandmother gave her as a wedding present, she leads Ted down to Mrs. Johnson’s office. There are only voluntary residents at Plymouth Brewster; it is no mental hospital with locked wards, but a place where people come to live structured lives. Elizabeth has never been much trouble to anyone at the facility. As long as they are back before dinner, Mrs. Johnson says, it would be fine.

“I USED TO drive a station wagon like this,” she remarks as they pull onto a highway she has not seen before. “Has this road been here a long time?”

“I guess like, yeah, since before I was born.”

Elizabeth laughs. “Ginny doesn’t want to upset me, you see.

They tell her familiarity is a good thing, so she takes me on the old roads. It would make sense if I were senile, I suppose, but really it is quite interesting to see this road.”

Soon they will pave it all, every marsh and fen. The animals will die and we will die with them. How much must be destroyed before people are satisfied?

She is quite an environmentalist for a seventeenth-century woman, Elizabeth thinks, but a hypocrite too, she tries telling herself: remember the diseases you brought, dear, remember the dead natives.

You think you haven’t profited from that? Hester stabs back.

“I was thinking maybe you could help me out with something,” Ted says. Elizabeth looks across the seat at him. His hair is a mess. He hunches forward over the steering wheel, racked with a worry she finds adorable. She is here in the car with him. No slowing paste in the brain.

Seconds come one after the other.

“By all means,” she says. “What can I do?”

“Well, see, there’s this person—she’s a girl. She goes to my school. And somebody told me it was her birthday soon…”

“You want to buy her something.”

“Yeah,” Ted says, relieved. “Yeah, exactly. But what?”

“I’m charmed that you would ask my advice,” she says. They pull off the first exit and into the parking lot of a giant mall, another place not ten miles from the Plymouth Brewster Elizabeth has never seen.

“We will find you the perfect gift,” she says, stepping from the car. “My mother was a great shopper. We would take the train down to New York and spend the afternoon picking out dresses at Bergdorf’s and then we’d have tea at the Plaza and stay the night there and examine shoes in the morning.”

She barely recognizes the playful tone she hears in her voice.

“I know a good piece of merchandise when I see it.”

“Cool.”

Elizabeth is able to dispense with the entirety of a store named T. J. Maxx in under five minutes. “Not us,” she says, gliding into the sunlit atrium, amazed at how easy it is to be gliding into the sunlit atrium, amazed at how easy it is to be here among people.

“What’s her name?”

“Lauren. But she’s not exactly, at the moment, you know, like my girlfriend.”

“Ah-hah, I see. Yes. This information is helpful. Here we are, good old Lord & Taylor, I think this will do nicely.”

“Oh, yeah, and her family—they’re rich. But what’s cool is she didn’t take a car from her parents, even though her stupid brother drives an SUV.”

“And does she live in a grand house?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty big. Down at the end of Winthrop Street, kinda near your old place. I’ve only driven by it a couple times.”

They arrive at accessories, Elizabeth fighting nervous excitement, recalling suddenly that the Lesters gave her a leather wallet for her wedding, embossed with her new initials. The Lesters, who came all the way from San Francisco and sat in the third row at Saint Andrew’s Church, and danced at the club after dinner: the men in black tie or officer’s dress, the women in chiffon or silk, glittering beneath the chandeliers, champagne on the porch, the sloping landscape of the golf course visible in the summer evening light, all of it just a bit more than her father could afford but what he and everyone wanted.

“A wallet perhaps?” she asks. “Cordovan with a silver clasp?”

“It looks kinda like my mother’s wallet. I mean, she’s got a cool wallet and all, but—”

“Of course, you’re right, we need something… contemporary.”

“Do you think it’s stupid to buy her something? I mean, she hasn’t even gone out with me.”

They pause briefly in luggage.

“What is it about her, Ted, what captivates you?”

“Well, she’s only been at school since the beginning of the semester, so she has friends but not really a clique yet. And she’s like an alterna-chick, you know, with her nose pierced, but real small, just a little stud, really tasteful, and her hair’s short and she wears great clothes, I guess like Euroindy-pop clothes. But that’s only part of it. I guess I just want to figure out what’s in her head, you know. Something about her makes me want to figure that out.”

Hester disapproves mightily of the cosmetics department.

Strumpets hawking vanity: this is what we have become. A month of humiliation wouldn’t cleanse the body spiritual.

“Days of humiliation went out a long time ago, deary,” Elizabeth mutters, “and besides, they suffer too,” she reminds her old companion, sensing the fatigue in the smiles of the brightly clad women behind the shimmering counters.

And shimmer they do, so fiercely Elizabeth wishes she had brought her sunglasses: the way the light hits the polished steel and glass, the glare of the tall orange display of a football player and bride, the picture of an ocean coming at her from the left, the saleswoman’s plucked eyebrow rising.

“Something for the holiday?”

Elizabeth breathes.

