THAT NIGHT
by
ALICE MCDERMOTT


Alice McDermott's A Bigamist's Daughter, published when she was
twenty-eight, won exceptional praise.  That Night--.wftR

(continued on back flap)

(continued from front flap)

its remarkable talent for evoking a world and its inhabitants, and its
subtlety and artfulness in telling a story--is an equally memorable
achievement.

alice mcdermott was born and brought up on Long Island and now lives in
La Jolla, California, with her husband and son.  She teaches at the
University of California at San Diego and is at work on a new novel.

Jacket illustration by Etienne Delenert

Jacket design 1987 by Rita Marshall

Author photo 1987 by M. A. Armstrong

Farrar Straus Giroux 19 Union Square West * New York 10003

Also by Alice McDermott

A Bigamist's Daughter

THAT NIGHT

ALICE McDERMOTT

THAT NIGHT.

FARRAR, STR AUS AND GIROUX/NEW YORK

MULTNOMAH County Library

Copyright 1987 by Allice McDermott

All rights reserved Published simultaneously in Canada by

Collins Publishers, Toronto Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 1987

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McDermott, Alice

That Night.

I. Title.  PS3563.C355T5 1986 813'.54 84-45765

For David and in memory of Paul Briand

ONE.



That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before
her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and
bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who
surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the
house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains they carried
go limp in their hands.  Even the men from our neighborhood, in Bermuda
shorts or chinos, white T-shirts and gray suit pants, with baseball
bats and snow shovels held before them like rifles, even they paused in
their rush to protect her: the good and the bad--the black-jacketed
boys and the fathers in their light summer clothes--startled for that
one moment before the fighting began by the terrible, piercing sound of
his call.

This is serious, my own father remembered thinking at that moment. This
is insane.

I remember only that my ten-year-old heart was stopped by the beauty of
it all.

Sheryl was her name, but he cried, "Sherry," drawing

out the word, keening it, his voice both strong and desperate.  There
was a history of dark nights in the sound, something lovely, something
dangerous.

One of the children had already begun to cry.

It was high summer, the early 1960s.  The sky was a bright navy above
the pitched roofs and the thick suburban trees.  I hesitate to say that
only Venus was bright, but there it was.  I had noticed it earlier,
when the three cars that were now in Sheryl's driveway and up on her
lawn had made their first pass through our neighborhood.  Add a thin,
rising moon if the symbolism troubles you: Venus was there.

Across the street, a sprinkler shot weak sprays of water, white in the
growing darkness.  Behind the idling motors of the boys' cars you could
still hear the collective gurgle of filters in backyard pools. Sheryl's
mother had already been pulled from the house, and she crouched on the
grass by the front steps saying over and over again, "She's not here. 
She's gone."  The odor of their engines was like a gash across the
ordinary summer air.

He called her again, doubled over now, crying, I think.  Then he
pitched forward, his boot slipping on the grass, so it seemed for a
second he'd be frustrated even in this, and once again ran toward the
house. Sheryl's mother cowered.  The men and the boys met awkwardly on
the square lawn.  Until then, I had thought all violence was swift and
surefooted, somehow sleek, even elegant.  I was surprised to see how
poor it really was, how laborious and hulking.  I saw one of the men
bend under the blow of what seemed a slow-moving chain, and then, just
as gracelessly, swing his son's baseball bat into a teenager's ear.  I
saw the men and the boys leap on one another like obese, short-legged
children, sliding and falling, raising chains that seemed to crumble

backward onto their shoulders, moving bats and hoes and wide rakes
that seemed as unwieldy as trees.  There were no clever D'Artagnan man
mid-air meetings of chain and snow shovel, no eye-to-eye throat grip
pings no witty retorts and well timed dodges, no winners.  Only, in the
growing darkness, a hundred dumb, un rhythmical movements, only blow
after artless blow.

I was standing in the road before our neighbor's house, frozen, as were
all the other children scattered across the road and the sidewalk and
the curbs as if in some wide ranging game of statues.  I was certain,
as were all the others, that my father would die.

Behind us, one of the mothers began to call her husband's name, and
then the others, touching their throats or their thighs, one by one
began to follow.  Their thin voices were plaintive, even angry, as if
this clumsy battle were the last disappointment they would bear, or as
if, it seems to me now, they had begun to echo, even take up, that
lovesick boy's bitter cry.

They had first appeared just after dinner.  Three cars-hot rods, we
were still calling them then (not one of us imagining the phrase to be
more than descriptive, never considering it somewhat obscene)--turning
onto the north end of our block, moving slowly, steadily.  I had just
joined my parents on the front porch.  I saw my mother raise her chin
to look over the wrought-iron railing and the rhododendron bush as each
car stopped at our corner, one waiting patiently for the next, like
cars carrying beauty queens in a stalled parade, and then, just as
slowly, carefully, they turned to the right.

We could see they were full of teenagers; there was an

impression of black leather elbows at each window, black hair,
sunglasses.  No radios were playing and so only the sound of the
straining, impatient motors seemed threatening.  Like a big man
snoring, I thought, or a dog growling in his sleep.  I can't recall at
all the cars' colors or their makes.  A Chevy of some sort, no doubt,
say turquoise or sky blue, then a dark one, say a dark green Ford with
tinted windows (and the tinted windows must be true because Sheryl's
boyfriend was in that second car, pressed into the back seat between
two others, and none of us saw him until the cars, after who knows how
many slow circuits of our street, suddenly turned with a sound like an
explosion and drove onto her driveway and up over her lawn), the third
perhaps a white Buick with one long red stripe that ended in a
pitchfork or maybe a devil's tail.

When they approached a second time, about ten minutes later, again
turning onto the far end of our street and still maintaining that
patient, creeping speed, my mother said, "Uh-oh."

As the last car once again rounded our corner, making a left this time,
I saw Sheryl's neighbor, Mr.  Rossi, standing at his front door.  He
wore a T-shirt and suit trousers and held a folded newspaper in one
hand.  His short, thick arms were both stained with darkening tatoos.
He turned away only when the low rumble of their engines, which did not
change even after they'd left our block, had faded completely.

I once thought they had been wise to maintain this slow speed even
after they'd left our street, to slowly cruise a dozen blocks, to
spread suspicion up and down the neighborhood, dissipating it, but now
I wonder if they would have avoided suspicion altogether if they'd
taken off, backfired, burned rubber.

This was not an especially rough town, but by then its residents must
have simply resigned themselves to hoods and gangs and hot rodders, to
teenagers in trouble, the way the first frontiers people must have
resigned themselves to an occasional Indian raid, an occasional outlaw
who shoots up the saloon.  At that time, in our town at least, it was a
given that hoods bombed around, intimidated the band members who tried
to get past them into the pizza parlor, drank beer.  Word was that some
of them poured gasoline over stray cats and set them on fire, screamed
"Fung-goo la" into old ladies' bedroom windows in the middle of the
night, smoked reefer--that one had pulled and used a knife on a
geography teacher (something I recalled only years later, when our
university announced it was cutting the entire geography department),
that another had run his car into the dry cleaner's window, but
essentially, they were innocents.  When they got out of hand the police
could be called and, without nightsticks or tear gas, scatter them.

On the night he came for her, it was the uncharacteristic speed, the
calm, that made us take notice.  It was their order, their odd control
(they all sat still inside their cars, looking straight ahead) that
made my mother say as they passed a third time, "This is ominous."

My father looked over his newspaper.

Next door, Mrs.  Evers had brought her garbage to the curb (her husband
would later carry the lid like a shield into the battle) and now stood
with her hands on her hips, watching the cars as they passed, one, two,
three, through the stop sign and, this time, down the next street.

She turned, saw my parents, and slowly climbed our steps.  She was a
big woman, freckled, pot-bellied, her belly split like a backside by
her caesarean scars.  She was famously homely around our neighborhood,
not so much because of

her looks, which were plain enough, but because of her husband's.  Mr.
Evers was exquisite, handsome in that chiseled Hollywood way that could
make even the oldest mother suddenly shy, and it was the speculation
regarding why a man who looked like that would have married a woman who
looked like this that had transformed poor Mrs.  Evers from not
good-looking to our very code word for ugly.

She had four sons, one my age, the others younger, all of whom later
swelled into monstrous adolescence, went on to become bouncers and
third-rank football players and, my brother sometimes said, retaining
walls.  It was Georgie, her oldest, who had cried so terribly beside me
as the fighting began.

She had dark hair and a wide, pitted face.  It amazes me to think she
was only about thirty then.

"What are those kids up to?"  she asked us.

My mother shrugged.  "They just keep driving past."

"Joyriding," my father said, his tone indicating that it would be silly
to make any more of it.  Once, in order to illustrate how one bad habit
can completely destroy your good name, he had told me how he had
happened to see Mrs.  Evers push her fingernail up into her nose,
examine it, and then put it into her mouth.  I myself had already seen
her do this any number of times--stretched in her chaise by their
aluminum pool, reading the newspaper with one hand--but now the gesture
took on the significance of his moral and I could no longer look at the
woman without disapproval.

Mrs.  Evers stared at the street as if the three cars were passing once
more, although--and I had begun listening for them now--they were
nowhere near.

"They're going so slow," she said.

#

"Maybe they're teaching each other to drive," I offered.  I used my
father's "Why worry?"  tone, hoping he'd catch my disdain.

I suppose they ignored me.  Mrs.  Evers again looked down the street.
"I just hope," she said, scraping a piece of her dinner from between
her teeth with yet another fingernail, "it doesn't have anything to do
with Sheryl."

I caught my mother's look: a pinch between the eyes, her mouth
shriveling to the size of a dash.  I saw her wrestle for a moment with
her desire to protect me from what she considered the sordid details
and her desire to gossip.

"He knows she went away?"  she whispered, the whisper a kind of
compromise, I suppose.  "Doesn't he?"

Mrs.  Evers shook her head, but said, "I don't know.  They had to have
their number changed.  He was calling."

My mother put her hand over her heart and looked at Sheryl's house
across the street and three houses over.  It was much like all the
rest, brick and shingle, no front porch like ours, but four front steps
and, under the front window, an odd hedge, dead in spots and in need of
trimming.  At that time, everyone in our neighborhood was painting
their bricks red or white, or, in a scattered kind of hounds tooth a
little of both, but Sheryl's house still had plain dull brick color
bricks--they looked somewhat dusty in comparison-and I took this as an
outward sign of her household's one distinction: Sheryl's father had
died the spring before; she, her mother and her grandmother lived there
alone, as everyone put it, meaning without a man in the house.

Their front door was wide open that night behind the aluminum screen
door, as were the front doors all up and down that side of the street
on this, on every, warm summer evening.  We could see just faintly the
white stair steps

beyond the door.  There was a window fan, a blur in the front upstairs
window.

My mother put her hand to her heart and looked at the house, and I
looked with her.  It could not have seemed more forlorn, more
unprotected.

"I'm sure they told him she's not there," she said.

"I hope they told him," Mrs.  Evers said, sucking her teeth.  "He's a
troublemaker."  She nodded emphatically at the word, for Sheryl was
indeed "in trouble" and surely he had made it.

My mother shook her head.  "None of those cars is his."

Mrs.  Evers was halfway to her own side door when the faint guttural
sound of their approaching engines came upon us again.  Now curtains in
other windows began to stir.  Mr.  Carpenter, our neighbor across the
street, paused while setting a sprinkler out on his lawn.  His wife
appeared in the window behind him.

I noticed this time that when the first car stopped at the corner, the
second stopped just past Sheryl's house, the third just in front of it.
No one in the cars turned to look at her house, at any of our houses,
and yet it was easy to imagine that despite what seemed a steady
forward pace, it was before and around Sheryl's house that they
lingered.

When they had passed, my mother mentioned this.  My father, who this
time had watched the full progress of the cars down our street, the
paper for once forgotten, said, "You could just as well say they're
interested in our house.  All their cars stop in front of us, too."

I saw that the young childless couple who lived next to the
Everses--they had what the other women in the neighborhood called "the
unlikely name of Sunshine" (always tagging the accusation with a
mouthed "Jewish," as if that

both explained the name and made it even more unlikely)-were now out
on their driveway and that Mr.  Meyer, who lived on the opposite
corner, was already on his porch.

I looked again at Sheryl's house.  There was only the spinning fan, the
pale shadows behind the thin screen door.

The sun by this time was just below the houses across the street, but
not yet low enough to give any real hint of darkness.  Since it was a
usual night except for the cars, other children had begun to come out.
I remember the Meyer twins tossed a ball on their front lawn.  Billy
Rossi crossed the grass between their driveways and was admitted
through the Carpenters' side door.  Jake, the little retarded boy from
the end of the block, rode his bike up our driveway and then, as he did
every evening, called for help until my father went down to turn him
around.  From here and there, the sound of lawn mowers rose like the
staccato drill of locusts.

I don't remember hearing any arguments that evening, none of those
strained, echoey exchanges between husbands and wives, parents and
children, that made us turn to one particular house as if to a radio,
raising our noses as we listened, as if strife were a scent on the air.
And as far as I can recall, no neighbors went out looking showered and
flushed and, the wives especially, unusually polished, for anniversary
dinners or wakes.  (Whether these were really the neighborhood's two
most common social engagements, I can't be sure.  I'm relying now only
on my mother's comments.  When we saw the wives emerge in silver blue
dresses or sequined tops, my mother would say, "It must be their
anniversary."  If they left the house on a weekday night dressed in
simpler Sunday clothes, my mother would say, "They must be going to a
wake.") Except for the cars, a

usual evening.  My parents, as usual, keeping vigil from behind the
rhododendron bushes.  Enough, too much, has already been said about
boredom in the suburbs, especially in the early sixties, and I suppose
there was a kind of boredom in those predictable summer evenings.  I
suppose boredom had something to do with the violent, melodramatic way
the men later rushed to Sheryl's mother's aid.  But I remember those
nights as completely interesting, full of flux: the street itself a
stage lined with doors, the play rife with arrivals and departures,
offstage battles, adorable children, unexpected soliloquies delivered
right to your chair by Mrs.  Evers or Mrs.  Rossi or whoever happened
to climb our stairs.  It's nostalgia that makes me say it, that most
futile, most self-deluding of desires: to be a child again, but there
was no boredom in those suburbs, not on those summer evenings, or at
least not until this one.  For after this, after the cars and the
sudden spinning onto her lawn, the boys with their chains and the fight
and the chilling sound of her boyfriend's cry, after this, no small
scenes could satisfy us, no muffled arguments, no dinner-at-eight
celebrations, no sweet, damaged child, could make us believe we were
living a vibrant life, that we had ever known anything about love.
Venus, as I've said, was already bright.

