Secrets and Surprises Part 6

Nickel brought me here to live. I was living with my aunt, and the baby, and waitressing the night shift at a restaurant. I lived with her when I was pregnant and for nearly a year after the baby was born, with her caring for the baby while I worked, until she told me she was getting married.

Nick came for me in his old Mercedes, with a velvet-covered, foam-padded board for a front seat, and drove us to Carlos' house. All the time I was hoping he'd tell me to come to his house-that his large, scarred hand would shyly slip into mine, and that I would go with him. The wind chimes dangled from the handle of the glove compartment and the baby kept lunging for them. Our cat was in the back seat, pacing, meowing. She didn't like living with the gray cat and ran away our first week at Carlos' house. Inside the car were little square mirrors. There was a full moon, and when the trees were not dense along the road I could c.o.c.k my head and see my profile in the mirror glued on the pa.s.senger-side window, or bend forward to take the chimes out of the baby's sticky fist and see my eyes in the mirror on the dashboard. Nick was grumbling about what a bad thing it was that the Ma.s.s was no longer said in Latin. The front left headlight had burned out, and he smoked gra.s.s and drove seventy all the way there. No cop had ever stopped the car.

I first met Nick at the restaurant about a month before. He was there trying to sober up Dominic. It was the end of my shift. When I got off, I went out to my aunt's car, which I parked in the field behind the place, and saw the two of them, in the Mercedes, doors thrown open, weeping. Dominic was alcohol-sick, and Nick was sick of being called from bars to round him up. I talked to them, and pretty soon we started to laugh. Dominic pa.s.sed out in the back seat, and Nick and I drove for hours, going in circles, because he was a strange man I had just met and I was afraid to go anywhere with him. I told him about my baby, my aunt. He told me that he had lived with a woman named Julie for seven years. He had met her when he went to college in the Hudson Valley in 1965. Her father gave them money. They always had money. Every Valentine's day she cut hearts out of red paper and wrote love messages on them and glued them together in a circle, points touching. He took his hands off of the wheel, curling his fingers and looking into the empty circle between them. We went to a bar, had three drinks apiece and danced. We went back to the car and he opened the door for me. I sat down and put my hands beside me, bracing myself already for his fast driving, and it shocked me to feel the material: I was confused and thought that it was something living that I was sitting on-soft, chilly moss. The dome light came on again when his door opened, and I looked down to see the royal-blue velvet. In the back seat Dominic was very still, no expression on his face, his hand cupped over his fly.

We drove a long way without speaking, until a big black dog ran in front of the car.

"Do you have a dog?" I said.

He shook his head no. "Dime's got five cats."

"Does she really love you?"

"I don't know. I guess so."

"Should I stop asking questions?"

"I'm not giving very good answers."

"Aren't you afraid to drive so fast?"

"I used to work in the pits, repair race cars." He turned his scarred hand toward me. "I don't have any awe of cars."

"There," he said, pointing across a field. "That's where I live."

The silhouette of a big barn, no house nearby. No lights on in the barn.

"I could take you in," he said.

"No," I said, afraid for the first time. "I don't want to go in there."

"Neither do I," he said.

We drove to the end of that road and turned and began to climb a mountain. There were more stars, suddenly. Out of habit, I looked for the Big Dipper. It was as though the small mirror was a magnet-I kept looking into my own eyes.

We went to Dominic's house. There was no phone to call my aunt, and in my sleepy confusion, as I watched Nick load logs into the wood stove, I held my hand over my heart and sent her telepathic messages that I was all right. He put on a light and we helped Dominic to bed and pulled the cold covers over him. I saw the scar clearly then-a thick jagged scar still deep-pink and not very old, from thumb to fourth finger.

"You want to know about my life?" he said. "I was born in China. No kidding. My father was with the emba.s.sy-you don't believe me? I don't remember anything about it, though. We left before I was three."

My eyes moved from Dominic's bed in the corner of the room to a row of vacuum cleaners lined as straight as soldiers, and from there to the only table in the room where there was a mannequin head with a wide-brimmed black hat.