“Ted,” she says, suddenly imploring the lights to dim, “why don’t you explain to this nice lady.”

His cheeks flush red. “Well, ah, actually Lauren doesn’t wear makeup.”

Hester has noticed a large sign on the counter announcing a Thanksgiving Day sale for something called Egoiste perfume. Above the picture of the man’s naked torso there is a turkey in one corner and the cartoon of a pilgrim in the other.

“Don’t be silly,” Elizabeth says, “it’s just a bit of kitsch.”

“But I thought you said we’d get her something good,” Ted says.

“Oh,” Elizabeth replies, grabbing the nearest bar of lipstick, handing it to Ted. “How pretty that is, don’t you think? I think it’s pretty.”

“Ma’am, what are you doing?” the saleswoman asks.

“Nothing, nothing, it’s just that some people don’t like this—”

She has the sign now and is digging her fingers at the frame, trying to get at the poster, the sound of her fingernails extremely loud, the air all around beginning to hum.

“Lady—you can’t do that.”

“Stop shouting,” she says.

“Mrs. Maynard,” Ted says. “That’s the store’s display, maybe we should leave it there.”

“I know, Ted, I’m sorry, I agree, it’s just that it’s a piece of trash and it offends people and it needs to be gotten rid of, even though we all know Thanksgiving is a nineteenth-century invention, so why she should object”—Elizabeth has it now and begins ripping—“I don’t know, I guess the whole ego thing, just too much of it—”

“I’m calling security,” the cosmetics lady announces in a voice octaves lower than a moment before.

“Come on,” Ted says, taking Elizabeth’s arm even as her hands tear the glossy paper into ever smaller pieces. He’s afraid she’ll start crying like she did the day a few weeks back when he showed her the picture he’d drawn of her. He gets them quickly out of the store and onto the escalator.

She’s finished ripping, no more poster left. She stares forward now in what appears to be dread. He’s still got the lipstick in his hand but figures it doesn’t have a detector strip so pockets it as they head for the exit to the parking lot.

Crossing to the car, Mrs. Maynard still resting her hand on his arm, he thinks of his mother, who sits alone upstairs all afternoon, all morning too, coming down only for dinner, barely saying a word, her face almost dead, and how his father and brother say nothing. None of them ever talk about her when they go to the movies on the weekends, or when the relatives come and she stays in her room, or when Ted has a play at school and all week she says tomorrow, I’ll come tomorrow, and on Saturday night can’t look him in the eye to say she won’t make it. At first, Ted didn’t want to come to Plymouth Brewster as a volunteer. Enough already with the fucking mentally ill, for Christ’s sake, enough, but something made him come, and then Mrs. Maynard, when she asked him to draw, and he got to sit there and draw and have her ask him questions about the books he was reading and what he wanted to do, and how his car sounded in the winter, and what oil he used, and how much he’d weighed when he was born, just to sit there and be asked a hundred stupid questions while he drew pictures: it was all somehow worth it.

“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth calls out in a high-pitched voice as they get in the car.

“Don’t worry,” he insists, clenching the steering wheel.

“Don’t worry.”

Mrs. Johnson sees them from her office as they enter the lobby. “Oh dear,” she says. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Ted replies. “We went to a store, that’s all. Mrs.

Maynard, she decided she wanted to leave—nothing’s the matter.”

“Elizabeth?” the director asks. “Are you all right?”

She nods. “You must be tired,” she says, turning to Ted.

“You should go home and sleep.”

“Sure,” he says.

“Yes,” Mrs. Johnson agrees, taking Elizabeth’s arm, “it’s time for your nap.”

“DUUUDE,” STEVIE PIPER calls out that night, “check this out.” The bottom of a plastic gal on milk container has been cut off with a bread knife, a foil screen placed over its mouth, the Davidsons’ kitchen sink filled to the brim, the bottomless container lowered into the water, the pot lit on the screen, Stevie now slowly raising the handle, the motion drawing smoke down into the milk jug, which comes to hold an immense, dense cloud of marijuana. Stevie removes the foil, Ted puts his lips over the jug’s mouth, following it suddenly downward as Stevie plunges the handle into the water, the air pressure forcing the huge mass of smoke straight into Ted’s lungs, sending him reeling backward from the sink, against the corner of the granite countertop, into Heather Trackler, his feet catching on a half-full double bowl of cat food and milk, sending him onto the black-and-white tile, smoke billowing from his mouth, his butt hitting the strip heater with a harsh metallic crunch.

“Domestic FUCKING bliss!” Stevie cries, throwing his arms in the air as though he’s just crossed the finishing line of some Olympic event conducted entirely in his own head. He begins rejigging the hydraulic mechanism for another round.

“Oh my God, you guys,” Heather says, wiping Sprite off her cashmere sweater. “People live here.”

“You know what?” Stevie says. “I bet they fucking do.”