On their fifth or sixth time past our house, my mother said, "Maybe I
should call the police."

"And tell them what?"  my father asked her.

She considered this briefly.  "That they keep driving around."

"Nothing wrong with that," he said.

My mother looked at me.  I could tell she didn't want to call.  If
she'd wanted to, she simply would have gone inside and done it.

"Somebody's probably called already," my father added.

Now we were simply waiting, waiting for the cars to return, for
whatever was going to happen to happen.  Mr.  Rossi was again at his
front door, his shirt off and the newspaper now open and loose in his
hand.  There was a blue television light behind him.

We saw Elaine Sayles walk to the mailbox on the opposite street (my
mother swore she only pretended to put something in it) and then stop
to talk to Mr.  Carpenter, who was now sitting on his front steps with
a beer.  We saw them both glance up and down the street as they spoke.
Mrs.  Sayles was a tidy little blonde, the only woman in our
neighborhood to wear tennis whites to the supermarket--to wear tennis
whites at all, I suppose.  She was said to have come from money,
although her husband wore gray work clothes and carried a lunch pail
She left him and their three children for Harvard while I was in
college, but on that night she was still a silly short woman in a tiny
white skirt, flirtatious, nosy, quite capable of merely pretending to
put something in the mailbox.

This time when the cars passed, the boy in the front passenger seat of
the first one turned full face to us and grinned an enormous Sergeant
Bilko grin.  He wore sunglasses, maybe mirrored ones.  I don't know if
he had a counterpart on the other side of the car, but when the last of
the three had once again passed, Mrs.  Sayles was already hurrying back
to her house.  Mr.  Carpenter, still sitting on his stoop, was
beginning to look somewhat mean-eyed.

"She'll probably call the police," my mother said, a splinter of
annoyance in her voice.

But the cars passed again: we calculated that they'd just driven around
the block; and again, they must have gone to the boulevard and back;
and once more: around two

blocks, or maybe as far as the grammar school and back.  We waited.

Now night was beginning to show itself, along the hedges, in the bushy
center of trees.  As we waited for them to return, the interval growing
longer and longer, becoming the longest yet, we saw Mr.  Rossi turn
from his door and go back into his living room.  We saw Mr.  Carpenter
crumple the beer can in his hand, stand and, bringing the can to the
garbage, look up and down the street one last time.  He too went
inside, and Mrs.  Sayles turned on a light and drew her curtains.  We
were beginning to spot lightning bugs.  Down the block, the Sunshines
(who were sports minded it was assumed, because they were childless)
practiced a few golf swings with an imaginary club, he standing behind
her, her arms inside his, and their cheeks together.  The Meyer twins
began tossing their small pink ball with a vengeance, aiming at each
other's thighs.  One or two cars passed.  The streetlights snapped on.
My parents began to discuss something else entirely.

I suppose we all believed that the boys had given up the game; that
with the beginning of darkness they had gone on to the highway or to
the broader, less peopled territory of the schoolyard or the parking
lot outside the bowling alley; that they had grown bored with teasing
us, scaring us, laughing at us, and had finally moved on to their real
fun, to adventures that we, even as observers, couldn't share.

None of the boys in those cars was more than nineteen or twenty and yet
they obviously, maybe instinctively, knew something about courtship.
When we finally heard the engines again, that constrained roll and
tumble of slow-moving, muffler less motors, we merely sighed, not
daring to smile.  We turned our backs to them, tossing our heads like

hurt girls, snubbed tramps.  Mr.  Rossi did not leave his television;
Mrs.  Sayles's curtain didn't stir.

They traveled in the same order: the blue one followed by the green,
then the white one with its red devil stripe or a black flourish shaped
like a striking snake.

The first was just at Sheryl's house when all the engines seemed to
explode and the cars, as if the road itself had suddenly leaped and
tossed them into the air, were over the curb, one on Sheryl's lawn, one
perpendicular to it, up over the sidewalk, the third at an odd, twisted
angle in her driveway.

My mother grabbed my arm at the sound, pulled me even, as if she would
have me run, although both of us were still in our chairs.  My father
had jumped up, his arms raised, a caricature of rough-and-ready.  The
other men were already out of their homes.

The car doors--the ones that faced the house--swung open and the boys
slid out.  They seemed eerily nonchalant; some even stretched, as if
they'd simply stopped for gas in the middle of a long trip.  Rick was
with them, of course, and he strode unhurried across the lawn and up
the three steps.  He knocked, not violently, more a polite rattle at
the screen door, while his friends stood in loose formation by the
cars, looking around and behind themselves as if they planned to stay
awhile.

It was their calm and his, especially his as he stood there at the
front door, waiting for someone to come, his shoulders hitched back,
his fingers slipped into his rear pockets, that must have kept us all
at bay.  We had seen him standing there in just that way a hundred
times before; we had seen Sheryl come to the door, seen Sheryl's
mother, on countless Saturday nights, greet him and let him in, and
even those

of us who knew Sheryl was gone, even those who knew why, must have
considered the possibility that this was some crude and spectacular
rite of hood courtship and that to interfere, to call the police, to
run, at this moment, to her mother's aid, would have been foolish,
either terribly childish or terribly middle-aged.  Except for the sound
of the idling motors, the smell of exhaust, the black strip of torn
grass, it seemed harmless enough.

I don't know when we would have noticed the chains.

Rick rattled the door again and then cupped his hand to the side of his
face to look inside.  I thought I saw, but only faintly, Sheryl's
grandmother appear on the stairs.  And then her mother was behind the
screen.

There was some exchange of words.  Sheryl's name must have been heard
by the boys scattered around the lawn, by the neighbors standing
nearby.  Rick suddenly glanced up at the house; his movements for the
first time somewhat abrupt, nervous.  He said something else through
the screen and then quickly grabbed at it, pulling it open.  He spoke
again, as if the opened door would give him more meaning.  We saw him
lean inside, his foot on the threshold.  His voice grew louder, but his
words were still unclear.  Then, in one swift movement, he pulled
Sheryl's mother through the door.  He was holding her forearm.  I
remember she wore green Bermuda shorts and pale blue bedroom slippers.
He swung her around and off the steps.  She fell with her arms out, the
dry hedge catching her hips and her legs.  I don't know if she
screamed, but at almost the same moment she fell, the front door
slammed--the real door this time, not the screen--and Rick began to
yell.

Now the men in the neighborhood were running to their garages, calling
to one another with what I remember only

as sounds, sounds with lots of go's and ca's.  "C'mon," I suppose they
said.  "Let's go."  My father answered in kind, barking one syllable
from our porch and then rushing past us.  My mother, who still had a
death grip on my arm, said, "Go call the police."

Rick had kicked the door and then run down the steps, yelling for
Sheryl.  He sidestepped across the lawn, looking up to the bedroom
windows, to the one spinning fan.  Her mother cried, "She's not here,"
and he looked down at her, made as if to kick her, and then, spinning
around, called again.  He was bouncing now, almost jiggling.  He moved
backward across the lawn, looking up at her house, yelling for her. You
could hear the men running in the street.  You could hear the boys
gathering up their chains.

Rick bent as if he might fall, danced a little and then drove his fists
into his thighs.  His cry rose above the idling engines, the footsteps,
the hum of backyard filters and window fans, the hard sounds that
passed between the running men.  For just one second before the
fighting began, it was the only sound to be heard.

 While we, the children, roamed through our neighborhood like
confident landlords, while we strolled easily over any lawn, hopped
into any yard, crossed driveways and straddled fences as if all we
surveyed were our own (looking shocked and indignant when someone
suggested otherwise, or simply smiling ruefully, dismissing some
adult's demand to stay off the grass as we would any bad idea), while
our mothers knew the kitchens and dining rooms and side doors of any
number of our neighbors and could chat as casually on a street corner
as in a breakfast nook, our fathers, until that night, were housebound
and yard bound  Once their cars had delivered them home each evening,
they might be seen puttering on the lawn or taking the garbage to the
curb or sitting on their porches, but until that night, the night of
the fight, the sidewalks for them might have been like those two
closet-sized bedrooms in each of our homes, might have been meant for
children only, meant only as a place to line up for the school bus to
push a doll carriage, to ride a bike until you had grown

coordinated enough to ride in the road.  Seen out upon them, usually
late at night and usually with a dog, our fathers seemed huge and
foolish, like fullbacks on tricycles.  They smoked cigarettes, hunched
their shoulders, hugged the curb.  They walked quickly and quickly
returned to touch home.

But in those days that followed the fight, all that changed.  In the
days that followed the fight, our fathers stepped out of their houses
and over their property lines.  They drew together as only our mothers
had done before, meeting each other as if by chance at the curb, the
mailbox, the edges of lawns.  Some of them still wore squares of gauze
taped over their foreheads or pink Band-Aids wrapped tightly around
every knuckle of one hand, and when they met they would lift their
shirts or raise a pant leg, bending like farmers to examine each
other's wounds.  They would reenact in slow, stylized motion the blows
they'd given, the blows they had received, adding now the grace that
had been missing from the original performance, the witty dialogue, the
triumph.  They would talk together until nightfall and the mosquitoes
drove us all inside.

Now the children stepped back from what until then had been their own
territory, stepped back and grew silent as children will do whenever
grown-ups join and claim their games.

On the first of these evenings, the men gathered at the foot of our own
driveway.  My mother and father had been sitting out on the porch.
Diane Rossi and I were on the steps below them, talking listlessly of
what we would like to do with the evening, wishing, as we were always
wishing, that there were an amusement park with a roller coaster and a
funhouse somewhere nearby.  When my father went down

to the driveway to help Jake turn around, Mr.  Carpenter stopped
polishing his car and crossed the street to greet him.  I heard him ask
for my father's opinion: What did he think would happen to Rick now
that the police had him?

My father shook his head.  He was still guiding Jake, holding with one
hand the curved silver handlebars of his four-wheeler, and he seemed to
say something about getting what he deserved.  The two men watched the
boy list badly as he headed down the sidewalk.  Then Mr.  Evers crossed
his own driveway to join them.  He had his hands in his pockets, his
pants loose and low on his slim hips.  His face was delicately tanned.
"A couple of years in the cooler," he said.  He held out his hand and
one by one drew in his fingers.  "Trespassing," he said.  "Assault.
Attempted kidnapping.  Maybe breaking and entering."  His good looks
added authority to his words, as if he were reading them from a script.
The other two men nodded, their eyes on him.

Diane and I had also grown silent.  Behind us, my mother had placed her
magazine on her lap and turned her head away from the men as if she
were contemplating some article she'd read, not eavesdropping.

"He hasn't got a record," I heard my father say.

"He does now," Mr.  Carpenter told them.

Jake Sr.  approached.  He had Daisy, their beagle, pulling furiously on
the end of a leash.  He smiled when they questioned him.  He was a
tall, thin man and he reminded me of a cowboy on a restless horse the
way he moved back and forth, trying to counterbalance Daisy's desperate
forward motion.  "How about five years on a chain gang?"  he said.
Their laughter was like a shout.

On the night of the fight, while my father and most of

the other men were at the hospital or the police station, I had asked
my mother what would happen to Sheryl's boyfriend.  Her sigh had
surprised me.  Just an hour or so before, she had been as shrill with
outrage as all the other women, spitting out words like hoodlums and
punks.  "I don't know what will happen to him," she'd said, sadly,
perhaps even somewhat wistfully.

Later, I heard my father in the kitchen, telling her, "Just a slap on
the wrist."  I may have grinned with relief.  I imagined them releasing
him.  I imagined him searching the country, trying to find her.  I
imagined him growing closer and closer, zeroing in.  I imagined him
taking her in his arms.

But early the next morning, when my father in his short summer pajamas
limped across the hallway to the bathroom, I saw that his pale legs
were covered with red welts and bruises the color of tea stains and I
was suddenly ashamed of my disloyalty.

That evening over dinner, he explained to my brother and me that the
men in the neighborhood would get a slap on the wrist from the judge
because they had taken the law into their own hands, but the hoods
would end up in jail.

Jake broke through the men and once more pumped his bicycle up our
driveway.  This time, Diane and I helped him turn around.  Then we
followed him down to the sidewalk and the men.  Mr.  Rossi had joined
them, and so after we petted Daisy (who, unaccustomed to being walked,
was now lying exhausted on the grass), we each went to our own father's
side.

"To tell the truth," mine was saying, "I don't really care what happens
to him as long as they stay away from here."

"They'd better," Jake Sr.  said.  He had a piece of masking

tape on his thick tortoise-shell glasses and I wondered if they'd been
broken in the fight.  "They'd just better."

Mr.  Rossi smiled.  "Oh, I think they'll stay away.  I think they
learned their lesson."

The men all agreed, stirring a little.  I feared the subject would be
closed--it was closed, I suppose, but the men seemed reluctant to break
up.  It was a humid night and they were all in T-shirts or shirt
sleeves.  They stood with their arms folded across their chests, their
hands pressed flat under their arms, or, as Rick had stood, with their
fingers tucked into the back pockets of their pants.  Their skin gave
off a warm metallic odor that I associated then with their belt
buckles, with the dog tags or Saint Christopher medals they wore around
their necks.

"Well, I don't know how we didn't see it coming," Mr.  Carpenter said
suddenly.  He glanced at the others.  "With that crowd she ran with."

Again the men stirred with a kind of agreement.

"Saw what coming?"  Mr.  Rossi said.

I felt my father glance at me.  "Her getting herself into that
situation," he said softly.  He looked at Mr.  Carpenter.  "Right?"

Mr.  Carpenter nodded.  "Yeah," he said.  "That and the fact that a
crowd like that isn't going to let one of their girls just go away."

The men moved again.  I had the feeling they were nodding with their
whole bodies.

Mr.  Carpenter ran a hand over his short red hair.  "I don't know," he
said.  "Maybe we should have seen it coming.  We should have said
something to her mother."

"If she had her father," Jake Sr.  said, and Mr.  Rossi interrupted
him.

"If she had her father," he told them, "none of this would have
happened.  You think those punks would have come to the house if
there'd been a man there?"  He laughed, as if at the foolishness of
anyone who would believe such a thing.  He was a short, dark man with a
flat head, bound for the death of his only son and a middle age spent
in sideburns and bell bottoms.  "She had her father," he said, "he
would have stopped it long before it started."

The men moved again to show they agreed.  I tried to remember Sheryl's
father.  A thin blond man with high color.  Balding.  He, too, had been
somewhat housebound.  I remembered him getting out of his car and
getting into it.  He had had a heart attack one morning as he drove his
car to work.

Mr.  Evers said, "I don't know."  He might have been speaking to
himself, but the other men leaned forward to listen.  "She always
seemed like a nice kid."  He turned to Mr.  Rossi.  "Your daughter
starts dating a punk, what are you going to do?  Lock her in her
room?"