"He repairs vacuum cleaners," Nick said. "He's been my friend since we were twelve years old. Really. Don't you believe that?" He struck a long wooden match on the side of the stove and held the flame over the bowl of a small ivory pipe.

When I woke up it was getting dark. Nick was breathing into my hair. Dominic was sitting on the floor surrounded by his tools, repairing a vacuum cleaner, able to concentrate as though he'd never pa.s.sed out the night before.

"I thought you should wake up," Nick said, his hand on mine as though he were consoling a patient. I was sprawled in a pile of blankets and quilts that seemed about three feet high. "You've been asleep for almost fourteen hours."

When I told him my aunt was getting married, he told me I should go live with the marionette-maker. They call him that instead of calling him by his real name because his profession interests them. Formerly he was in medical school. Formerly a fiddle player.

His marionettes are made of cherry wood and peach wood, some of birch. They are unicorns and bears and huntsmen. He has pa.s.sed some on to a friend, a silversmith, to sink eyes of silver into them. There is a green-jacketed huntsman with silver eyes, and there is a shapeless cow with a ridge of fox fur down its back and amber beads for eyes. Sometimes he hangs them on strings from the ceiling beams, and the slits and circles of eyes glow at night like the eyes of nightmare demons. The baby is not afraid of any of them. She has broken pieces of some of them and understands their fragility-a bit of unicorn horn, a sliver of claw.

It is sad when Kirk comes the last Sat.u.r.day of every month and collects them for the drive to New York. The ones that have been around a long time seem like friends, and it reminds me of a funeral when they are laid in layers of white towel in boxes and carried to Kirk's VW bus.

"It would be good if you could make more people and less animals," Kirk says. But he knows that Carlos will carve whatever he pleases. He lingers by our stove, accepts a mug of tea with cloves and honey.

"What do I want to drive to New York for?" he always says. It is his mother's shop that sells the marionettes.

Carlos' father was Mexican, his mother Scandinavian. Carlos does not look as if he belongs to any nationality. He is six three, almost too tall for his house, with thick curly red hair and a blond beard streaked with gray. The baby watches him move around the house, watches him carving and painting. It is clear from her expression that she already understands that men are to be respected. He is fond of her and will sometimes call her "my baby," although he has never asked who her father is.

We came to Carlos' because Nick told me Carlos was a kind person who wanted a woman to live with him. I went feeling like a prost.i.tute, but it was weeks before he touched me. The cats and the dog were more affectionate-and he tried to keep the animals away, afraid that they would overwhelm us. The baby missed her cat when it ran away, though, and quickly befriended all of them.

I looked for clues about him in the old cabinet above the bathroom sink that he used for a medicine cabinet. I found gauze and adhesive, tweezers, aspirin, a jar of crystallized Clover honey, a pair of socks folded small, and a card decorated with a pressed yellow field flower-the sort of card you'd scotch-tape to a gift-with nothing written inside. There was a box of Cepacol throat lozenges. There was a paperback book about megavitamin therapy.

That was the end of my first week in his house, and it frightened me the way I felt about him, as though I could love any man.

a a a Kirk is apologetic. I have heard people described as shrinking before, but this is the first time I have understood what a person who is shrinking looks like. He opens his mouth, clenching his teeth; his neck disappears into his sweater like a turtle's neck.

He has not been to New York. Before he got ten miles down the road, his bus was stopped by the cops. At first he is so funny, cringing, hating the cops, that Carlos is amused. There were all those b.u.mper stickers: NO NUKES; I AM A c.o.o.n HUNTER; HONK IF IT'S MY BIRTHDAY. And on the side of his bus Kirk's brother had painted gypsy women, dancing in a field with blue smoke blowing through it. Kirk's headlight was burned out. The cops went mad looking for drugs, with Kirk telling them his rights all along: they couldn't search the bus unless they saw something, or they had a warrant (c.o.c.ky because he had nothing with him).