Ted nods apologetically, his mind beginning to sail. Lauren walks into the kitchen. He looks up at her from the floor, his hand splayed in a pool of milk, cat food all around him. He raises his hand to wave, feeling liquid drip down his arm.

“Looks like you’re having fun,” she says.

He experiences an overwhelming sense of gratitude that she is still wearing the orange cardigan.

“Duude. You gotta get up outta that food over there, man, don’t let it waylay you, don’t get detained by it.”

With Stevie’s encouragement, Ted rises and suddenly he and Lauren are face-to-face, as if conversation were now supposed to ensue. Stevie gazes at the two of them and with the wily eye of a stoner clocks their little tension. “So do you—,” he begins, but unable to manage, dissolves into a fit of laughter. They watch him because he is something to watch that is not each other. “So do you come here often?” he finally gets out, folding over in hysterics, slapping the counter, weeping.

“You’re such a loser,” Heather says. “Come on, you guys, let’s go upstairs,” and she leads them up the back staircase onto a landing, from where, through another open door, they can see a fully clothed boy standing in a nearly overflowing bathtub swatting at a floating house plant with a tennis racket, cheered on in his novel sport by three other boys gesticulating furiously, tubside.

“This is all so meaningless and destructive,” Heather says.

Ted risks a sideways glance at Lauren and is rendered momentarily inoperative by the realization that she was in fact already looking at him when he glanced, this causing their eyes to meet. At lunch—what seems a thousand years ago—she grinned twice at comments he made and none of her friends laughed.

Heather announces she is going to put an end to the bathroom vandalism and marches across the landing, calling out ahead of her, “Hey there!” leaving Ted and Lauren alone by the banister. Acid house pumps from the living room up into the brightly lit stairwell.

Stevie has advised Ted that if he finds himself toasted and needs to simulate normal conversation, he should adopt a simple compare-and-contrast strategy: state an uncontroversial fact about yourself—who you have for history, what you did last summer, et cetera—followed by a question eliciting the same information from the other person. This is what people do in real life, Stevie always says. Just behave as if the given circumstances were real.

The method seems partially effective until the music changes abruptly to Lou Reed, at which point Ted becomes convinced all remaining facts about his life are deeply controversial.

“Sorry Stevie was such an asshole,” he says.

“Whatever. You’re not joined at the hip.”

Lauren’s casual eloquence stuns him. “You’re right,” he says, “we’re not.”

Caged longing presses up through his chest and into his throat. He wants to tell her he’s never had a girlfriend, never even had sex, only been kissed twice, and that this makes him feel like an ugly creature and a freak, but he concludes these thoughts are better kept to himself.

“I love your sweater,” he says.

“Thanks.”

“And I like that thing on your neck—what is it?”

“Jade,” she says, touching it with her fingers.

“I bet it’s warm. It must get warm when it hangs on your neck.”

“This is criminal!” Heather yells from the bathroom.

“You’ll do time for this.”

“You want to sit down?” Lauren asks.

“Okay,” he says.

They cross the landing into what looks to be a guest room.

Lauren flops down onto a large white sofa. “I bet the Davidsons are drinking pina coladas in some beach hut on Aruba.”

“Yeah,” Ted agrees, “talking to friends about their good son Jack applying early admission.”

“Exactly.”

“My parents never go away,” he says. “Do yours?”

“Sometimes. They’re trite. They care about silly things.”

“Harsh.”

“Yeah,” she says. “It is.”

Ted perches on the edge of the couch. “You seem older.”

She turns to look at him, her eyes slightly narrowed, slightly blurred.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like you’ve experienced all this before. The way you don’t talk much, but like you’re thinking something instead, something you’re not saying. It’s odd.” He would like to put his hand behind her head and let it rest in his palm, perhaps taste the jade lozenge hanging round her neck. He wonders what he would know about her if they touched.

“I’m stoned,” he says, leaning back into the sofa. “If I say weird stuff, you won’t be offended, will you?”

She shakes her head. “I’m drunk.”

Ted closes his eyes. He sees Mrs. Maynard asleep in her room up on the hill. He’s never mentioned to his parents or his brother that he visits her, but then they’ve never asked about the program he signed up for.

“I went to this store today,” he says, “with this woman I visit over in Plymouth, for the volunteer thing. I draw for her usually, but we went out today. She kind of flipped out in the store. She ripped up this poster they had, and then…” He sees Mrs. Maynard’s face as she gazed, terrified, onto the highway ahead of them. “In the car she told me there was a woman sitting in the backseat, but that I shouldn’t look because she was angry. She said she heard the woman’s voice a lot but she only saw her once in a while.”

He opens his eyes and looks at Lauren. “The strange thing is,” he says, “I wasn’t scared. I mean, it was creepy, but I believed her.”

“You thought there was really another person in your car that you couldn’t see?”

“For her there was, yeah.”