We all looked at Diane, who seemed a little frightened and yet pleased
by the question, as if it were proof that Mr.  Evers had designs on
her. I tried to imagine her pigtails gone, her short bangs grown down
into her eyes, her hair teased into a lump at the back of her head.  I
pictured her with some teenager's leather arm hung heavily over her
shoulder.

Mr.  Rossi put his arm around her.  "Yeah," he said.  "Maybe.  If I
have to."

"She was pretty," Jake Sr.  said suddenly, indicating Sheryl's house
with a nod.  "Wasn't she?"

The men seemed to consider this.  They might have been recalling
someone already long gone.  And then, one by

one, they began to agree.  "Oh yeah," they said.  "She was a pretty
girl."  "Sure."  They looked toward Sheryl's house, where her mother
and grandmother were already packing.  Packing their clothes and
consoling themselves with the news that the girl had been found in time
and so would live: a miracle, of sorts.

"Cute," Mr.  Evers said.

I suddenly felt Mr.  Carpenter's great hand on my head.  He gripped my
skull, palming it like a basketball.  "Cute as these two gals?"  he
asked.  All the men smiled.  There was something proprietary about
their looks, as there was about Mr.  Carpenter's touch.  As if having
claimed the sidewalks and the streets, they were now ready to claim the
children who used them.

"Just as cute," Mr.  Evers said.  Jake Sr.  smiled.  "Sure."

"Well, then."  Mr.  Carpenter moved my head back and forth.  "We'd
better get sharp."  He slid his hand down the back of my hair and
lightly held my neck between his thumb and forefinger.  He had a small
daughter of his own who even in adulthood would be known as Little
Alice, as if she were a gnome.  "We're going to be throwing boys off
our lawns for years to come."

"Spare me!"  my father cried, grinning.

Mr.  Rossi laughed.  "We'd better start studying jujitsu."

"Or get a shotgun," Jake Sr.  shouted.

As if sensing their enthusiasm, Daisy suddenly stood.

Diane and I looked at one another, both frightened and pleased.  What
were roller coasters and colored lights, fun house mirrors and barrels,
compared to the nights we would soon experience, suspended over the
furious battles of our fathers and our boys?

"I'd kill them," Mr.  Rossi was saying.  "I'm not kidding."

He stepped forward to jab a finger into the center of the circle. "And
it would be justifiable homicide, too!"

Mr.  Carpenter raised his hand from my neck to say, "I'd make them a
present of their balls."

"That's what they deserve," my father said.

Jake Sr.  added, "Punks."

My mother called to me and Diane from the porch.  Reluctantly, we went
to her.  "Why don't you stay here and let the men talk?"  she
whispered.  We whined a little, but she insisted and we sat again on
the steps.  My mother's call had reminded the men to lower their voices
and they were speaking softly now, but not so softly that we couldn't
hear our names being mentioned, and the names of the other daughters on
the block; not so softly that we couldn't hear what they would do to
them, those hoodlum boys, how they would protect us.

Our fathers.  They were still dark-haired then, and handsome.  Their
bruised arms were still strong under their rolled shirt sleeves, their
chests still broad under their T-shirts.  They had fought wars and come
home to love their wives and sire their children; they had laid out
fifteen thousand dollars to shelter them.  They had grown housebound
and too cautious, as shy as infants, but now, heady with the taste of
their own blood, with the new expansion of their territory, the
recalled camaraderie of men joined in battle, they were ready to take
up this new challenge, were ready to save us, their daughters, from the
part of love that was painful and tragic and violent, from all that we
had already, even then, set our hearts on.

They were wrong about Sheryl, of course.  She had not been very pretty.
And as time passed, they became even more wrong about her.  They said
she had been beautiful.

They said, when trying to praise another girl's looks, "She is as
pretty as that Sheryl was," her name giving the praise an edge of
sadness and ill fate, so the listener would often reply, "Let's hope
she turns out better," so we all could come to recognize the fine,
dangerous line that only pretty girls must walk.  Even just recently,
while watching the Miss America pageant in the white- and coral-colored
living room of her Florida condo, my mother had said of her favorite
contestant, "You know who she reminds me of?  She reminds me of
Sheryl."  It wasn't true, but I long ago had stopped trying to push
back the tide of her praise.

She was skinny, not very tall, with thin taffy-colored hair and light
brown eyes.  Her front teeth overlapped each other like dealt cards and
protruded just enough to change her lip when she held her mouth closed.
Her mouth was small and seemed to hang a little too low in her round
flat face.  She wore pancake makeup and black eyeliner that itself was
sometimes lined with white.  She dressed as all the girls who went with
hoods had dressed.  To school, she wore tight skirts and thin, usually
sleeveless sweaters made of some material like Banlon or rayon and
meant to show off both her bra straps and her small breasts.  She wore
bangle bracelets and, later, Rick's silver ID bracelet and a delicate
gold "slave chain" on her ankle, under her stocking.  She favored thin,
transparent Woolworth scarves in bright red or pale blue and black
pocketbooks shaped like small shopping bags.  After school and on
weekends, she traded her skirt for beige or black Wranglers that she
had tapered along the inseams so she would have to lie down on her bed
in order to zip the fly.  She kept a teasing comb in her back pocket,
the two turquoise spikes of its handle pointing toward her shoulder
blade.

I remember my mother and some of the other women saying how she had
trembled as if she would convulse throughout her father's funeral.  How
on the morning he died she'd been driven home from school by the
principal himself.  Most of the women were out on the sidewalk by then,
drawn first by the sight of the police car at the curb and then by the
news of what had happened.  They saw her paw wildly at the car door
before the principal had even managed to come to a complete stop and
heard her call to her father, who was by then a good couple of hours
dead, as she ran across the lawn and into the house.

She was the first female child on our block to enter adolescence, but
until the night of the fight, I don't remember anyone taking notice of
the fact.  During the summer before, her fifteenth summer, when the
sight of her might ordinarily have startled and touched the men, made
the mothers wary and filled us young girls with envy and awe, Sheryl
was marked by a different distinction.  I would see her carrying her
books and her pale blue looseleaf binder home from school, see her
boarding the bus for the shopping mall, coming to the door when Rick
picked her up for a date and kissing him good night when he dropped her
off, and think not that these were freedoms and pleasures soon to be my
own, but only that these were all things she did despite the knowledge
that she would never see her father again.

I was at the age when I believed that if either of my parents died, I
would simply die too, would simply disappear, as if with their last
breath they would draw me back into themselves, just as they had once
told me they had kissed each other and breathed me into life.  (Which
was not the mere bit of whimsy it may seem.  I had asked them

what all that heavy breathing they did in their bedroom was meant to
achieve.) That Sheryl still lived, that she dressed herself in the
morning, ate food, sometimes even smiled, all with her father dead,
seemed far more remarkable to me than the fact that she was also
growing into an adult.

Apparently, it struck our neighbors the same way: more than our first
female teenager, she was our first parent less child.

And Rick, given her fatherless ness the way she had trembled in her
tight skirt and dark stockings, the way her thick makeup had seemed so
pathetic on her childish face, bruised with weeping, Rick must have
seemed merely a pleasant diversion for the poor girl, maybe someone she
could talk to.  Not the best boy in the school, but better at any rate
(let's face it) than someone like Larry Lawlor, who ate whole sticks of
butter, played the clarinet and still, at seventeen, appeared costume
less every Halloween to rattle an orange milk carton in your face and
to say in his girl's voice, "Trick or Treat for Unicef."

Mr.  Carpenter was wrong: no one could have seen it coming, could have
anticipated the girl's logic, the way she had determined to love.
Certainly I didn't, and I was someone, perhaps the only one, she'd
taken the trouble to explain it to.

They had met sometime during that fifteenth summer, the summer before
Sheryl went away and the fight took place.  At least they'd started
dating then, because they must have known or seen one another in school
before that.  Rick was two years older, but he'd dropped out or been
suspended often enough to end up in many of Sheryl's classes.  Still,
it was that summer when we first saw them together.

Sheryl had a friend named Angie, who lived four or five blocks away.
Early that summer, we used to see Sheryl and Angie, freshly made up
and, you could be certain, smelling of Ambush cologne, meeting on our
corner at about seven thirty each evening.  They would then walk down
toward the schoolyard, their hips bumping, their black shoes scraping
over the sidewalk.  Early that summer, we would see them come back,
too, just after dark.  We would hear their voices, made twangy and
snappy by the gum they chewed.  They would call good night to each
other as Sheryl went inside and Angie walked back to her own house
alone.

There was a sadness in Sheryl's voice as she called to her friend, one
that I associated then with her father's death but that I'm certain now
had more to do with her reluctance to see the evening end, to see the
children disappear and the lights come on in the houses all up and down
the street-lights that would burn her eyes when she stepped inside,
that would flatten the room's tables and chairs and make the green
living room walls seem as discouraging as the triumph of stupid people.
Reluctance to hand over a summer evening to small stuffy rooms and a
television and the company of two" lonely widows when it is only nine
o'clock (Sheryl's mother was strict about her daughter's hours) and the
boy you would like to love will be free in the wide world until eleven
or twelve.

Sometime in July it must have been, in the deeper, stiller days of the
season, Sheryl came home in a car just about the time my parents and I
were getting ready to go in.  It was a sleek, navy-blue Chevy, and with
its motor running, it seemed to tremble by the curb in front of her
house as if it thrilled to the significance of this event as much as
she did.  She let herself out, bent to say something to the driver we
had caught him just briefly as the door opened and the light went on
inside: a boy, in sunglasses--and then with a wave of her hand she ran
across the lawn to her door.  The car tooted its horn, leaped to a
start, screeched to a stop at our corner and then tooted again as it
took off down the street.

That was the last we saw of Angie.

On Saturday night, when the car returned and Rick got out, my mother
said, "Oh, Sheryl has a date," and I should remind her the next time
she tells me the chosen Miss America isn't nearly as pretty as the one
who looked like Sheryl that she had said it with a kind of gratitude,
as if the girl deserved it, after all she had been through, as if the
boy were merely being kind.  Late in that summer, just before school
started, I brought my pajamas and my pillow to Diane Rossi's house.  We
stayed awake through most of the Late Show, and when we heard the car
pull up outside, we turned off the television and crawled over the bed
to the window.  Kneeling on our pillows, we could see them walk toward
Sheryl's house.  Rick had his arm across her shoulder.  She held the
hand he had draped there.  At her steps, they kissed again (it was the
first time we'd seen them kiss, but even at that age we knew it was
again).  I remember how painfully her head seemed to bend back as he
leaned over her.  She climbed the steps, but after she'd opened her
front door, she turned and came back down again.  She paused above him.
He pressed his face into her chest and she wrapped her thin arms around
his head.  In the yellow pool of light from her hallway they were
nearly silhouettes.  Only a bit of light caught his shoe, the pale
material of his shirt, her white arms.  Delicately, she turned her
head, touching her cheek

to his hair.  She seemed to sigh or, with a dancer's grace, to softly
lift her body and settle it down again with one breath.  Then,
abruptly, she threw her head back, his face still pressed to her
breasts, and looked straight up at the sky.  Some light from a
neighbor's house seemed to penetrate the fine ends of her ratted hair,
seemed to touch her throat and her forehead.

She bent her head again, dipped it back into the shadows, kissed his
forehead and lips and throat in a kind of blessing, turned and went
inside.

He moved quickly once she had closed the door and again tapped his horn
as he pulled away, setting someone's dog barking.

Diane and I sank down into our pillows.  We could feel the warm night
air on our faces.  We could smell the summer dust on the windowsill. We
could hear her brother, Billy, his summers numbered, snoring in the
next room.  I think we must have gone right to sleep.

In the days that followed the fight, and they were all hot days, humid
and cloudless, the front door of Sheryl's house remained closed and
only the shades in the front window, opened in the morning, pulled down
in the evening, hours before it was time to turn on a light, reminded
us that her mother and grandmother still lived there.

In the middle of one hot afternoon, a black car with a blue police
light on its dashboard pulled into the driveway and a man in a thin,
somewhat shiny blue suit got out.  He wearily climbed the steps, rang
the bell and then rapped on the aluminum screen door.  We saw him reach
into his inside coat pocket as he waited, saw when Sheryl's mother came
to the door how he held his wallet up to the screen.

She let him in.  There was an Ace bandage around her wrist.

Days later, my mother told me that Sheryl's mother and grandmother were
gone.  She said she supposed they went to Ohio, where Sheryl was.  I'd
been outside for most of the day every day and so I imagined they'd
left very early in the morning, maybe before dawn.  I imagined them
running between the house and the car like fugitives, rolling quietly
down their driveway, turning on their headlights only when they'd
reached the boulevard.

I wonder now what heartache it caused them, the mother especially,
fleeing her home like that, the home she had made with her husband.  I
wonder now how bitterly she had looked back across the year and a half
that saw her lose her husband, her daughter, her home.  With what envy
she had looked at the other houses along our block as she drove past
them for the last time that morning.  How peaceful, how untouched they
must have seemed to her, those houses where the brave men slept, their
wives tucked under their arms, their children nearby.

Or perhaps as she drove past the shuttered houses, with their damp
lawns and purring window fans, she saw instead how precarious their
peace was, how momentary.  Maybe she saw instead the coming troubles:
the scattering of sons, the restlessness of wives, the madness of
daughters.  Maybe she was aware, in her flight that early morning, that
all futures were as uncertain as her own, that even as she drove away,
her mother crying quietly beside her, the very blood that pulsed
through their veins and set the rhythm that kept their wives asleep was
moving pain and age and sorrow to the hearts of the good men.

The house remained empty all the rest of that summer.  A police cruiser
passed by twice a day and, according to my

parents, twice every night.  We had all been forbidden to go near the
property, and although I had once, on a dare, run up the driveway and
rung the side bell, it wasn't hard to keep us away.  Up close and face
to face, the house seemed sad, but if you pretended to forget it or let
it remain in the corner of your eye as you teased Timmy or George Evers
or flirted with Billy Rossi or Billy Carpenter, it seemed almost
thrilling, almost like a dare.  A reminder of the risks and pitfalls of
a journey we were taking only the first, tentative steps toward--one
that would give us the power for the first time in our lives to bring
our entire family to ruin.

Just before Halloween, the Meyer twins tried to start a rumor that
Sheryl and her mother and grandmother and even Sheryl's baby were still
living in the house, in the top, attic, floor, that the police brought
them food and clothing in the middle of the night, but none of us would
go for it, even when they claimed they had peeked into the kitchen
window at three a.m. and seen four eggs boiling in a pot on the
stove.