They lifted the lid of the cardboard box and smiled to each other as they saw the packages of white towels. The tall old cop was furious when he unwrapped the towel and saw a smirking bear in a painted vest. His partner smelled it. Nothing. They made Kirk walk-to see if he could walk a straight line. He thought then that they would pretend that he had failed and run him in. But when he turned, they were huddled together, no longer even watching. The tall old cop stayed where he was, and the other one-who looked to Kirk as if he was a little stoned himself-went to the cop car and opened the trunk and came back with an ax. They placed the bear between them as Kirk watched. Then the young funny-faced cop whomped the ax through the center of it. The bear split into two halves, exposing the pale peach wood inside, where it had not been oiled. The funny-faced cop bent over it, squinted and picked up one half, sniffed again. They gave him a warning ticket to get the headlight fixed and drove away.

Carlos listened, transfixed as if a guru were speaking, the expression on his face somewhere between joy and wonder. That expression never meant that he was feeling good.

We followed Kirk out of the house, walking single file on the shoveled path, the baby taking clumsy baby steps beside me. They had not disturbed the swathed marionettes in the rest of the box. On the front seat of the van, along with a horseshoe-shaped mirror Kirk was taking to his mother and an unopened bag of licorice, lay the bear. It had been neatly chopped, exactly in the middle. The pieces lay side by side. Before I saw that, I hadn't been as awed by Carlos' profession as the others, but when I saw it destroyed, I was as moved as if he had created something that was living, that they had cut open.

Kirk's teeth were chattering. He wanted both of them to sue the cops. Cops couldn't ax your possessions at will.

Carlos stared through the window sadly. He didn't open the door or touch the bear.

Kirk, neck still hunched into his shoulders, said he couldn't get it together to go to New York now.

We sat by the stove, as lost in our own silences as if we were stoned.

When the baby cried, Kirk went out to the bus and got the licorice. She sucked a piece and spit it out. He took a circle of licorice from the bag and skipped it across the floorboards. She watched it and smiled. He flipped another out of his fingers and she smiled and went for it.

It has made Carlos more sure that he is right: there is nowhere in the United States safe to bring up a baby.

He is so good to us that I hardly ever think about Nick anymore, though tonight Nick is coming to the house, and they are going to shoot pool at the bar where Nick and I once danced.

I am reading a book about ant societies. I am learning to type on a tall Royal typewriter lent to me by Kirk's brother. The baby, asleep in the coc.o.o.n of Carlos' coat, with Bat the Cat curled against her, sucks her first finger (she has never sucked her thumb). I part the material because she is too warm, her forehead pale-pink and sweaty. She has a small blue vein just at her temple. When we lived at my aunt's house I could hear, at night, her whispered prayers: "Please G.o.d, please King Christ, she's a girl-make the vein in her face go away." Her voice at night was nice to listen to-the prayers were so logical, all the things I would have forgotten to ask for, and she breathed them in a rhythm that came fast and slow, like a music-box song.

Carlos made my aunt two marionettes: a bride and a groom, with pointed silk shoes on the bride and rabbit-fur slippers on the groom. They both wrote letters to thank him. They have never asked us, since I came here, to come to visit.

At dusk Nick comes, a bottle of beer in his hand, his gray knit stocking cap lowered over his eyebrows. I am always happy to see him. I never see him alone, and I have never properly thanked him for bringing me here. The last time he came, when he got a sliver of wood in his thumb from stroking an unfinished marionette and I tweezed it out, I wanted to hold his hand longer than necessary to tweeze; I thought that I'd close the bathroom door and say thank you, but he was eager to be back in the living room, embarra.s.sed to have cried out.

From the front window I watch them go down the plank from door to field, and over to Nick's car. The baby waves, and they wave back. The car starts and fishtails out of the snowy driveway. The baby looks to me for amus.e.m.e.nt. I settle us by the fire, baby on my lap, and do what she likes best: I seat her facing me and bend my head until my lips graze the top of her head, and softly sing songs into her hair.

He does not know what childhood diseases he has had. He thinks he remembers itching with the measles.

He has lost his pa.s.sport, but has extra pa.s.sport photographs in a jar that once was filled with Vaseline.