To this Lauren makes no reply. They sit on the couch a while, listening to Lou Reed singing from downstairs. The borderline defeat in his voice seems alien to the objects in the room: the coffee table books, the dried flowers, the wafflepatterned bed skirts, the beige clock and ruffled curtains—these things they’re supposed to want one day. The objects persist blandly in the bland intention of their owners. For Ted, they have the sadness of the things in his own house, the maple living room set his parents bought the year he was born, the dining room table they used to sit at when he was younger, reminders of old marital hope. He and Lauren are just florid detritus in a room like this, drifting past on the dead river of time that never ceases here.

“I like you,” Lauren says.

Suddenly, Ted’s heart crashes into his rib cage. He hears George Clooney yell, “Lidocaine!” sees himself sped on a gurney toward a team of doctors, bright lights, IV drips, and he knows he is very high and all of a sudden absolutely happy.

“That’s so cool,” he says to her. “I got you some lipstick.”

And then Heather is standing in front of them, rage of a prosecutor emblazoned on her face, and she says she’s leaving, there’s another party at the Putnams’, and if they want a ride they better come.

II

THE HOLIDAYS BRING Christmas lights and family visits to Plymouth Brewster, along with the news that Mrs. Johnson is retiring at the end of the year. The new man, Mr. Attwater, young and handsome in a boring sort of way, wears dark suits and shakes everyone’s hand. The older women coo, the younger women are suspicious, the men play cards. Rehearsals for Our Town keep Ted from coming the first two weeks of December, though he calls to tell Elizabeth and says he’s sorry.

The second time he phones they speak a long while. Ted sounds reluctant to hang up. Finally, Elizabeth steels her courage and asks, “Have you seen Lauren?” They have not mentioned their trip to the mall.

“Yeah,” he replies with the quick, breathless voice she’s come to recognize as his unconscious signal of interest.

“Yeah, she’s in the play. I get to narrate what she does and stuff.”

“I’m sorry, Ted, that we didn’t get her a gift.”

“Oh no, that’s cool. I actually gave her the lipstick anyway.

She was kinda into it.” He pauses. “I’ve been sort of wondering, like when you were married…”

“Yes?”

“Or like before that, when you guys were dating… I mean at some point, you guys, like, got together so you must have let him know when it was cool to do that, right?”

“That’s right,” Elizabeth says. “He would call the dorm. I would tell him if I were free on the evening he suggested. He was very reliable in that regard. He always called when he said he would. You should remember that, Ted. Politeness is a tremendous asset.”

“Yeah, right,” he says. “But like after that, I mean after you decided to hang out, did you let him know when other stuff should happen, or did he kinda… let you know?”

“Oh. I see. You mean about sex.”

She can almost feel his wince at the other end of the line; she restrains a giggle.

“Yes,” he whispers.

“I’m afraid I’m not much of one to ask about these things. But you’re a good person. You’re kind. Be kind to her.”

“Okay.”

The next time he calls he tells her it’s coming up for winter break at the high school, and with performances and things he and the other volunteer won’t be back until January.

Elizabeth hadn’t been told about a break over the vacation, and she takes it hard. But Ted calls each week, once on Christmas, and with this she thinks she will get by until the day he returns.

Judith, the nurse, has grown suspicious of her behavior over the last few weeks, hearing her talk sometimes, and Elizabeth has begun flushing her Primidone down the toilet rather than risk discovery. She’s been on the drugs so long she’s forgotten many ordinary satisfactions. What cold water feels like in a parched mouth. The pleasure concentration on a single thought can yield. The days bring with them the pulse, the hum, joyous sometimes, terrifying others, but alive, full and alive. And they bring Hester, never now a day without her. In the midst of it all, there is so much she wants to ask Ted that she’s started making a list so she won’t forget.

NEW YEAR’S EVE begins with a clear, bright sky, flooding Elizabeth’s room in light. The annual party is scheduled for after dinner. Families will drop by in the early evening and everyone will be in bed by ten. It is Mrs. Johnson’s last day as director and she makes the rounds of the rooms saying goodbye. Some of these men and women she’s known twenty-five years. It’s just after lunch, as the sky clouds over and snow begins to fall, that she comes to Elizabeth. They start as they always do by Mrs. Johnson reporting what she’s been reading—a book written by a foreigner about traveling in America, she says, full of suggestions for places to visit.

She and her husband plan a trip across the country in the spring. She’s never been to the South and wants to go.

To snap pictures of plantations and muse at the faded grandeur of it all, I suppose. What a blissful forgetting it must be.

In the mornings, it is easier to reply without speaking aloud (at night it has become impossible), so Elizabeth tells Hester to be quiet, which for the moment she is. There is a sad expression on Mrs. Johnson’s face and Elizabeth wonders if she actually wants to retire, or if perhaps she has been made to by others.