They had gone to Ohio, we were certain of it.  And we named the state
as if it were another dimension.  Ohio.  The sound of it shaped like a
drain, a well, like a mouth that had opened to receive them.  Ohio.  We
would spend our whole lives in this neighborhood, in these very houses,
even, but she, we were certain, would never come back.

I imagined sending a cryptic message to the jail.  I imagined him
circling the country until he found her.

We were chalking a spiraling hopscotch into the street before my house
and the fingers we moved along the tarred road were growing cold.  It
was mid-November.  The dark tire marks in Sheryl's lawn had lost their
sharp edges, like

scars that had begun to heal.  Our fathers were raking leaves,
receding already from the summer's men's club, ducking their heads
after muffled greetings.  Two cars pulled up to her house.  A woman got
out of one; a couple about our parents' age got out of the other.  The
three climbed the steps, the couple looking behind and around them as
the boys in the gang had done that night.  The woman opened the door
and then stepped back to let the couple inside.  Behind the screen were
the white stripes of the stairs.  The shades in the living room went
up, and after a bit of a struggle (we could see the woman's forearms
behind the glass, and then the man's), the front windows groaned open.
The moving vans were there by the first of the year.

w

The bowling alley in our town was air-cooled: the decal on the door
showed the letters capped with blue and-white glaciers, dripping like
mounds of ice cream.  Inside, the cold air smelled of foot powder and
warm socks.  There was a row of pinball machines in the entryway, a
cigarette machine, two mahogany-colored phone booths with seats like
Ping-Pong paddles and doors that turned on both a light and a fan when
they were pulled closed.  As you entered, there was always the
seemingly faraway echo of rolling balls and falling pins.  There was
the sense, especially in the dimly lit area behind the alleys with its
wiry carpeting and small square tables, its trophy hutch and padded
bar, of a public place striving to become, for an hour or two, a place
to call your own: a homey, ingratiating sense matched only by certain
movie theaters and the basement rec rooms of some of our neighbors.

From here Rick made his first troubled call, a day or two, perhaps as
much as a week, before that night.

He had not seen her at the supermarket where she worked

and where he usually picked her up on summer evenings.  The kid who
collected the steel carts from the parking lot said she'd already gone
home.

He may have thought of driving to her house, but he was young enough to
still be wary, even of her: young enough to fear that any change of
routine could portend a sudden and inexplicable change of heart.  He
drove instead to the bowling alley, where he knew his friends would be.
He called from there, the fan whirring above him, the distant sound of
the balls and the pins like that of a battle heard from across a wide
sea.

Her mother's voice was sad and determined.  Sheryl wasn't there.  There
was no saying when she'd be in.

He rubbed his palms on his thighs before he left the booth, and outside
he began to shrug even before his friends had turned to see him.  "I
don't know where the hell she is.

"Shopping," one of them said.

In a taunting voice, "Maybe she's buying you a present, Ricky."

Only the thickest of them failing to imagine the worst, what was coming
for him: the end of the romance.

He stayed with them long after the hour he usually drove off alone with
Sheryl.  He leaned against his car, one foot hooked back onto the
bumper.  He grew impatient with their conversation, yet discouraged
them when they said, "Let's move."  He called her again.  The
summer-league bowlers had begun to play, and through the glass panels
of the booth he could see the backs of their bright, identical shirts,
foolish and indifferent--Mr.  Carpenter and my father among them.  He
let the phone ring twenty-three times and then hung up and dialed
again.  Now it was busy.

He left the booth before he could imagine her: carefully re cradling
the receiver.

Outside, some girls had arrived and he questioned each of
them--quickly, not even attempting to seem casual, but making sure that
tomorrow, when she rejoined him, he would not be ridiculed.  They
shrugged.  None of them knew Sheryl better than he did.

At midnight, with all of them waiting for him in their cars, he called
again.  Her mother said this was no time for a boy to call.  They were
all in bed.  She would not wake her.

In the bowling alley, the stale cool air seemed hardly to exist, except
as a smell and a chill from no particular source.  Outside, without a
breeze, only the summer heat, the lingering odor of sun-warmed parking
lot, of cars and litter, he might have felt this sudden silence had
stopped whatever it was that turned and refreshed the earth.

Like most kids who can't get along in high school, Rick had trouble at
home.  His mother was a strong woman with frail sensibilities who had
decided on a fairly regular basis throughout his childhood that she
would prefer not to live.  She would then either swallow a bottle of
aspirin or a box of baking soda or gather up as much cash as she could,
combing the house for lunch money and pocket change, and leave town,
often with a baby in the crib and the other children still in school.
She would choose obscure, unpredictable routes: board a bus for
Baltimore or Pittsburgh or take a train to some wealthy suburb of
Connecticut or New Jersey.  She would check into motels that faced six
others on busy interstates or find a place that was an anomaly to its
area: a tiny motor inn in a declining middle-class development,

an eight-room hotel over a beauty parlor in a small working-class
city.

Rick's father was a doctor then, although he'd long stopped practicing
by the time Sheryl came around.  He was a tall, heavy-boned man, either
weary or kind, and he somehow brought his wife back home or back to
life every time.  Once or twice there had been a piece in the local
paper: "Doctor's Wife Sought / Doctor's Wife Found," but apparently the
last, discreet line of these articles, "Mrs.  Slater was reported
missing once (twice, three times) before last year (January, month) and
was once (twice, three times) again returned to her home," became too
vexing to compose.  Or perhaps the editor realized that this was simply
the difficult, enduring stuff of daily life, not news, and so the less
said the better.

When Sheryl met Rick, his mother was in a flexible main streaming
program at the state hospital and was home most weekends, "doing okay,"
her need to disappear or die somehow met by the distance between the
sprawling campus of the hospital and the untidy lawn of her
four-bedroom house.

Rick's father by then was almost always on crutches.  A botched disc
operation the same year he had abandoned his failing practice had set
off a slow deterioration that subsequent operations only momentarily
forestalled, as if the brief recoveries they brought about were mere
missteps in the steady progression of his decline.

There was some money from a lawsuit, and at the time Sheryl knew Rick,
his father was working for a local medical lab.  Two of Rick's sisters
had married strangers before they were twenty, and a third took care of
things at home and worked part-time in a department store at the
mall.

I have never quite gotten straight what happened to Rick's

father's medical career.  My mother had visited him once, when I was
young, as she had visited every doctor in the phone book in those days,
wondering what had happened to her talent to conceive, but she only
made the connection months after that night.  His office had been in a
part of our town that had somehow escaped new development if not
rezoning and so still retained a battered and incongruous trace of the
farm.  There were two or three people who still kept chickens in that
area, and here and there you could still find narrow wooden-frame
houses, some of them abandoned, with old wells and useless water pumps
in their tiny yards.  Dr.  Slater's office was one of these.  A
green-shingled place with a grape arbor and a sloping porch caught, as
touches of paint and threads of old carpeting might be caught in the
corners of renovated houses, between a drive-in Dairy Barn store and a
stucco ranch given over to card reading and TV repair.

He was a GP, but according to my mother approached his profession with
the pride and the disdain of a haughty artist.  He wanted nothing to do
with money, either taking it in or paying it out.  He hired no nurse,
no receptionist, no interior decorator to choose couches for his
waiting room or paintings for his walls.  He used the kitchen and the
dining room of the old house for his office and examining room and
lined the living room with unmatched stuffed or stiff back chairs.  A
handwritten index card on the front door told what time he'd be there,
and patients simply arrived with their own magazines and ashtrays and
waited their turn.  He would stay for as long as it took to see
everyone, sometimes letting patients into the dining room long after
midnight.

When my mother's visit had ended, she had asked him

if he would send her the bill.  He seemed offended, she said, or
embarrassed, and gruffly told her, "Six dollars."  He took out his
wallet to make change, and when he saw that he didn't have enough
singles, made it five.  He put the cash in his wallet and the wallet
into his pocket, as if, my mother said, he would spend it at the
grocery store that very evening.  As he probably had.

What his intentions in all this were, no one was sure.  A kind of
purity, I suppose--medicine alone, medicine as it might have been in
older, simpler days of the American frontier, or in some suburban
doctor's dream of it.  A one man effort at National Health.  My mother
had liked him, although the stark and dusty waiting room and especially
the old yellow refrigerator she had stared at while he examined her had
startled her a bit.  When she went back to him a second time, every
chair in the living room was taken and people were standing out on the
porch.  She had me and my brother with her then and had neither the
time nor the endurance to wait.  She went on to another doctor, one
with a motherly nurse receptionist and an appointment calendar and a
collection of his own paint-by-number oils on the bright walls, and
never returned to Dr.  Slater again.

I suppose it's possible that his other patients did the same, as the
low fees and the down-home feeling gradually lost their novelty or as
the doctor's obvious lack of prosperity began to seem to them a
reflection of his skill.  Or maybe his scorn of paperwork got him in
trouble with the IRS or the AM A or the local hospital.  Perhaps his
mad wife drove the patients away; or his own wistful and deliberate
pursuit of a time that had never been his to begin with had finally
appeared even to him as another kind of madness.  It hardly matters.
His back went out and his operation went haywire.  His practice
ended.

On the night of the fight, the night Rick came to claim her, he was
home with his eldest daughter, who had just returned from her job at
the store.  She answered the phone, still in her stockings and dress,
her name tag still pinned to her collar.  He got up slowly, a big man
with pale, heavy limbs.  He leaned against tables and held on to walls
as he made his way to the telephone.  His daughter put out her arm for
him.  Her pity at times like this seemed cloying.

More trouble, he must have thought when he heard his boy's muffled,
sullen voice.  More bad luck.  At some time during that night he must
have thought it overwhelming, the bad luck, the series of mistakes that
plagued his family.  His wife on the edge of some hotel bed in a
strange city, her pocketbook on her lap, her eyes passing over him. 
His youngest daughter already trapped in a bitter, childish marriage;
the middle one pregnant and broke, on the road somewhere with her
brute; the oldest steeped in a dutiful loneliness.  And now his intense
and restless son playing out some B-movie drama over the love of a
skinny girl.

He must have wondered at some point if they drew the bad luck to them,
even unwittingly welcomed it.  Or if they were simply, merely,
hopelessly badgered.  Plagued by invisible, arbitrary demons, by chance
alone.  Always in the wrong place at the wrong time, the place where a
thousand others before them had stood unharmed.

Or is it only that their bad luck seems all of a piece only in the
recounting of it?

Would it have seemed to him, even on that night, that his family's
history of misfortune was, if not fair, at least reasonable--the good
with the bad--when held beside, scattered among, all the days when his
wife was well and his children untroubled, when his patients waited for
him on the porch of the small house, watching the sunset, smelling

the grass, speaking softly to one another as neighbors should.  Would
it have seemed to him, even on that night, more appropriate to ask, as
Sheryl's mother might have asked the morning she fled our street, as
lucky as whom?  Whose luck is unending?  Whose luck has lasted as long
as mine has, till now?

When the phone rang that night, he was watching the way the living room
light played prettily over his daughter's plain features.  She was
telling him about a customer and laughing.  Her toes in their shiny
stockings were round and perfectly shaped.  The room, which she had
polished and vacuumed that morning, had finally given up the day's heat
and grown cool.  He was thinking about his wife, who would be home
again on Friday, doing better, and how he had loved her when she was
his daughter's age.  Loved her the way Rick loved his girl now: crazy
cross-eyed with it, a little unreal.  He had finally found a good
position on the couch and for the past hour or two had felt no pain.

When Rick called Sheryl's mother again the next morning, prepared to be
relieved, she said her daughter had gone out for the day.  He would
have recognized the change in her voice from the night before.  The
night before, she had been hesitant, a little curt, but now she used
the sure tone of a person who has long and gleefully rehearsed the way
to say, "Gosh, I hate to tell you this ..."

"She said if you called I should just say she'd gone out for the day. I
don't know where she's off to, Rick.  You know I've never made her tell
me her every move.  You know that."

He went to the supermarket, but they told him she hadn't come in to
work.  He headed for the mall.  Neither of their

birthdays was coming up, and their one-year anniversary had already
passed.  What surprise could she be planning for him; what present was
worth all this?

He was young enough to fear that he had simply become unlovable to her
overnight, and he began his search casually, self-consciously, just in
case it was true.  Just in case somewhere someone was watching him,
someone who knew.

He walked slowly through the mall, his arms loose at his sides, the sun
warm on his shoulders and hair.  This was in the earlier days of
shopping malls, when they still attempted to resemble cluttered Main
Streets, not sealed airplane hangars and Disney World bazaars.  There
were large concrete planters regularly spaced down the center, filled
with hedges and begonias and sad-looking trees.  Some were surrounded
by small groups of teenagers, who held cups of soda or slices of pizza
wrapped in greasy wax paper.  The girls wore pale, chalky lipstick,
their hair was teased, some had pink or turquoise combs slipped into
the back pockets of their jeans.  He scanned them all quickly--he would
know her in a second.  He would put his hand to the back of her neck,
"Where the hell you been, babe?"  If he saw her with someone else, he'd
just walk by.  Hope his legs would hold him until he got to his car.

He looked carefully into the shoe store, where the customers, lined up
neatly in their seats, were easy to see through the plate-glass windows
and doors.  He dismissed the paint stores, the men's shops (unless she
was buying him a present?), made one quick pass through Sam Goody's.

He began to walk more quickly, sensing she was there but also feeling
still the wise, amused eyes of whoever it was who was watching him,
knowing the truth.  He was young enough to believe that his
foolishness, his humiliation

in love, could not go unnoticed and once noticed could never be
forgiven.

He set his face into a smirk, even chuckled as he pushed through the
door of Newberry's.  He passed the counter where she sometimes bought
earrings, hit the curtain of the instant photo machine.  He passed the
bins of white and beige pocketbooks whose odor filled the store, of
plastic sandals, of discount makeup and perfume.  He checked the wall
of birthday and anniversary cards.

In Woolworth's, he paused at a table of scarves.  They were piled
loosely, bright and tangled and so thin that it seemed only their white
price tags kept them from rising like smoke into the cooled air.  He
touched one--a pale yellow with almost colorless white polka dots--and
its rough, familiar feel already seemed a reminder of something lost.
He had untied the scarves she sometimes wore around her throat.  Once,
she had draped one across her bare shoulders like a stole.

Again he checked the jewelry and the makeup.  At the lunch counter, a
child had just gotten sick.  She stood pale and dazed as her mother
seemed to beat at the front of her sun suit with a wet paper towel.  A
black janitor was wheeling a bucket and a mop to the spot.  The other
customers had scattered to either end of the counter.