With Nick and Dominic he plays Go on Mondays.

He washes his own sweaters, and shapes them.

He can pare radishes into the shape of rosebuds.

The woman he lived with five years before, Marguerite, inspired him to begin making the marionettes because she carved and painted decoys. Once he got furious with her and pulled all her fennel out of the garden before it was grown, and she came at him screaming, punching him and trying to push him over with the palms of her hands.

I practice typing by typing these facts about him. He nods his head only-whether to acknowledge that these are facts (some told to me by Nick) or because my typing is improving, I don't know. Sometimes I type lies, or what I think are lies, and that usually makes him laugh: He secretly likes Monopoly better than Go.

He dreams of lactobacilli.

He wants a Ferrari.

I have typed a list for him that says I was born to parents named Toni and. Tony, and that they still live in Virginia, where I grew up. That I have no brothers or sisters who can console them for their wild child, who wanted to run away to New York at seventeen. When I was eighteen, they sent me to live with my aunt in Vermont, and I went through a year and a half of college at Bennington. I fell in love with a musician. We skied cross-country (I was more timid than my parents knew), and in the spring he taught me to drive a car. I learned to like Mexican food. I learned to make cheese, and to glaze windows. I ended the list here; I wanted him to ask if this man was the baby's father, where he went, what my life was really like before I met that man, if I was happy or sad living in my aunt's house. I have told him a lot about myself. Sometimes I've talked for so long that we are both left exhausted. He is so good to us that I want him to remember these facts: height and weight and age, and details of my childhood, color preferences, favorite foods. Sometimes, in his quiet way, he'll ask a question, say he understands. Last week, after I had rambled on for hours, I stopped abruptly. He knew he had to give something. He was painting a unicorn white; it was suspended from the beam with fishline so he could paint it all at once and let it air-dry, steadying it only at the last beneath a hoof, then dabbing paint on the last spot of bare wood. He took a deep breath, sighed and began: Should he raise chickens? Do we want our own eggs, so we will not have to rely on Dime?

Tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day or night, we have to talk.

I have to know if we are to stay always, or for a long time, or a short time.

When he talked to me about eggs, I went along with his conversation. I said we should get another hive, make more honey.

We are thinking about the spring.

I pick up the baby's Christmas present from Nick: an Octascope (a kaleidoscope without the colored gla.s.s), which she uses as a toy to roll across the floor. I hold it and feel as powerful raising it to my eye as a captain with his periscope. I aim it at the two toys suspended from the beams, a camel and a donkey, and watch them proliferate into a circular zoo. I put on my jacket and go to the door and open it. It closes behind me with a tap. I have never before lived where there is no lock on the door. I thought that a baby would make demands until I was driven crazy. When I step out, she is silent inside, dog curled beside her, waiting. I raise the Octascope to eye level, and in floods the picture: the fields, spread white with snow, the palest ripple of pink at the horizon-eight triangles of the same image, as still as a painted picture when my hand is steady on the Octascope.

Bat the Cat darts from under a juniper bush to crouch between my legs. It will rain, or snow. Pink blurs to pearly gray.

This is the dead of winter.

Weekend.

O.