“You haven’t been in touch with your husband, have you?”

she says. It is odd that Mrs. Johnson should ask this question. Elizabeth hasn’t spoken to Will in more than twenty years. He lives in California with a wife and three children.

Mrs. Johnson knows this well enough.

“No,” Elizabeth says.

“And Ginny, she’s never mentioned anything about other arrangements?”

“Is something the matter? Do I have to leave?”

Mrs. Johnson shakes her head. “It’s just that the new director and I have been reviewing things. I’m sure he’s right, there are issues of liability, legal things we have to be careful about. There was concern about your outing with Ted.

“Elizabeth, I tried to convince him otherwise, but Mr.

Attwater’s decided that as long as you’re here, you’re not to have visits from a volunteer. God knows it’s the last thing I wanted to tell you today, but I wanted it at least to be me who told you.”

Elizabeth tilts her head to one side. “No visits?”

Mrs. Johnson folds her hands in her lap.

“I see,” Elizabeth says. “Mr. Attwater. He’s decided.”

“Yes.”

HE CANNOT EVEN commence an attempt to concentrate on the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. As he sits in the cinema with Lauren on one side and Heather and Stevie, who’ve started dating, on the other, the deep irrelevance of the movie strikes him like an epiphany. In a few hours he, Ted, will be naked in a bed with a girl he loves, and the whole miserable material world seems a mighty petty thing in comparison to this. It seems it might never matter again. The date has been set for a week, her Christmas present to him whispered in his ear, the whole thing so damn sophisticated he feels like one of those men in top hat and tails who dance on moonlit balconies in the black-and-white movies his parents used to watch. “Suave” is the word.

Finally, the stupid flick ends and they follow the crowd out into the parking lot, where the snow has begun to fall heavily now and the plows have started their work for the night.

“You guys coming to the party?” Heather asks.

Ted squints, shrugs, looks off into the distance. “Sounds kinda cool, I’m thinking maybe not, though, you know. It’s getting late.”

“Hello? It’s New Year’s Eve.”

Lauren, dressed in sheer black club pants and a simple black leather jacket, interrupts Ted’s nonchalance by informing the others that her parents are away and she and Ted are going back to her place—no interruption of his hipness, he realizes, but a cubing of it.

“What do you think, Heather?” Stevie asks, rolling onto the balls of his feet. “Maybe you and me could go play some cops and robbers too.”

Heather gives a mocking snort. “Please. I’ll probably be bailing you out when you get arrested with your gay little drugs.”

“Have fun,” Lauren says, taking Ted’s hand, something she’s never done in front of other people. Instantly, he has an erection. As they walk toward his car, he wonders how premature premature ejaculation is, if men come miles from their girlfriends’ homes, if they’ll make it to her house in time.

On the highway, Lauren puts in an ambient house tape, a slow beat, the volume way down. Wet flakes zoom into the windshield out of the dark hills of the sky. The mall lots they pass are lit and empty. The stores are closed, the car dealerships vanishing beneath the snow. Tonight, Ted doesn’t see this familiar landscape as a present fact, but already as a memory, a scene he will one day recall. It’s strange and exciting to perceive things from such a distance.

He glimpses how beautiful even this world can be if you aren’t actually in it. On the passenger’s side, Lauren sits quietly, her leather jacket unzipped, the orange cardigan they’ve joked about buttoned underneath it. Her face has an oddly purposeful expression, her eyes fixed on the dashboard. In the month they’ve been going out, there’s been a fair amount of silence between them, which Lauren doesn’t seem to mind, though it makes Ted anxious. They’ve talked about her family some.

At first he thought she loathed her parents in the way some of his other wealthy friends do, with a kind of casual cynicism, as if their mothers and fathers were minor officials in the national corruption—illegitimate people living illegitimate lives. He’s always thought with bitterness it was a luxury to view your parents this way—as people strong enough to withstand your derision. But the more time he spends with Lauren, the more he thinks she understands this, that she could hurt her parents. Her determination, her careful plan for their getting together, it’s about something different, about being in control. Her house is a six-month-old mock château with a threecar garage, a fountain, and a turret. Inside, it’s wired like a spaceship: thermostats, alarms, humidifiers, key pads to control it all. Most of the time half the shit is broken, the living room tropical, the doorbell not even working. Her father spends evenings yelling at contractors. His work has something to do with money. They’re down at their condo in Florida this weekend with Lauren’s brother.

“Want a glass of wine?” she asks when they get into the kitchen.

“Yeah,” he says, “that would be cool.”

The high-ceilinged room is an odd combination of expensive chrome appliances and peeling wood furniture that looks like it was bought at a yard sale.

As Lauren hands Ted his glass, she leans forward to kiss him gently on the lips, a touch he receives, as always, weak kneed and nervous. He puts his free arm around her. He tries not to think about this evening in his own house, his brother out with friends, his father reading the paper in the living room, alone, his mother upstairs in bed, alone, their empty kitchen smelling slightly of the cleaning spray his father will have used on the counters after making dinner and washing the dishes.