When he turned away, he found two teenage girls watching him.  "Oh,
sickening," one said directly to him, and he recognized the invitation.
He could talk to her, take her telephone number.  He could bury his
face in her stiff hair.

"You're ugly," he said and saw her face change, just slightly, as if
some small thing behind her makeup had slipped.  He left the store.

Now he was jogging.  The big stores seemed to mock him

with their narrow aisles and invisible doorways, their elevators and
dressing rooms.  He realized that he could just be missing her at every
turn.  She could be just on the other side of the mall sitting with her
back to the trees, smoking a cigarette.  She could stand and wander
away just as he left the escalator in Klein's.  She could be fingering
the very scarf he had touched just as he emerged into the sunlight once
again.

He imagined how he would later see it around her throat or her waist,
laugh and say, "When'd you buy this?"

She could be on the bus already, headed home.

He called again and caught her mother by surprise.  Her voice was
cheerfully formal when she said hello.  He asked if Sheryl was home
yet.  There was a terrible pause.  "No, Rick," she said.  "No, she's
not."

At some time during that day he must have driven past her house.  No
sign of her, of course, but a startling memory of himself as he had
been just days before: confidently climbing those steps, Sheryl there
even before he had rung the bell.  Himself stepping inside without
thought or hesitation, without gratitude or, he realized, even pride.
He would wait for her to finish drying the dishes or to run upstairs
for her purse.  He would stretch out in an armchair like the owner of
the house, joke with her Polish grandmother like a favorite son.  He
would be as confident as a married man of how the evening would end.

Just days ago, he had climbed those steps and she had been there behind
the screen.  Although last time she had been ready when he arrived and
had not invited him in.

He ate supper with his father and his sister that night, simply to
define for himself the beginning of evening, the end of the lousy
day.

His sister said, "To what do we owe the great pleasure of your
company--run out of pizza money?"

He told her to stuff it, then added that she was becoming a bitchy old
maid.

She called him a punk.

He said he didn't see any boyfriends knocking down her door.  "When was
the last time you had a date?"

She said, "Oh, shut up."  But he leaned closer to her as she worked at
the sink.  He knew, unconsciously, that she would do anything for him.
Long ago she had taken up their mother's slack in compassion and care,
taken up with a kind of fatalism what she saw as their consequences:
she would never be loved sufficiently in return.

"Don't you even wonder what it's like to get laid?"  he whispered.

"Go to hell," she said.

"To have some guy slip it to you?"

She was silent, but her cheeks were burning.

"Make you feel so good you want to go crazy."

"Drop dead," she said.

He sighed.  "Guess if you've never had it, you'll never miss it."

He turned from her.  His father was leaning in the doorway.  He had one
crutch under his arm, and his free hand grasped the doorframe.  "Knock
it off, Rick," he said.  His father's skin seemed tight on his skull.
He seemed to be growing older and thinner by the hour.

"Christ," Rick whispered as he brushed past him.  "Nice to be home."

He called again at about eight.  Her grandmother answered the phone,
and he said quickly, "Can I speak to Sheryl, please?"  There was
another pause.  He could hear

muffled voices, the sound of someone putting a hand over the receiver.
Then her mother's voice.  "Yes?"  As if she didn't know who was on the
other end.

"Can I speak to Sheryl?"  he said again.

She hesitated once more and then simply said, "No, Rick.  No you can't.
And I think it would be best if you didn't call here anymore."

She hung up before he had shouted his reply.  He dialed again, but the
phone was once more off the hook.  He pounded the metal wall of the
booth, pulled open the doors.

"She won't let me talk to her," he told his friends at the pinball
machines, his voice cracking with anger.  "I'll kill her."  He headed
for the doors as if that's what he would do.  Some of the bowlers had
turned around when they heard his shout.  His friends put their hands
on his chest.  He tried to push them away.  "I'll kill that old bitch,"
he said, and they all feared he was about to cry.  They got him out the
door.  He pulled away from them and kicked at his own car.  "What the
fuck's going on?"  he said.  "What the fuck is happening?"

Cautiously, they asked if he and Sheryl had had a fight, was there
anything wrong between them.  He shook his head.  "No," he said.  "No,
man, it's her old lady.  It's that old bitch."

He said it to protect himself, no doubt, to keep from having to admit
to them that he feared everything had changed, that he feared she had
changed her mind overnight, become, as his mother used to do, another
person entirely--one whose strangeness was all the more terrible
because of what part of him it hid: she had said she loved him and then
become someone else.

His friends, who would have been more comfortable with

his anger than with his tears, who would have preferred to say what
should be done to the old bag than to offer their condolences over the
loss of something as difficult as love, were no doubt willing to agree.
Clearly, they said, she was keeping Sheryl from him, the jealous, horny
old bitch.  She had found out what Sheryl and Rick did.  Her own
husband had croaked (probably when he put his head between her legs,
one of them said--they had left the bowling alley and were now leaning
across their cars in another parking lot, drinking beer), so she's
jealous that her daughter's getting what she'll never get again, not
unless she pays somebody.  Sure, they said, that's what's going on.
It's the old lady, trying to make Rick think Sheryl's stepping out on
him.  Probably keeping her locked in her room till Rick finds somebody
else.  Sure, that's what's going on.

They shook their heads.  They believed it.  They had heard enough
stories about bitter stepmothers and ugly old queens who locked
beautiful girls in dungeons and towers.  They were willing enough to
see themselves as handsome, persecuted princes whose very rights as men
these women would deny.

The familiar, aimless evening took on form, took on drama as they
talked.  The dark summer trees were thick with it.  The dim lights
around the parking lot made the black asphalt a stage.  They had seen
movies with lighting like this.  They worked themselves into their best
emotions.  Isn't this what they'd always suspected: They were
persecuted, wrongly accused, unfairly denied.  They told the others who
joined them what had happened, their voices rising with outrage.

"Gimme a dime," one said, and, to Rick, "What's her number?"  The
others watched him cross the street to a

lighted telephone booth: spotlight.  He dialed and hung up and dialed
again.  He came back.  "She must still have the phone off the hook."

Three others jumped in a car and took off.  Minutes later, they
returned with the news that there were lights on in Sheryl's house, in
the living room and in one window upstairs.  Another went to the phone:
still busy.

"Call Angie," someone said.

Now the grouping of cars had become a command post.  When the girls
arrived, they stood to one side, looking sympathetically at Rick, who
had once again become possible to them, more possible than ever, hurt
as he was, or would soon be (because none of them believed Sheryl's
mother was keeping her from him--they had mothers, too; they knew it
couldn't be done).

Word came back that Angie and a friend had gone to the nine o'clock
movie.  Two boys were dispatched to wait for them outside.

Someone dialed Sheryl's number again.  The plan in the beginning was to
ask for her politely; if questioned, to say, "I'm in her math class at
school and I thought I'd say hello since I haven't seen her all
summer."  But as the hour grew late, they decided they would simply
curse into the phone, "Listen, you old bitch."

Rick was drunk by now and growing morose.  By now he no longer
understood what had happened to him--not merely in the past twenty-four
hours, but in the past twelve months.  She had said she loved him.  She
had promised him things he could hardly understand except as some kind
of fulfillment of all that he knew he wanted, and then become someone
else.

His two friends returned from the movies.  They'd found

Angie and her girlfriend, but she said she hadn't seen Sheryl in a
couple of days.  She and Sheryl weren't that friendly anymore anyway.

Rick leaned against one of the girls who had pulled herself up onto the
hood of his car and his arm pushed into her thigh.  "I just hope she's
not pregnant," he told her softly.  "I just hope that's not it."

Later, he told them that he, and they, should just go right over there
and pull her out of the house.  Murder the old bitch if they had to.
They agreed, but not tonight, they said.  They needed a plan.

He drove himself home a little after three.  He lightly sideswiped a
car parked in the street, scraping paint.  He called her again from the
phone in the kitchen.  This time it rang and her mother answered with a
gasp, as if she had just struggled up out of the water.

"C'mon," he said--he would not remember this in the morning--"let me
talk to her.  Come on."  But she hung up on him without a word.

It's hard not to think of Sheryl's mother as cruel in all this: hard
not to think of her as the boys did, as the jealous queen, the wicked
witch.  She was the one, after all, who had swept her daughter out of
the state the very day her pregnancy was confirmed, who chose to
torment her boyfriend with these coy games.  It was she who made sure
her daughter had no chance to explain, to tell him goodbye.  No doubt
Sheryl tried to get past her, tried to call him from the supermarket on
the last day she worked, from her own house as she quickly gathered her
things together, from the airport, even, when she'd told her mother she
wanted to go to the bathroom before boarding the plane and instead
headed

for the phones.  But Rick's house was often empty, or maybe his father
couldn't bring himself to move at that moment, or didn't want to try;
maybe his sister ignored the ringing phone, certain it wasn't for
her.

This isn't news: the world is as indifferent to lovers as it is to the
poor and the unlucky.  Sheryl's mother would have known this: it's as
indifferent to lovers as it is to the dead, and to those who mourn
them.

Before her husband's sudden death, she had always been known as a
sweet, soft-spoken woman.  She didn't pick her nose or pepper her
conversations with "Jesus Christ"; she said "sugar" and "fudge" when
she drew the wrong cards at canasta, and even the dirty jokes she told
were cute and inoffensive.  She had curly brown hair and a round, dry
face, what I used to think of as gumdrop eyes, as small as buttons.

But at her husband's wake, my mother later told me, she screamed
shrilly at a young attendant who placed a small arrangement of flowers
on the floor by the casket rather than on a table top, where they
clearly belonged.  She sent Sheryl out of the room at one point to
demand that the funeral director tell the group of Irish people in the
next chapel to lower their voices and control their laughter.

"This is a funeral parlor," she said to those who tried to calm her.
"Not some shanty gin mill."

In the days that followed, she told the neighbors who asked, "No,
there's nothing you can do for me.  What in the world can you do for
me?"

Our mothers were hurt and puzzled by this.  The sudden death of one of
the block's husbands had startled them, but Sheryl's mother's anger was
even worse.  They held their throats as they spoke of it, slid their
hands over the kitchen

table as if there was something they wanted to straighten and smooth.
Their own plans for widowhood, which I sometimes heard them discuss in
the same frightened, delighted way we children planned our encounters
with vampires and communists, usually involved a gallant, tragic air, a
nice secretarial job and the return to the house they'd been raised in.
(Although Mrs.  Evers, whose parents had both died of the same heart
trouble that would eventually, when I was about twenty, free her
forever from the risk of becoming a widow, had only cousins to go to.)
Never this fury.  They shook their heads.  I remember them repeating
the word distraught.  I remember thinking that it meant not merely
sorrowful but somehow emotionally skewed: you were angry when you meant
to be sad, mean when you meant to be grateful; you cried when you were
happy.

My father went to her house one evening not long after her husband died
to help her with her income tax returns.  He came back furious.  At one
point she had grabbed the pencil out of his hand and flung it across
the room.  She'd accused him of intentionally trying to confuse her.

"What can you do for a woman like that?"  he'd asked.

My mother had shrugged.  She seemed a little fearful, as if she were
just realizing what being a widow might involve.

"Did she cry?"  she asked, and my father said, somewhat indignantly,
"She did not."  We all shook our heads.  There was no forgiving her
then.

I think of us as naive in those days.  All of us.  Years later, just a
few months after Billy Rossi was killed, Mrs.  Rossi turned a hose on a
couple of little boys who had wandered onto her lawn.  No one seemed
surprised then, although Mrs.  Rossi had always been known as
easygoing, even kind.  Then we merely shrugged and nodded as if we
understood. We

said seeing little children, boys especially, was rough for her.

But we resented Sheryl's mother's anger.  We said (or our parents said
and we children concurred), "She's never going to find another husband
with an attitude like that."

We gradually replaced the word distraught with ungrateful and then
bitter.  Our mothers, who had begun by then to look for reasons to
avoid her, said it was high time she pulled herself together and
started being pleasant again.  How long could they go on feeling sorry
for her?  How long could one person mourn?

By that summer, she had still not found the courage to look for a job.
She had still not learned to change a tire or mow the lawn.  She had
handed all her finances over to an accountant.  Her deliverance, no
doubt, took the form for her as much as for us of another husband, but
that must have seemed to her as impossible as her loneliness.  By that
summer she must have realized that she could not mourn forever, or rage
forever, that she would have to do something to get on with her life
and that still she had no idea what to do.

When Sheryl came into the room that summer morning, her mother was
already awake, her hand held over her eyes.  In the year and some
months since her husband's death, she would have found no change in her
sense of loss, or in her disbelief that the loss was hers, but it might
have become with each morning more and more difficult to raise the
tears that she had thought would wake her for the rest of her life. 
She might have been remembering some moment from their early marriage,
or from their last days together, perhaps some argument they'd once
had, turning the memory over and over, searching for whatever it was
that would fill her with the appropriate sadness, the only feeling she
had become

willing to wake for, the only feeling she still feared to lose.

Sheryl appeared in the doorway and said, "Mom," in much the same way
she might have said it years ago, hoping to be kept home from school.
She wore lacy baby dolls, lavender and white, no makeup, but her eyes
still smudged with mascara.  Her legs and arms were bony, lightly
tanned.  Her hair, flattened from sleep, was pressed back behind her
ears.

Sheryl walked into the room and knelt on the floor beside her mother,
who only turned her head, her hand just lifted off her brow.
Reflexively, without tenderness, she reached out to brush the bangs out
of her daughter's eyes.

She might once have thought, or been told, that if she lost her
husband, her children and grandchildren would save her, but she had
learned by then that this simply wasn't true.  Sheryl had her father's
mouth and full face and something of his coloring, but she was beside
the point somehow.  Their child, that was all.  Another life, not
theirs.  She was only vaguely aware of the betrayal in this.  What,
then, were children for?

The light in the pale blue bedroom was the early light of a thousand
such summer mornings.  The windows were open, and through them came the
sounds of the first children, out surveying the grounds, revving up
bicycles, me knocking on Diane Rossi's side door.

"Mom," Sheryl said softly, kneeling beside her mother, her hand
touching the mattress in some approximation of herself at three,
demanding to be pulled into her parents' bed.  "I think maybe I'm
pregnant."

Her mother rose immediately and went to the phone on what had been her
husband's side of the bed.  In the months since his death, she had
often thought that if it hadn't been

so swift and unexpected, so immediately complete, she would have done
well.  If he had woken her in the middle of the night, clutching his
heart, she would have phoned the police, their doctor, the hospital,
she would have supervised the attendants who carried him down the
stairs and sat calmly beside him in the ambulance.  If he'd had cancer
or some such slow disease, she would have learned to use hypodermic
needles or catheters or whatever he needed.  She would have set up a
hospital bed in the living room, slept beside him on the couch every
night, drawn the curtains and adjusted the pillows so he could see the
street, the progress of his lawn (which she would have tended for him),
the cardinals and jays perched on the hedge.