n Sat.u.r.day morning Lenore is up before the others. She carries her baby into the living room and puts him in George's favorite chair, which tilts because its back legs are missing, and covers him with a blanket. Then she lights a fire in the fireplace, putting fresh logs on a few embers that are still glowing from the night before. She sits down on the floor beside the chair and checks the baby, who has already gone back to sleep-a good thing, because there are guests in the house. George, the man she lives with, is very hospitable and impetuous; he extends invitations whenever old friends call, urging them to come spend the weekend. Most of the callers are his former students-he used to be an English professor-and when they come it seems to make things much worse. It makes him much worse, because he falls into smoking too much and drinking and not eating, and then his ulcer bothers him. When the guests leave, when the weekend is over, she has to cook bland food: applesauce, oatmeal, puddings. And his drinking does not taper off easily anymore; in the past he would stop cold when the guests left, but lately he only tapers down from Scotch to wine, and drinks wine well into the week-a lot of wine, perhaps a whole bottle with his meal-until his stomach is much worse. He is hard to live with. Once when a former student, a woman named Ruth, visited them-a lover, she suspected-she overheard George talking to her in his study, where he had taken her to see a photograph of their house before he began repairing it. George had told Ruth that she, Lenore, stayed with him because she was simple. It hurt her badly, made her actually dizzy with surprise and shame, and since then, no matter who the guests are, she never feels quite at ease on the weekends. In the past she enjoyed some of the things she and George did with their guests, but since overhearing what he said to Ruth she feels that all their visitors have been secretly told the same thing about her. To her, though, George is usually kind. But she is sure that is the reason he has not married her, and when he recently remarked on their daughter's intelligence (she is five years old, a girl named Maria) she found that she could no longer respond with simple pride; now she feels spite as well, feels that Maria exists as proof of her own good genes. She has begun to expect perfection of the child. She knows this is wrong, and she has tried hard not to communicate her anxiety to Maria, who is already, as her kindergarten teacher says, "untypical."

At first Lenore loved George because he was untypical, although after she had moved in with him and lived with him for a while she began to see that he was not exceptional but a variation on a type. She is proud of observing that, and she harbors the discovery-her silent response to his low opinion of her. She does not know why he found her attractive-in the beginning he did-because she does not resemble the pretty, articulate young women he likes to invite, with their lovers or girl friends, to their house for the weekend. None of these young women have husbands; when they bring a man with them at all they bring a lover, and they seem happy not to be married. Lenore, too, is happy to be single-not out of conviction that marriage is wrong but because she knows that it would be wrong to be married to George if he thinks she is simple. She thought at first to confront him with what she had overheard, to demand an explanation. But he can weasel out of any corner. At best, she can mildly fl.u.s.ter him, and later he will only blame it on Scotch. Of course she might ask why he has all these women come to visit, why he devotes so little time to her or the children. To that he would say that it was the quality of the time they spent together that mattered, not the quant.i.ty. He has already said that, in fact, without being asked. He says things over and over so that she will accept them as truths. And eventually she does. She does not like to think long and hard, and when there is an answer-even his answer-it is usually easier to accept it and go on with things. She goes on with what she has always done: tending the house and the children and George, when he needs her. She likes to bake and she collects art postcards. She is proud of their house, which was bought cheaply and improved by George when he was still interested in that kind of work, and she is happy to have visitors come there, even if she does not admire them or even like them.

Except for teaching a night course in photography at a junior college once a week, George has not worked since he left the university two years ago, after he was denied tenure. She cannot really tell if he is unhappy working so little, because he keeps busy in other ways. He listens to cla.s.sical music in the morning, slowly sipping herbal teas, and on fair afternoons he lies outdoors in the sun, no matter how cold the day. He takes photographs, and walks alone in the woods. He does errands for her if they need to be done. Sometimes at night he goes to the library or goes to visit friends; he tells her that these people often ask her to come too, but he says she would not like them. This is true-she would not like them. Recently he has done some late-night cooking. He has always kept a journal, and he is a great letter writer. An aunt left him most of her estate, ten thousand dollars, and said in her will that he was the only one who really cared, who took the time, again and again, to write. He had not seen his aunt for five years before she died, but he wrote regularly. Sometimes Lenore finds notes that he has left for her. Once, on the refrigerator, there was a long note suggesting clever Christmas presents for her family that he had thought of while she was out. Last week he scotch-taped a slip of paper to a ca.s.serole dish that contained leftover veal stew, saying: "This was delicious." He does not compliment her verbally, but he likes to let her know that he is pleased.

A few nights ago-the same night they got a call from Julie and Sarah, saying they were coming for a visit-she told him that she wished he would talk more, that he would confide in her.

"Confide what?" he said.

"You always take that att.i.tude," she said. "You pretend that you have no thoughts. Why does there have to be so much silence?"

"I'm not a professor anymore," he said. "I don't have to spend every minute thinking."