“What’s up with the table?” he says.

“Having decrepit old shit you pay through the nose for is the latest thing. They can’t get enough of it. Perverse, isn’t it?”

Ted supposes that it is. She leans her head into the hollow of his shoulder and puts her hand in his back pocket, palming the cheek of his ass. He thinks they better hurry. Be kind to her, Mrs. Maynard said. He imagines he’s the only kid at his school who gets his romantic advice from a schizophrenic.

Taking his hand, Lauren leads him through rooms of fine rugs and distressed furniture, chandeliers and gilt-framed paintings, up a staircase wide enough to sleep on.

TIRES OF PASSING cars send arcs of snow into the air, dotting the skirt of her coat. She pauses now and then to wipe the fur clean with her gloved hands. Several inches have already accumulated on the road’s shoulder, but she manages all right in her boots, huffing a bit as she goes, unused to the exertion of a walk longer than the circumference of the grounds. In the hubbub of the New Year’s party, no one noticed her leaving. Headlights flash up into her eyes, pass, and vanish. Wind drives snow down out of the sky. She reaches an intersection and sees it’s the old Plymouth Road, gas stations on three corners now. She turns north, ears full of the storm and Hester’s voice.

You should have heard the animals dying that winter in the cold, how the horse groaned in the frost, sheep starving in their pens, snow past the windows. And you know my eldest died of her cough in my arms when the ground was covered and too hard to bury her, so she lay under a sheet in the woodshed, where for a month I saw her every time I went to gather fuel for our fire. And we weren’t the worst off, sick at least with diseases we knew.

“I don’t care,” Elizabeth says, though it isn’t true and she can’t help seeing Hester in the woodshed. Her responses go unheeded now in any case. She starts up a rise she can remember being driven along by her grandfather in his Packard.

Eighty years the owners of a sawmill and merchants through the Revolution, and of course, you know the cellar was fitted with a second cellar covered with a boulder lowered from an oak beam by rope, where our family hid during raids by the British, relying on the appointed neighbor—should he survive—to come and lift the stone when the soldiers had quit their burning. And merchants still in the early days of the Republic, selectmen at town hall, teachers, a judge, a colonel, a daughter ended in the river, never mentioned, a graveyard full of us. On the sidewalk, she shakes her head back and forth, back and forth. “I know this. What does it matter?”

Witnesses by news and action to the slaughters here and abroad; money in the banks that made the wars; snobbery; polite unspoken belief in the city on the hill and our place at its center; disdain; a preference for distant justice; lives of comfort made from other people’s labor; and don’t tell me it doesn’t matter, that it’s all too complex now, because it isn’t and you know it and we always have. One eye on heaven, the other blind.

At the top of the rise, Elizabeth sees the factory where they make cranberry juice and she remembers walking in the fields behind the house with Will, past the old bogs, thinking to herself how they would one day walk those paths with their child, how once he was born, life would be about the future.

The oval Ocean Spray insignia is painted in red and blue on the side of the building, perched there on the shore against the icy, churning sea.

Farther from the center of town, traffic lights hang over deserted intersections. She walks on and on past fields and houses, another group of stores, a liquor market, a fast food restaurant. She crosses the town line out of Plymouth and keeps going, the snow coming faster. At the highway overpass there is no more Howard Johnson’s, some other motel now.

“He’s out this evening,” Ted’s father said when she called from her room. Then she remembered him telling her he and Lauren were spending New Year’s together. At the end of Winthrop Street, he’d said her place was, the day they visited Lord & Taylor.

Brickman’s Funeral Home is still there, and the Catholic church, and the convenience store at the top of the hill.

Crossing the river, she walks by the old shoe factory, shops and apartments now, built on the ground of the ancient sawmill. She can barely feel her cheeks in the cold as she turns down her family’s street.

The old house sits back from the road, steep front roof with the long sloping back covered in a layer of white; weathered shingles detached in places; the shutters the same dark red they’ve always been. Her brother has never been able to bring himself to sell it, so it’s rented to people who usually don’t stay long. The crab apple tree still stands in the front yard, buffeted by the winds of another snow, and she thinks the house looks much as it must have the night she lay upstairs in the front room. Once the doctor told Will and her parents that a third of babies were born with the cord wrapped once around the neck—twice less often but not never—whatever unspoken suspicion they had ended. But the trouble was Hester didn’t leave that night. She stayed.

And occasionally Elizabeth couldn’t help yelling at her for not uncoiling her son as a midwife would. After a week, Will left to see his family. Her parents took her to the psychiatrist. In the fields she used to play in as a child—sold now—there are other homes, outsized in every way, their wide circular drives paved, lights sprayed down over the yards as if from the walls of prisons. Huge, gaudy places that dwarf the crumbling saltbox.