She would have proven to him, and to herself, that she was capable. She
would have done well.

She asked Sheryl, "When did you have your last period?"  and then
quickly spoke the answer into the phone.  It was nearly three months
ago.  She said, "Right away," and checked the bedside clock.  When she
hung up, she told Sheryl they would see the doctor that morning. Sheryl
was now sitting on the bed, her hands in her lap.  Her mother went to
her then, put her arm around her shoulder, maybe kissed the top of her
hair, which smelled of cigarette smoke and hairspray.  "Okay," she
said.  "It will be okay."  Thinking already of her sister in Ohio and
if it wouldn't be better for Sheryl to fly out there as soon as they
knew for sure, maybe tonight.

She took control of her daughter's tragedy in a way she had been unable
to do with her own and turned the anger she had learned, the nastiness,
to what would have seemed to her to be good use.  For in these matters,
it was well accepted at the time, the girl must disappear and the
hoodlum boy never know.

That night, as soon as I'd managed to break out of my mother's grip, I
left our porch and went into the street.  All the children were doing
it, not even running but almost staggering, somewhat reluctantly, in
our fathers' wakes, going only as far as what seemed to be the
prescribed borders of the fight: about six feet or so from the cars and
her lawn, which left us scattered across both sidewalks on either side
and down the middle of the street.  When the first police car
approached, we merely turned our heads, stricken, I suppose, with that
strange paralysis that seems to grip all crying and moaning children.
Georgie Evers and I were the first two in his path, and it never
occurred to us to step out of his way.

But by then the officer had seen the cars on the lawn and the brawl
that took place beyond them.

He stopped, then turned on his siren and his lights, got out quickly
and stood dumbfounded for a moment with one foot still in the car and
his hand on the open door.  He shouted, "You kids," waving his arm
(still none of us moved),

and then dove into his car again.  He turned off the siren, made a
call on his radio (the Meyer twins, who stood nearly at his elbow,
claimed he said, Mayday!  Mayday!), then leaped from the car again, the
nightstick in his hand.

But the boys had begun a retreat as soon as they heard the siren.  We
saw them shaking our fathers from their legs and their arms, dropping
their chains and even their jackets to the lawn if that was the only
way to get rid of them.  Some of the boys were bloodied, the blood
black shadows that covered their mouths or their ears.  They were
shouting each other's names.  I saw one of them was lifted and pushed
into a car by the others.  Car doors slammed.  Even as the poor young
officer jogged toward the fray, the first car, the one in Sheryl's
driveway, the white one with the painted flourish, backed up with a
screech and, turning its front wheels over the curb, headed
out--passing within inches of some of the children who still stood
crying or who, seeing the car come toward them, had leaped into bushes
or onto the grass.

Again the cop turned to us and with another wide wave of his hand
cried, "Get out of the street."  But at the same time, the car that had
led the procession did a sudden U turn across Sheryl's lawn, its horn a
staccato yell, and pulled out from her driveway.  The next instant, I
saw Rick.  The light was on inside the remaining car, the one he had
emerged from.  I saw him through the back passenger window.  I almost
thought he was turning toward me, but he was simply curling forward in
pain.  He had lost his sunglasses.  His hands, streaked with blood,
were cupped over his face.  I later learned his nose had been broken,
but at the time I was certain he was crying.  Then the door closed and
the light went out.

While our fathers were still pulling at its doors, pounding at its
windows, the car suddenly spit out in reverse and then raced backward
down the street, wavering in the streetlight like a fish.  Just past
the north corner it stopped, darted forward and disappeared.

It seemed the whole world was wailing.  In the now nearly total
darkness, the sound made you think you should see an orange glow in the
sky just beyond the rooftops, see the red flames of some city being
consumed by the final conflagration.  There was the disappearing siren
of the young cop's car, the approaching sirens of his reinforcements,
little Jake screaming in his mother's arms.  There were the other
children, who had been blasted into the hedges and the grass by the
escaping cars (and who were lying tragically now, unharmed but
unwilling to stand until their own part in the adventure, their own
brush with death, had been fully recognized), the children like Georgie
Evers, who had never stopped wailing, the mothers who were now running
to their battered husbands' sides, even Sheryl's grandmother, who had
finally opened the door again and now stood crying in Polish from
behind the screen.

It seemed our whole neighborhood had raised its voice in one varied,
inharmonious wail.

Amidst all this, I saw my father and Mr.  Rossi, who had a glistening
gash on his head and on his arm, help Sheryl's mother up the steps and
into the house.  My mother followed.  Just before I caught up with
them, I saw Billy Rossi and Billy Carpenter burst out of their
driveways on their bicycles, headed in the direction the hoods had gone
and whooping like Indians.

Inside, Sheryl's living room seemed soft and comfortable (there were
the green drapes and the green carpeting, the

 small velvet paintings hung high on the walls) and yet at the same
time, perhaps because of the plastic slipcovers, sheathed in a thin
layer of ice.  Her grandmother stood trembling and crying by the single
floor lamp, the only light on in the room.  She was a small, plump
woman.  She wore a light cotton shift, her neck and freckled shoulders
bare.  Her sunken eyes were dark in the dim yellow light.  Sheryl's
mother sat on the couch.  The men were trying to get her to lie down,
but she kept saying, "I'm all right, I tell you.  I tell you I'm all
right," her voice quivering.  She was shoeless, and her legs looked
clawed.  There was dirt on her palms and on her knees.  My mother came
through the dining room from the kitchen, a glass of water and a wet
dish towel in her hands.

"Here, Ann," she said.

Sheryl's mother refused the water but took the cloth and wrapped it
around her wrist, sighing and telling them she was all right.

"Mama," she said suddenly and quite crossly to the old woman who stood
by the lamp, crying and murmuring, clasping and unclasping her plump
hands.  "I'm all right."

I saw my parents exchange a look.  What can you do for a woman like
that?

Then the police cars pulled up outside, their sirens dying.  Their blue
lights moved eerily behind the drapes.  We heard the doors slam, heard
the cops' and our neighbors' voices, heard the spit and sputter of the
police radios, those small muttering sounds that seem to accompany all
disasters.

A policeman rattled the screen door and then let himself in.  Two of
them, both large and hippy with their gunbelts and nightsticks.  One of
them was carrying a small black

pad.  The other, who was somewhat older, tipped his hat to the ladies
and asked their forgiveness for barging in.  Sheryl's mother
immediately gave them Rick's name and what she knew of his address. The
other cop took it down while the older one simply smiled.  "We've got
one of the cars already," he said.  He seemed to be enjoying himself. 
"It's not going to be any trouble picking them all up."

Taking a seat on the edge of one of the thick plastic covered chairs,
he leaned forward and in a soft, fatherly voice advised her about
pressing charges.  She nodded, listening.  Yes, of course, of course.
The quiver had left her voice.

At one point, my father crossed the room as they spoke and gently took
my mother's arm.  She was still holding the glass of water she had
gotten for Sheryl's mother, and wordlessly, he urged her to drink it.
She did, looking all the while like a runner-up in a game with only one
perfect prize.  (Later that night, after a botched, embarrassed and
only sporadically explicit attempt to explain what Sheryl had done, she
told me, "Let's just say the stork missed our house and landed on
hers.")

When the officer stood again, the plastic slipcovers or his leather
holster groaning, he told Sheryl's mother he'd be glad to drive her to
the hospital if she wanted to get her legs and her wrist taken care of,
have a doctor make sure everything else was okay.  He turned to Mr.
Rossi, who now held a handkerchief to the wound on his head.  He said
it wouldn't be a bad idea for him to come along, too.

The cop turned to my father.  "You okay?"  he asked.  My father's shirt
was ripped and there was grass and dirt on his pants and in his thick
hair, but he said he was fine.

"How about you, tootsie?"  the cop said to me.

Involuntarily, I smiled.  I had always liked policemen, but now my
loyalties were torn.

Suddenly, Sheryl's mother said, "I know you."  We all turned to see
that she was looking carefully at the officer with the notepad.

"You've been here before," she said.  "The day my husband died.  He
died in his car."

The cop pushed back his hat and said, "That's right," as if he were
making a confession.  He looked sheepishly at the other men, Mr. Rossi,
my father, as if he feared they'd think him a harbinger.  "Maybe I can
come back sometime when the news is good," he said.

Sheryl's mother continued to study him.  Then she said, "No," shaking
her head, still not crying.  "No," she said.

Outside, the men who were to go to the hospital were easing themselves
into the police cars.  The others were sitting on the curb or standing
on the lawn, waiting to go to the police station.  The lawn itself had
been badly ripped by the tires and was littered with chains and
sunglasses and a leather jacket, but as they waited, our fathers leaned
on their rakes or their hoes, Mr.  Carpenter crouched beside his
upright baseball bat, and so they gave the scene a somewhat wistful
portrait-of-America air.  They might have been farmers standing over
their plowed fields, sandlot baseball stars.  Mrs.  Sayles, almost
luminous in her tennis whites, picked her way among them, offering
praise and consolation and cool face cloths

In the distance, the bells of an ice-cream truck tinkled gaily.  Mr.
Rossi, still holding a handkerchief to his wound, took a deep breath
and told my father to take a look at that sky.  "Planets," my father
said.  He turned to my mother.  "You always know which ones are
planets."  But she refused

to look up for him.  Instead, she began what was to become the women's
second chorus of the night.  She put her hand over her heart and
whispered, "Stupid kids.  Those stupid, stupid kids."

My mother's determination to have another, or as she so often put it,
just one more, child had always confused and puzzled me.  My brother
was born first and then I had been born and it seemed to me her luck in
having one of each, both talented and healthy and, in my opinion at
least, perfectly formed, should have filled her with gratitude and
pride, not longing.  And yet, through our thin walls had come the
nightly thumping, the hard quick breaths.  Listening to them each
night, I would imagine both my parents as I had once seen them an hour
before the start of one of their New Year's Eve parties: my mother in
her slip and her jewelry, my father in his undershirt and good suit
pants, puffing frantically into one balloon after another, apparently
trying to fill the room.  They had seemed to give themselves entirely
to each, blowing into it with one long breath (always futilely for the
first few seconds, then a miraculous blossoming), quickly examining it,
then blowing again.  The fruits of their labor, yellow and green and
blue and red, bobbing at their feet, bright and useless.

Twice that I remember, my mother had announced that a new brother or
sister would indeed arrive, and twice the delicate thing she and my
father had managed to form broke without warning.  I came home from
school to find she was in the hospital for the evening.  I was awakened
one night by the sound of her voice: every light in the house seemed to
be burning, and I found her sitting on the edge of her bed, already in
her coat and shoes, waiting for my father to retrieve the fetus from
the bathroom.

(Even now in her pleasant and irresponsible retirement, she can say
without hesitation how old those children would be today and just where
in school or marriage and their careers they might be, had they lived.
Even now I'm surprised by the precision and the detail with which she
has imagined their lives, and I'm forced to make such calculations of
my own.)

That summer, my mother was past forty and in her quest to conceive had
begun to resort to what I can think of now only as a kind of voodoo.

Each night she would run hot water into the bathtub before she went to
bed and then, when their lovemaking was over, trot from the bedroom to
the bath to soak for an hour or two in a solution of Epsom salts or
baking soda or whatever powder or potion the other women had advised.
Often, my father would go in to keep her company.  He would turn down
the toilet seat and sit there in his bathrobe, his voice made hollow by
the water and the tiles.  Sometimes he would read to her from one of
her magazines, stories of married women triumphing over various
domestic difficulties, reviving their husband's love, re winning their
children's affections, escorting their friends through innumerable
tribulations.

In the morning, I would find these magazines on the edge of the tub or
the back of the toilet, folded over to the last page and buckled here
and there by the dampness, as if the end of each story had been wept
over.  I would reread them myself to fill in what part I hadn't heard
the night before, either because my father's voice had grown too soft
or my mother had swished the water too loudly or I had simply fallen
asleep before I'd caught the resolution.

In these stories, the women who longed for children got them, usually
just as the longing itself had been nearly

obscured by something else: a death, a birthday party, an adoption, as
if the longing itself had been the culprit.  I suppose the message was
that too blatant a desire to manipulate your own life was unseemly.  I
suppose my mother never caught on.

One early morning not many days before the night he came for her, I
woke to a kind of drumming sound: hard soft, hard soft--long
interval--hard soft  In the hallway I passed by my parents' room and
through the partly opened door saw my mother attempting a head stand at
the foot of their bed.  Her head was pressed firmly against the
mattress and her hands gripped the spread as if she would tear it, her
pale legs kicked up again and again, flailing like arms beneath her
white nightgown, one foot hitting the floor each time she was drawn
inevitably back to the earth.

I probably would have laughed, rushed in to join them (probably would
have offered some good advice), were it not for the serious and
determined way in which she tried again and again to raise herself.
Were it not for the solemn and somewhat bemused look on my father's
face as he watched her from his pillow.

I later learned that it was Leela, Jake's mother, who had advised these
acrobatics (meant, of course, to get the sperm moving more swiftly
toward its mark).  That same summer she and my mother were involved in
one of those brief yet intense bouts of friendship the women in our
neighborhood so often experienced.  They had gotten to talking in the
supermarket one morning and for a good number of weeks after were
suddenly inseparable.  I would smell the smoke from their cigarettes
and hear Jake's thick voice as I dressed in the morning.  I would see
Leela, with Jake on her lap, ride past in my mother's car as I played
outside in the

afternoon or find her still in the kitchen, Jake's dark head just
under the red ash of her cigarette, his cheeks covered with ice cream
or cookie crumbs, when I came in from the Everses' pool.  In those
days, they spent an hour or two on the phone each evening too, talking
in low voices that made my father look over his paper to ask me,
"They've been together all afternoon, what have they got to talk
about?"  as if, being female, I would understand.

They talked about conception.  Headstands and Epsom salts and vinegar
douches that would not only guarantee a baby but a baby boy.  They told
their life stories.  Leela, it seemed, had been married once before.
(My mother sharing the news with me on various weekday evenings as she
made dinner in much the same way some other lonely woman might have
shared it with a bird or a dog, not expecting either response or
comprehension, her eyes bright only with the pleasure of repeating what
she had heard.) That first marriage had ended precisely because she had
not been able to conceive.  It was neither of their faults, they were
told.  It was simply that the atmosphere of her particular womb was
inhospitable to his particular seed: an unlucky and insurmountable
problem of chemistry.  Leela herself had been willing to accept the
verdict, had contacted a few adoption agencies and begun sending long
chatty letters and eight dollars a month to an orphan in Indonesia, but
apparently her husband had been determined to prove the doctors right
and, out of nowhere, said my mother, after nine years of marriage,
asked for a divorce so he could marry another woman.