But he loves to talk to the young women. He will talk to them on the phone for as much as an hour; he walks with them through the woods for most of the day when they visit. The lovers the young women bring with them always seem to fall behind; they give up and return to the house to sit and talk to her, or to help with the preparation of the meal, or to play with the children. The young woman and George come back refreshed, ready for another round of conversation at dinner.

A few weeks ago one of the young men said to her, "Why do you let it go on?" They had been talking lightly before that-about the weather, the children-and then, in the kitchen, where he was sitting sh.e.l.ling peas, he put his head on the table and said, barely audibly, "Why do you let it go on?" He did not raise his head, and she stared at him, thinking that she must have imagined his speaking. She was surprised-surprised to have heard it, and surprised that he said nothing after that, which made her doubt that he had spoken.

"Why do I let what go on?" she said.

There was a long silence. "Whatever this sick game is, I don't want to get involved in it," he said at last. "It was none of my business to ask. I understand that you don't want to talk about it."

"But it's really cold out there," she said. "What could happen when it's freezing out?"

He shook his head, the way George did, to indicate that she was beyond understanding. But she wasn't stupid, and she knew what might be going on. She had said the right thing, had been on the right track, but she had to say what she felt, which was that nothing very serious could be happening at that moment because they were walking in the woods. There wasn't even a barn on the property. She knew perfectly well that they were talking.

When George and the young woman had come back, he fixed hot apple juice, into which he trickled rum. Lenore was pleasant, because she was sure of what had not happened; the young man was not, because he did not think as she did. Still at the kitchen table, he ran his thumb across a pea pod as though it were a knife.

This weekend Sarah and Julie are visiting. They came on Friday evening. Sarah was one of George's students-the one who led the fight to have him rehired. She does not look like a troublemaker; she is pale and pretty, with freckles on her cheeks. She talks too much about the past, and this upsets him, disrupts the peace he has made with himself. She tells him that they fired him because he was "in touch" with everything, that they were afraid of him because he was so in touch. The more she tells him the more he remembers, and then it is necessary for Sarah to say the same things again and again; once she reminds him, he seems to need rea.s.surance-needs to have her voice, to hear her bitterness against the members of the tenure committee. By evening they will both be drunk. Sarah will seem both agitating and consoling, Lenore and Julie and the children will be upstairs, in bed. Lenore suspects that she will not be the only one awake listening to them. She thinks that in spite of Julie's glazed look she is really very attentive. The night before, when they were all sitting around the fireplace talking, Sarah made a gesture and almost upset her winegla.s.s, but Julie reached for it and stopped it from toppling over. George and Sarah were talking so energetically that they did not notice. Lenore's eyes met Julie's as Julie's hand shot out. Lenore feels that she is like Julie: Julie's face doesn't betray emotion, even when she is interested, even when she cares deeply. Being the same kind of person, Lenore can recognize this.

Before Sarah and Julie arrived Friday evening, Lenore asked George if Sarah was his lover.

"Don't be ridiculous," he said. "You think every student is my lover? Is Julie my lover?"

She said, "That wasn't what I said."

"Well, if you're going to be preposterous, go ahead and say that," he said. "If you think about it long enough, it would make a lot of sense, wouldn't it?"

He would not answer her question about Sarah. He kept throwing Julie's name into it. Some other woman might then think that he was protesting too strongly-that Julie really was his lover. She thought no such thing. She also stopped suspecting Sarah, because he wanted that, and it was her habit to oblige him.