At the end of the street, she sees Ted’s car parked in front of the blue imitation of a château. She walks up the drive, past an empty fountain.

“WHAT ABOUT YOUR room?” he asks, passing it in the hall. She shakes her head. “We’ll use my parents’.”

They enter a room with dark satin walls, a canopy bed, undistressed, the carpet thick and plush. Lauren goes straight over and pulls the comforter off, throwing it onto the floor, leaving just the white sheets and lots of pillows. He wishes they were at least a bit drunk. This premeditation is unnerving. Standing beside the bed, they start to kiss. It’s harder than they’ve kissed before, their teeth knock, their tongues squirrel deep into each other’s mouths. The remove Ted felt on the highway is with him here again, his mind somewhere behind them, committing the scene to memory.

She takes his hand, puts it on her breast. He starts unbuttoning her shirt, wondering if he’s moving too fast, but her hands are rubbing the small of his back in encouragement and he guesses this is how it is done. The material is silky to the touch and the buttons come apart easily. When he has her shirt off, Lauren reaches over her shoulders and removes her bra. Her breasts are small, her nipples darker than he expected. He’s not sure what to do.

Neither of them is moving. He has no erection and doesn’t know why. She bites her lip and stares at the floor.

“Don’t you want to do this?” she asks.

Suddenly, awfully, she doesn’t seem older. Her knowing expression is gone. Replaced by awkwardness or confusion, maybe even anger, he can’t tell. He feels alone.

There’s a halfnaked stranger in front of him. He’s the desperate guy he always imagined he was. Being here feels wrong, but somehow too late. He’s supposed to know how things go and he doesn’t. He leans down and tries kissing the side of her face, which works more or less, their bodies moving closer, her breasts warm through his shirt. He never imagined she might not have done this before. The thought terrifies him.

“Yeah,” he replies, “of course.”

He sits on the edge of the bed and Lauren starts undoing his shirt. He doesn’t want to take his T-shirt off, but she tugs at the back of it, so he pulls it over his head, exposing his slender chest. They shift farther onto the mattress and he lies back. He’s expecting her to climb up and kiss him but she doesn’t. She unzips his jeans, which finally gives him his hard-on back. It’s almost as he imagined it: her on top of him, this inscrutable look on her face, only it’s not distance, nothing like that, and he’s not asking her about where she’s been or what it’s like to come back from faraway places, even though these childish questions are the ones he still wants to ask. He thought somehow he would ask them now.

But neither of them speak. There is the weight of her crushing his leg, a mole his fingers discover on the back of her shoulder as she kisses his stomach. It is weakness and helplessness he feels as she pulls down his jeans and boxers. They haven’t talked about sex, only Christmas night outside her house, as her parents watched from the kitchen and she waved to them and then turned to Ted and whispered, New Year’s, let’s do it then. Naked now before her, he wants to ask if he is actually male in the way other men are, or if he is missing something he’s never been able to see. His back arches sharply at the moist warm touch of her mouth on the head of his penis and he senses he can’t let her do this or it will be over, so he pulls her up by her armpits and rolls her onto her back. He looks at her mouth but avoids her eyes. Still they say nothing.

Lauren slips off her pants and underwear. She makes no sound as he leans down to kiss her nipples, but once he’s started, she puts her hands in his hair and guides his head into her chest. He shudders at the taste of salt on her flesh.

For an instant, he’s poised between drive and revulsion. He licks her breast. She presses his face harder against her skin. He wants it now, his whole body wants it. With his elbows, he presses against the inside of her knees, spreading her legs.

“Put it on,” she whispers. He leans back to grab from his jeans the condom he bought that morning. He’s never used one before but he’s seen pictures; he rolls it on as fast as he can. Then he crawls forward and she takes his penis in her hand. There are long, hideously awkward seconds as she squiggles farther down on the bed and he tries to push. His eyes are clenched shut. He hopes hers are too. Lauren takes a sudden, sharp breath, shouts, “Ow!” He holds himself above her.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I can stop.”

“No,” she says, her voice so deep and determined he doesn’t recognize it. She puts her hand on his butt and pulls.

He can feel her trembling. Her breath is short and tight as he uses the muscles in the backs of his legs to move in and then almost out of her. It feels involuntary. Beastlike. Good.

He begins to shiver and then with no warning comes in a rush, collapsing down onto her, burying his sighs in the pillow over her shoulder.

For a few seconds he lies across her, then rises, slipping out of her, leaning back onto his ankles. She covers herself with a pillow. He feels a wave of misery and defeat.

“Are you okay?” he whispers.

Her expression is blank, a little stunned. As though she has arrived somewhere only to discover it is no different than the place she has come from.

He leans to kiss her, but she turns her head. A bit of the lipstick he gave her is smeared across her cheek. He wonders why she ever decided to wear it. They remain there on the bed, neither of them moving. Hot air streams from a vent somewhere on the floor. His lips are dry and cracked.