My mother slammed pots and let the water in the sink run violently.
Forget all that had come before, she said-wielding a serrated knife
like a machete--forget the years

of their courtship, their big hotel wedding, their first apartment,
the hundreds of beds she'd made for him and shirts she'd washed and
meals she'd cooked.  Forget the head stands and baking-soda baths, the
painful and intricate advice, not to mention the humiliating questions,
of the pharmacist in her old neighborhood, who had used his white lab
coat and mortar and pestle to give credence to the foolish formulas the
women themselves brought him: hot-water douches and citrus diets and
intercourse performed with your head and throat hanging from the side
of the bed.  Forget what she had once confided to her husband,
believing they were forever bound: if I fail at this, I am neither male
nor female; I cannot know my worth.  Forget especially that he brought
that confidence with him to his new marriage and his young wife.

She'd been barren three years into her own second marriage, already
moved into her house down the block, when she finally conceived Jake.
She knew, of course, the first time she held him with something like a
clear head that he wasn't right, and she momentarily recalled, as the
doctor explained, what another had said about her inhospitable womb.
But she remembered, too, my mother said, what it had been like to have
no child at all.

On the night of the fight, the night Rick came to claim her, Leela had
followed her husband farther than most of the other women had done. She
was just in front of the Sunshines' driveway when she stopped to put
her hands to her mouth.  She wore a white scarf around her bleached
blond hair, wore it tied into a bow at her crown because even then,
when she had grown chunky and was no longer young, she wanted to look
like the GI's dream of Betty

Grable.  She wore white shorts, a turquoise top that was ringed with
perspiration.  She called to her husband as the other women were doing,
not moving any closer, not making any other gesture to retrieve him,
but seeing, no doubt, as the other women saw, the sharp black edge of
the hoe he'd lifted as he ran, the threat that had suddenly transformed
the night.

And then, just as the first police car arrived and the boys began to
retreat, she turned (God only knows, she said in our kitchen the next
morning, what made her turn) to see Jake in his pajamas, standing in
the middle of the street, the sharkish nose of a car headed toward him.
Somehow, she found his arm and pulled it hard, so hard the child
screamed and something cracked (although, she said, it may have been a
bone in her own jaw).  On the sidewalk, she slapped him so fiercely his
teeth were bloodied, so savagely that the faint bruise mark of her hand
was still there the next morning when I came downstairs and found them
both in our kitchen.

Jake was on her lap, a piece of bread crust in his hand.  He was
grinning and chirping, but she jiggled him on her knee as if he were
still wailing.  She held a cigarette in one hand and his shoulder with
the other.  Her nose was running and her eyes were filled with tears.
When she saw me, she wiped at her cheek with the heel of her palm.

My mother reached across the table to touch Jake's fist.  "But he's
fine now," she said, thinking, I'm sure, just as I was thinking, that
the child had never been fine.

Their friendship was already beginning to wane.  In another week or
two, Mrs.  Carpenter would have briefly moved into my mother's
affections and Leela and Jake once more returned to their own end of
the street.  I saw her a final

time just before my parents' house was sold, and she told me that she,
of course, could not leave the neighborhood as nearly everyone else was
doing.  Jake had a job at the mall and knew how to take the bus there
and back.  If she or her husband met him at the boulevard each evening,
it was safe enough for him to walk home.  "If we moved," she'd said,
"he'd be losing his whole world."

I saw her raise her eyes to the cloud of smoke that hovered under the
light fixture.  She sniffed loudly, rubbing her son's shoulder.  "If I
lost him," she began to whisper.  "If I'd lost him."

My mother was stroking the child's hand, her eyes, too, filled with
tears.  "Don't even think about it," she said.  "Don't even imagine
it."

But Leela wanted to complete her thought.  "If I lost him," she said,
"I'd end up with nothing.  I only have this one baby.  What will I end
up with if I lose him?"

My mother glanced at me and I knew for the first time that it was not
our perfection, my brother's and mine, that she'd been hoping to
duplicate.  It was insurance she'd been looking for, and any living
child would have sufficed.

Sheryl called hi to me from the sidewalk in front of our house and
then to my surprise and delight walked up our driveway.  She carried
her looseleaf binder and a small paperback book.  There was a dark,
pilly sweater thrown over her arm.

This was in the early spring, four months or so before that night.  It
had been a warm day, perhaps the first warm day of the season, and
although it was now growing cool, there was still the lingering odor of
bright sunlight, the spring smell of fresh dirt.  I had brought my
Barbie doll out to the front porch, probably because my brother and his
friends were somewhere in the house and this was my way of showing my
disdain.  I had the black doll case opened at the top of the steps and
was choosing a dinner outfit.

Sheryl said as she approached, "How are you?"  as if she asked quite
regularly.  I must have said something like "Fine."

"This your Barbie?"  she asked.

I said yes.

"It's nice."  She suddenly sat on the step just below mine and placed
her books on her lap.  I could see the initials she had written all
over her looseleaf binder with black magic marker, hers and Rick's.  I
noticed how the ink had bled a little into the fabric.  I could have
been glimpsing her garter belt, her diary, the initials seemed so adult
and exotic, so indicative of everything I didn't know.

Turning a little, she reached back to my doll case and gently touched
all the tiny dresses and skirts that were hanging there.  Her fingers
were thin and short and the edges of her nails pressed into her flesh
as if she had only recently stopped chewing them.  Then she touched the
bare feet of the doll.

"She needs shoes," she said.

I told her I was trying to decide which outfit to put on.

Sheryl looked through the clothes again and extracted a pale blue
jumper with a white frilly blouse.

"This is cute," she said.

I'd had something more sophisticated in mind, but I was somewhat
bewildered by her presence--did she really want to play?--and so I
bowed to what I thought was her better judgment.

I slipped off the brown sheath the doll was wearing.  (Someday I'll do
a study: What's become of that part of my generation who insisted that
their Barbie dolls wear underpants and bras?  What's become of the rest
of us, who dressed her only in what could be seen?)

"Where's she going?"  Sheryl asked.

"Out to dinner," I said.

Sheryl held the dress by its little hanger.  "On a date?"

I nodded.

"With her boyfriend?"

I said, "Yeah."  At that age I was suspicious of any adult, any
teenager, who too willingly joined in my imaginary games.  But Sheryl
was good.  There was no smirk behind her words.

"Well then," she said, "you want something dressier than this."  She
again looked through the clothes and this time extracted a strapless
red dress with a wide gold lame belt.  It was the dress I had more or
less planned to choose from the start.

As I slipped the naked doll into it, Sheryl opened her purse and began
to rummage through it.  There was a sound of tumbling and clicking,
plastic and glass.

"Do you have a boyfriend?"  she asked me.

I said I didn't.

"Not even anyone you like a little bit?"

I shook my head.  I wasn't saying.  "Where's your boyfriend?"  I asked
her.

She looked up from her bag and glanced toward her house.  "He had to go
to the hospital to pick up his mother," she said.  "She's been sick,
she's a nutcase, but now she's coming home.  For a while anyway, the
weekend.  He's got to help out."  She lifted her black bag again and
squinted into it.  "I guess I won't see him until tomorrow or
something."

I understood: she was bored, friendless, without him.  She was speaking
to me merely to pass the time, maybe to keep from having to go home.

I watched her extract a single cigarette and a matchbook from her bag.
She looked at me cautiously but without a word and then lit up.  I
watched her draw, her chin raised.

"Are you going steady?"  I asked, although I knew.

She said, "Yeah," smoke pouring from her nostrils, and

then lifted her arm to show me Rick's heavy ID bracelet.  She turned
her wrist to show me where she'd had a jeweler add an extra catch so it
wouldn't slip over her hand.  The inside of her wrist was pale white,
almost blue, marked with red and purple veins.  She pulled the bracelet
around so the nameplate rested there.  We both looked at it.  The name
was engraved in bold straight lines like Roman numerals.

I leaned over my lap to touch it and was surprised to find it wasn't
ice-cold.

"Did he have to ask you?"  I said, making plans of my own.  "Did you
have to wait until he asked you to go steady?"

"He had to ask me," she said.  She turned the bracelet again and then
shook her wrist until it fell, just so, over the back of her hand. "But
I knew he was going to."  She looked at me from under her bangs. "I
knew it the minute I met him."

Her perfume reminded me of my father's aftershave.  Her eyes were
rimmed with smooth black eyeliner that grew, expertly, I thought, thick
just over her eyeball and then quickly tapered to a fine, feathery tail
that ended about a quarter of an inch beyond the corner of her eye.
There was a touch of white powder on her lids.

"How did you know?"  I asked.

She held the cigarette between the porch step and her legs and slowly
leaned back against the railing.  "I just knew," she said.  She raised
her other hand to brush the bangs from her eyes.  The bracelet slid
down her arm.

"But how?"  I said again.  "Who told you?"

Sheryl shrugged and then pulled her lips over her teeth to smile.  "No
one told me," she said.  "I just knew it.  In fact, I told him."  She
looked toward her house again.  There were thin short wisps of hair
pulled down in front of her

ears like sideburns.  There was something hard and tense about the set
of her jaw.  She quickly raised the cigarette.  "I told him the very
first night we met."

This was marvelous to me: that she knew, that she told him.  And more,
that she was here telling me.

"What did he say?"  I asked her.

She toyed with the corner of her paperback, flipping the pages.  "He
didn't know," she said.  She looked at me.  "See, he'd had a lot of
girlfriends before me.  He didn't think it was going to be any
different.  He just kind of said, "Oh yeah?"" She raised her chin,
imitating him, then laughed again.

I was still leaning toward her, my Barbie doll all but forgotten.  I
don't think I'd ever been this close to Sheryl before--certainly not
for this long--and I don't know which I took in more eagerly, what she
said or how she looked.  I remember there were a few pimples on her
chin, almost buried beneath the thick makeup, a few flecks of pale pink
lipstick on her small mouth.  Her cigarette smoke curled toward me, and
I breathed deeply.

"What we have," she said, and she may have looked a little sly as she
spoke, "is completely different."

"How come?"  I asked.

She thought for a moment and then leaned forward, pulling her books up
onto her lap, her tight skirt binding her thighs.  I saw the flash of
her ankle bracelet under her dark stocking: another gift from Rick,
another sign of going steady.

"It's just different," she said.  She was holding her mouth as if she
wanted to grin.  "I mean, I'm not like any of those other girls.  I've
been through a lot of things and so I know more."  She seemed to squint
at me, perhaps gauging my

understanding.  "And I'm not afraid of anything," she added.  "I'm
really not."

I nodded.  I saw that she had written their initials on the cover of
her paperback as well.

"I'm not even afraid of dying,"" she told me, the cigarette at her
lips.  Her tone was pleasant but self-assured.  She blew smoke upward
into the air.  "They showed us movies of these car accidents in school
and it didn't even bother me.  Even Rick got nervous when he saw them,
but I said, "So what?  Everyone's going to die."" She looked at me
carefully through the smoke and then sat back again, letting her head
touch the railing.  She wore a navy-blue scarf around her throat.  One
end was thrown behind her, the other hung down in front of her bright
red shell.  Except for a small bruise just above her scarf, what the
Meyer twins had taught us to recognize as a love bite, her throat was
as white as the inside of her wrist.

"Pretty day," she said softly, looking up at the sky.  I looked, too,
ready to follow her anywhere.  "Yeah," I said.

And then, still studying the sky, she told me, "My father died last
year."

I don't know when the deaths in other people's lives stop seeming
merely inevitable and start becoming a kind of embarrassment.  I know
that now I would greet such a statement with a quick consolation and a
change of subject, but then I simply said, "I know it."

With her head still back, she turned and once again reached out to
touch the doll dresses, the cigarette burning between her fingers.
"Before that," she said with some disgust, "I didn't know anything.  I
thought it was stupid that people you really loved could just die.  I
used to think that it would be better if we were all like squirrels or
something so when people died we wouldn't feel so terrible."

She dropped her hand and slowly ran her finger along the edge of the
step.  "I didn't know anything," she said.

Then she raised her head and looked at me.  Her mouth was low in her
face.  There were clumps of mascara in her long lashes.  "Listen," she
said.  "If you knew everybody you loved was just going to end up
disappearing, you'd probably say, Why bother, right?  You'd probably
even stop liking people if you knew it wasn't going to make any
difference, they're just going to eventually disappear.  Right?"  She
leaned closer.  I began to understand what my mother meant when she
said that girls who dressed like Sheryl looked tough.  There was
something tough, even arrogant about her now.  "I mean how logical is
it," she went on, "for you to love somebody and then they just die,
like you never existed?  How stupid would it be to keep loving someone
who was dead if you were never going to see them again--what do you
love, then, air?"

I shrugged and she suddenly sat back.  "No you don't," she said
impatiently.  "You don't end up loving air."

She raised her cigarette again, her elbow resting on the binder.
"That's why it wouldn't matter if Rick got killed or something," she
went on, cool, even nonchalant.  "I guess it would be lonely, but it
wouldn't be like I'd never see him again or anything.  It would be just
like with me and my father.  I miss him, but I know I'm going to see
him again because I think about him all the time.  And you don't keep
loving someone who doesn't exist anymore.  You can't just stop loving
someone because they die.  Right?"  She suddenly looked at me,
demanding a response.  "Right?"

"Right," I said softly.  I had no idea what she was talking about.  "I
guess."

She glanced down at her books, ran her finger over the inked initials.
"The problem with Rick was nobody loved

him enough before me.  If he had died, and once he was in a car
accident where he could have, he wouldn't have had anyone who still
cared about him.  He would have just stopped being, like a squirrel or
a cat or something.  He would have been forgotten about completely.
Maybe not right away, but eventually."  She picked a piece of tobacco
from her tongue, lowering her thick lashes as she did, and then flicked
her cigarette, dropping ashes onto our bricks.  "His mother has mental
problems.  Sometimes she even forgets about him now, so what difference
would it make to her if he died all of a sudden?  She's in her own
world.  I met her one time."  She shook her head.  "And his father has
too many problems to ever really think about him.  His sisters, too. If
he had died before he met me, everybody would have felt bad for a
little while and then they would have forgotten about him.  Pretty soon
it would have been like he'd never been born in the first place.  But I
wouldn't forget."

We sat silently for a few minutes.  My backside was growing cold
against the bricks, but I didn't want to go inside.

"Are you getting married?"  I asked her.