He is twenty-one years older than Lenore. On his last birthday he was fifty-five. His daughter from his first marriage (his only marriage; she keeps reminding herself that they are not married, because it often seems that they might as well be) sent him an Irish country hat. The present made him irritable. He kept putting it on and putting it down hard on his head. "She wants to make me a laughable old man," he said. "She wants me to put this on and go around like a fool." He wore the hat all morning, complaining about it, frightening the children. Eventually, to calm him, she said, "She intended nothing." She said it with finality, her tone so insistent that he listened to her. But having lost his reason for bitterness, he said, "Just because you don't think doesn't mean others don't think." Is he getting old? She does not want to think of him getting old. In spite of his ulcer, his body is hard. He is tall and handsome, with a thick mustache and a thin black goatee, and there is very little gray in his kinky black hair. He dresses in tight-fitting blue jeans and black turtleneck sweaters in the winter, and old white shirts with the sleeves rolled up in the summer. He pretends not to care about his looks, but he does. He shaves carefully, sc.r.a.ping slowly down each side of his goatee. He orders his soft leather shoes from a store in California. After taking one of his long walks-even if he does it twice a day-he invariably takes a shower. He always looks refreshed, and very rarely admits any insecurity. A few times, at night in bed, he has asked, "Am I still the man of your dreams?" And when she says yes he always laughs, turning it into a joke, as if he didn't care. She knows he does. He pretends to have no feeling for clothing, but actually he cares so strongly about his turtlenecks and shirts (a few are Italian silk) and shoes that he will have no others. She has noticed that the young women who visit are always vain. When Sarah arrived, she was wearing a beautiful silk scarf, pale as conch sh.e.l.ls.

Sitting on the floor on Sat.u.r.day morning, Lenore watches the fire she has just lit. The baby, tucked in George's chair, smiles in his sleep, and Lenore thinks what a good companion he would be if only he were an adult. She gets up and goes into the kitchen and tears open a package of yeast and dissolves it, with sugar and salt, in hot water, slushing her fingers through it and shivering because it is so cold in the kitchen. She will bake bread for dinner-there is always a big meal in the early evening when they have guests. But what will she do for the rest of the day? George told the girls the night before that on Sat.u.r.day they would walk in the woods, but she does not really enjoy hiking, and George will be irritated because of the discussion the night before, and she does not want to aggravate him. "You are unwilling to challenge anyone," her brother wrote her in a letter that came a few days ago. He has written her for years-all the years she has been with George-asking when she is going to end the relationship. She rarely writes back because she knows that her answers sound too simple. She has a comfortable house. She cooks. She keeps busy and she loves her two children. "It seems unkind to say but," her brother writes, "but ..." It is true; she likes simple things. Her brother, who is a lawyer in Cambridge, cannot understand that.

Lenore rubs her hand down the side of her face and says good morning to Julie and Sarah, who have come downstairs. Sarah does not want orange juice; she already looks refreshed and ready for the day. Lenore pours a gla.s.s for Julie. George calls from the hallway, "Ready to roll?" Lenore is surprised that he wants to leave so early. She goes into the living room. George is wearing a denim jacket, his hands in the pockets.

"Morning," he says to Lenore. "You're not up for a hike, are you?"

Lenore looks at him, but does not answer. As she stands there, Sarah walks around her and joins George in the hallway and he holds the door open for her. "Let's walk to the store and get Hershey bars to give us energy for a long hike," George says to Sarah. They are gone. Lenore finds Julie still in the kitchen, waiting for the water to boil. Julie says that she had a bad night and she is happy not to be going with George and Sarah. Lenore fixes tea for them. Maria sits next to her on the sofa, sipping orange juice. The baby likes company, but Maria is a very private child; she would rather that she and her mother were always alone. She has given up being possessive about her father. Now she gets out a cardboard box and takes out her mother's collection of postcards, which she arranges on the floor in careful groups. Whenever she looks up, Julie smiles nervously at her; Maria does not smile, and Lenore doesn't prod her. Lenore goes into the kitchen to punch down the bread, and Maria follows. Maria has recently gotten over chicken pox, and there is a small new scar in the center of her forehead. Instead of looking at Maria's blue eyes, Lenore lately has found herself focusing on the imperfection.

As Lenore is stretching the loaves onto the cornmeal-covered baking sheet, she hears the rain start. It hits hard on the garage roof.

After a few minutes Julie comes into the kitchen. "They're caught in this downpour," Julie says. "If Sarah had left the car keys, I could go get them."

"Take my car and pick them up," Lenore says, pointing with her elbow to the keys hanging on a nail near the door.

"But I don't know where the store is."