From beneath the pillow, he notices a dark red stain seeping along the sheet. Looking down he sees his crotch is dark and wet. Lauren moves quickly off the mattress, wrapping herself in a towel, hurriedly moving to the bathroom. She closes the door behind her. He’s kneeling there, on this enormous bed, staring into a circle of blood.

THREE TIMES SHE presses the bell, but there is neither sound nor answer. The downstairs lights are on, the shades up, snow visible as it drops through the squares of brightness into the bushes. She is cold and would like to be inside. Trying the latch, she finds it unlocked.

“Hello?” she calls, standing in the huge front hall, beneath a sparkling chandelier. “Ted?” The only reply is a click followed by the soft rumble of the furnace.

The walk has tired her. She passes into the dining room looking for a place to rest. The table needs painting, though it looks like a fine, sturdy old piece of furniture. She sits at the near end, taking off her hat, opening her coat. They have gone for a walk, she decides, young lovers in the snow, walking this ground she used to play on. She feels herself kneeling on the veranda, her arms around Peck, the shaggy mutt, holding him as he barks at a bird in the yard, feeling the bark’s reverberations in her chest, her brother yelling at a friend up in the copper beech, the drone of the mower in the back field, air scented with grass; and she wrestles on the lawn with her father, trying to pry a coin from his fist. Her fingers run over the dent in his thumbnail; her mother says, Watch it, you two, leaning down to kiss her father. On the floor of the upstairs landing is a grate just above where her grandmother sits at her desk, and with her ear against it, crouched on the floorboards, Elizabeth hears the steel nib of her grandmother’s ink pen scratching the thick card stock she writes her thank-you notes on. She is playing by herself upstairs. The bedspreads have patterns of tufted cotton. The posts of her grandparents’ bed are of dark red cherry wood, tops carved in the shape of pineapples. Standing on the corner of the mattress, grasping the bedpost, her heels sink lower than the balls of her feet, stretching the joints of her ankles. The knife she uses to stab at the wood is the knife her grandfather uses to carve roast chicken on Sundays. Beneath the quick jabs of the silver tip spots of lighter red blossom in the dark varnish. Her heart beats so fast she can hardly breathe. Her mother shuts her in the guest room and in the evening her father spanks her over the edge of the couch, though she tells him she didn’t want to do it. The marks are still on the posts of the bed there in the candlelight, as the snow falls, and she lies grasping her mother’s hand, wishing the doctor would come to make her baby safe.

She wonders what other people’s lives are like. Ted halts at the entrance to the dining room, slack jawed. Mrs. Maynard sits in her fur coat at the far end of the table, staring out the window, a bleary, ruined look on her face.

“Mrs. Maynard?”

Elizabeth turns to see Ted standing in the door to the living room. He’s not wearing a shirt, only jeans. His hair is as messy as she’s ever seen it.

“Mrs. Maynard, what are you doing here? How did you get here? What’s going on?”

“I thought you’d gone for a walk,” she says. “It’s snowing, you know. I thought you and Lauren were on a walk.” She looks about the room as if searching for something. “I used to play on the ground this house is built on. Did you know that? Some say this place is an offense—ugly—that most all of what we’ve done since the beginning is ugly. But you’re not, Ted. I told you. You’re beautiful. The dead don’t remember you. It’s better that way. Will you come here and sit?”

Ted watches Mrs. Maynard lean forward and pull a dining room chair up beside her. She’s had some kind of break, he thinks. The woman must be with her. He crosses to the chair and sits.

From her coat pocket, Elizabeth takes the folded piece of notepaper on which she’s kept her list of questions. She pauses, then reading from the page, asks in a quiet voice,

“Did you ever think you meant more to your mother than her own life?”

It’s some nonsense she’s written down, Ted says to himself.

He still can’t figure out how she got here. He’ll have to drive her back.

“I’ll just read them, Ted, and then you can… What is your mother’s name?”

The roads will be bad by now; he doesn’t have snow tires. It will take time.

“Mrs. Maynard—”

“Do you exist as a judgment of her? What does it feel like to be in her arms?”

Ted would like her to be quiet now. There is so much to think about. For ten minutes he stood by the bathroom door, calling softly, “Are you all right?” but Lauren said nothing, and all he could think of was her disappointment.

“Can you see your mother’s face, or is it so familiar you don’t see it? Do you feel that you know her?”

Elizabeth looks up and sees tears running from Ted’s impassive eyes. She puts aside her list and lifts her hands to his cheeks. At her touch, his mouth trembles and he starts to sob.

You and all the inheritors of wealth who think life is a matter of perfected sentiment. You are wrong.

Elizabeth is exhausted. She does not argue. The lights in the room stream into her eyes like refulgent dawn. At last, she feels the warmth of her son’s tears in the palms of her hands.