She shrugged and again looked over her shoulder to her own house before
snuffing out her cigarette and tossing it onto our lawn.  "I guess so,"
she said.  She leaned back once more, holding an elbow in each palm.
She was completely, amazingly, self-possessed.  Completely sure.
Tough.

"Probably we'll get married," she said.  It was clear the subject was
not nearly as interesting to her as their immortality.  "Maybe in a
couple of years.  Not that it would make any difference."  She glanced
at me, but I failed to catch her meaning.  "None of that matters to us.
You know, getting married and having kids and buying a house.  None of
that means anything to us."

"How come?"  I asked, and she smiled as if she had just proven her
point.

"I told you," she said.  "I know things.  I've been through things.  I
know all those things that other people think are important come down
to nothing.  They disappear."

The air had grown chillier, but it was a spring chill, without the bite
of winter.  Sheryl suddenly arched her back and reached up to touch the
teased crown of her hair.  There were a thousand things I wanted to ask
her: what movies she and Rick went to, what she said to him when he
called her on the phone, when they sat together in his car--how she
drew such perfect lines across her eyelids.

The death stuff amazed me, but no more than all the rest.  It seemed
only a part, a profound, important but no less puzzling part of all I
would need to know in order to become a teenager.  All that I feared I
would somehow fail to learn.

Sheryl lifted the Barbie doll from my lap, adjusted her belt and hair,
turned to the doll case to find a pair of little red high heels.  I
wished she were my sister and I wondered without much hope if she could
somehow become my friend.  She handed the doll back to me and suggested
I wrap a white stole around her bare shoulders.

As I buttoned the tiny fur, I said, "Well, I hope Rick doesn't die."

"Everybody's going to die," she said quickly, and I thought for certain
that I'd completely missed her point.  Then she smiled, nodding
slightly.  "But I know what you mean," she said.

She gathered her books into her arms.  I watched her walk home: the
clink of his bracelet, the gold flash from her ankle, the paperback and
looseleaf binder marked with their names.  There was something sullen
about her walk, a kind

of challenge.  I saw her toss her hair back over her shoulder before
she pulled open the front door, armed and ready, it seemed to me, to
battle even the Angel of Death.

What Rick thought of all this I can only guess.  I tend to imagine he
was somewhat confused but nevertheless thrilled by it all.  No one
before had ever loved him enough.  No one else could have saved him as
she would save him.  He would find it fantastic, no doubt--the first
night they met he had laughed and said, "Oh yeah?"  He may even have
recognized some of her sources: the love songs of the Shirelles and
Shangri-las, the auto accident undying love poems printed in odd spaces
in her teen magazines, the old-fashioned, heaven-saturated Catholicism
of her grandmother.  But he was a teenager, a troubled one at that; he
would not have been able to resist the heady combination of love and
sex and death, even if he could never fully understand it.

Because to understand it, he would have had to see her that morning
months before they met, when she had looked up from her desk at school,
grateful for the distraction of Mrs.  Eason, the principal's secretary,
coming into the room.  He would have to know how idly she had watched
as the teacher bent to listen to the old woman and then turned to look
her way.  He said her name softly, although he was a cold, indifferent
young man who never met his students' eyes.  He took the exam she'd
been working on and said she could finish it when she got back.

The principal at our high school in those days was a chubby,
sweet-looking bachelor with an effeminate voice that had aroused no
suspicion until years later, when he spoke through a bullhorn trying to
quell a student protest.  Then his thick lazy drawl, his slight lisp as
he said, "Boys

and girls," had sounded loudly over the crowd of belligerent students,
crossed the playing field and the boulevard and reached the bakery and
butcher shop and candy store on the other side, where it lit the rumors
that eventually cost him his job.

He could not recall ever having seen Sheryl before, but he spoke to her
as if they were friends, his hand on her shoulder as he led her into
his office, his large white face unable to conceal his own dread of
what he had to say.

The mother had requested that Sheryl be told right away.  She didn't
want to have to explain it all herself: the heart attack and the car
pulled to the side of the road, the police finding him already dead.
Sheryl asked, "How can that be true?"  facing him as she had faced me,
impatient, demanding a response.  And then she began to cry.

The principal drove her home in his own car.  On the way, he remembered
his own father's death and how just that morning he had thought of the
old man and been surprised once again at the clarity with which he
recalled his thin bandy legs and his bullet-shaped head and the way he
had raised his cupped hand to his bald spot.  He glanced at Sheryl's
childish profile.  It was, he thought, much harder on the young, but
there it was.  There was no help for it.  The man was dead.  The
tragedy, even now when she still could not begin to comprehend it, was
already part of her history.  She would learn to accept it as he had
learned to accept so many difficult parts of his own.

He thought of telling her this but knew there would be no sense to it
right now.  Instead, he imagined, he'd call her into his office in
another month or two.  He could see himself leaning across his desk,
speaking softly, or taking

the girl down to the cafeteria and gallantly buying her a carton of
lemonade.  "It's hard to have to learn this so young," he would say.
"But loss is what life's all about."

The imagining pleased him as he drove the ten blocks to her house, even
relieved some of the pity he felt for her, and his own bloated sense of
sadness.

Sitting beside him, Sheryl was at first stunned by his kindness.  To
think that she was riding alone with the principal in his own car.  To
think he had called her by her first name and let her briefly cry in
his arms.  The peculiarity of it made what he had told her even more
unreal.  She found herself wondering why he wasn't married, if he had a
girlfriend or spent countless weekday evenings calling women he had
just met, trying not to sound too anxious when he asked to see them
once more.  She wondered who would be called if, driving this very car,
he pulled to the side of the road and died.  She wondered if anyone
loved him.

The neighborhood at this hour had a different life and this, too, made
the morning seem dreamlike.  There were pillows and blankets being
aired from upstairs windows and crowds of clothes hanging on nearly
every line.  She saw a woman unloading grocery bags from her car, a
large cookie stuck in her mouth and a child on her hip.  Another two
talking in the middle of the sidewalk, one with a baby carriage that
she rocked back and forth as she spoke.  They passed Angie's house,
where it looked as though no one was home, and a house where she
sometimes baby-sat, an empty playpen in its driveway.

At this hour there were only women in the neighborhood, as if somewhere
a war still raged, and Sheryl saw that every one of them was unaware
that what was ordinary about the day had been arrested and forever
transformed.  This was the day her father died.

She began to whimper, and the principal, who was by now thinking of
the teachers' meeting he would be late for, whispered, "I know, honey,"
reminding her again of his kindness.

She had said, "How can that be true?"  because she could still see him,
hear his voice.  And worse, because she still loved him.  She had not
been good; she had fought with him about her makeup and her hair.  She
had accused him just the other day of disapproving of everyone and
everything, of wanting her to be lonely, but she loved him.  And
wouldn't her love stop or change, begin even now slowly to disappear,
if what the principal had told her was true?

It was not logical, she thought, for it to be so pointless.  He was not
just anyone who had died in the middle of an ordinary morning.  He was
her own father.  He was loved.

She saw the police car at the curb when they approached the house, and
closed her eyes, refusing to believe it.  Because how could the daily
wash and the grocery shopping and the test that was still unfinished
back at school, Mrs.  Eason and the principal and the toddler she
sometimes minded all continue to matter when love could so quickly be
made pointless?  When love always, finally, would have to be dismantled
and unraveled, put away and forgotten because it couldn't keep its own
object from forever leaving the earth.

Unluckily, as the neighborhood women later put it, just minutes before
the principal arrived with Sheryl, another policeman had pulled her
father's car into her driveway, returning it to the family.  When
Sheryl saw it there, she pushed wildly at the car door and then ran up
the steps to her house.  She seemed to be laughing and the women all up
and down the block could hear her call to her father as she entered.

In order to even begin to understand, Rick would have

to imagine the triumph in her voice that morning, when she had
believed that by the mere force of her love she had saved him.

Their nights together always began with the others in the parking lot
outside the bowling alley or in the schoolyard.  I imagine she was
quiet then.  She would watch from under her bangs as the boys bragged
and joked.  She would watch Rick with only the slightest smile as he
stepped away from her to illustrate some story.  He would raise his
arms, lifting the hem of his jacket, and at the punchline wriggle his
backside.  The other boys would notice her squinting through her
cigarette smoke, smiling slightly, her eyes on his tight pants, and
they would remark to themselves, although not in so many words: Still
waters run deep.

His joke told, his status among them confirmed, Rick would step back to
where she leaned against his car and once again pull her under his arm.
She would hold his belt, and the homely boys, or those simply less
lucky in love, the virgins, the chronic masturbators, would have to
remind themselves that Sheryl was not really all that great looking,
lest they weep with envy.  When the hour came for the two of them to
drive off alone together, the boys would nod coolly, say, "See ya."
They would turn to the remaining girls with new interest.  Turn
especially and with the greatest charm to those known as the tramps
among them.

Alone, Sheryl and Rick would simply drive for a while, Sheryl sitting
close to him in the wide front seat, her hand on his thigh.  Rick with
his arm around her.  Slowly, she would begin to tell him things, about
his friends or his family, about the meaning of the songs that came on
the

radio, speaking with that same assurance she had shown me, the
assurance that she had been through more than any of them, that she
knew more.

"Larry really likes that girl he's dating," she might tell him.  "He
just won't admit it because she's so heavy.  He's afraid you guys will
make fun of him."

"No," Rick would say.  "He's using her.  He's just getting laid.  He
told me himself."

Sheryl would nod.  "Just wait and see.  See what he gives her for
Christmas."

He would learn to depend on her and the way she looked at things.  He
would begin to believe she knew more than anyone.

During that summer when they first met, through the fall they spent
together, again in the spring as soon as the ground had begun to dry
and that part of the summer they had before she went away, they would
end their nights in the park on the other side of town.  It was a long,
narrow piece of land fronting on the busy, brightly lit boulevard but
surrounded on its farthest end by dim streets lined with small homes.
On the boulevard side there were swings and slides, basketball courts,
and in summer a concrete wading pool, but the back half was given over
to a baseball diamond, a picnic area and, on a hill that marked the end
of the property, a sparse approximation of a wood.

Seven or eight years later, when I was Sheryl's age, this was the place
to buy and use drugs, to drink sweet apple wine or sangria from leather
wine skins pretending you were at Woodstock, but then, when the park
still closed at dusk, it was a place where only the most serious
couples went to make love.

The trick in Sheryl's day was to find an inconspicuous

spot to leave your car, somewhere along one of the side streets, far
enough from the park itself to avoid suspicion but not so far that you
could be seen by too many people as you walked, with a brown paper bag
filled with Cokes and a bottle of rum, toward the lowest part of the
fence.

Once over the fence, you would only have to choose your niche among the
trees.  A police cruiser would pass through each night at about twelve
or one, but it would never leave the road that circled the baseball
diamond and so it was easy enough to avoid its headlights.

Sheryl and Rick would sit down together on a sloping bit of dirt and
grass.  Rick would open the bottles of Coke, pour out half, open the
flask bottle of rum.  In the semidarkness (there were two or three tall
night lights in the park, some small bit of light from the surrounding
streets), he would match the lips of the two bottles carefully, pour
the rum with a precise and steady hand.  ("This is what my old man does
for a living," he told her.  "Pours piss and blood from one bottle to
another.") They would sit shoulder to shoulder, their knees raised, the
bottles in their hands.

She might tell him then: "I used to think it was stupid that people you
really loved could just die ..."

Moving her hand across the dirt and the grass, she might say, "If one
of us died."

He would tell her about the car accident he had been in before he met
her.  An older friend had been driving.  They had cut school and smoked
some reefer.  They had been drinking all day.  At about nine o'clock
that night, in a town not far away--his friend had been looking for the
house of some girl he knew--they turned a corner and hit a parked car.
Neither of them knew how or why.  They both might have been asleep.
They were laughing when they crawled

out, one through a window, one through a back door.  The engine was
nearly in the front seat.  Rick's father said that if they'd hit a tree
or a pole, something that couldn't have rolled with the impact as the
car did, they both would have been killed.  His father had said it
would have served them right.

Sheryl would whisper, "Before me, you would have been forgotten."

Or perhaps by then she would no longer have to say it.  By then, he
would understand it himself, even as he told her the story, as he
remembered his father's tired, angry voice, his mother's dazed
indifference.  If he had died then, before he met her, who would have
loved him enough to make his disappearance from the earth illogical?

Perhaps by then he understood only that when she spoke of dying he
should turn to her, loosen the scarf at her throat or her waist, gently
push her back onto the grass.

He lay beside her, his cheek to the cool ground, his arm across her
waist.  She studied the sky, speaking softly and with that same sure
tone.  Beyond her were the two empty Coke bottles, his wallet, opened
flat, the ripped silver paper from the condom, the circle of her scarf.
He watched the line of her profile, the shadowy movement of her dark
lashes as she whispered to him, her face to the sky.  The police
headlights passed through the trees, but they hardly made her pause;
she was afraid of nothing in that world that seemed only, even
superfluously, to begin at the end of these woods.  Speaking softly but
with that same assurance, she would name for him all the things that
didn't matter to them, that didn't have to matter to them, and it
seemed to him that she started at the foot of those woods and worked
outward, dismissing, obliterating, the entire world: not friends,

she told him, not family, not school, not getting older or getting
married or finding a job.  Not car accidents or hospitals, not any kind
of luck, good or bad, not dying.

She turned to him and even in the darkness he saw that same brightness
in her eyes, a hard, challenging gleam.  Only they mattered.  They
loved each other.  It would not be logical for love to bring them to
anything else.  And later, when she sat up, laughing, draping her scarf
over her bare shoulders like a shawl, he reminded himself that she knew
things no one else seemed to know.

In a town not far from ours, there was a school run by the Salvation
Army or the Baptists and called, blatantly enough, the Wayside School.
For troubled girls, my mother would tell me as we drove past, for girls
in trouble.  (The irony of it was never lost upon her: all her prayers
and all her formulas for pregnancy coming to nothing while mere
children were conceiving, casually, inadvertently, in parking lots and
playgrounds.) It was surrounded by a high stockade fence so that only
its green and silver sign was visible from the road, and the driveway
that led into it was blocked by an iron gate.  I never saw the school
buildings themselves, never knew anyone who went there, but each
Christmas one of the classes in our own school would draw Wayside as
its place to send Christmas packages.  Draw it from a field that
included the children's ward at the nearby mental hospital, a city
prison, a Catholic orphanage and innumerable nursing homes.  The girls
at Wayside, the class would be told each year, would appreciate
perfume, hand cream, small stuffed animals and dusting powder.  Each
year

the class was asked not to enclose notes, names or addresses with
their gifts.

In college, I met a girl who had grown up just a few blocks from the
school.  She told me about the occasional incident when one of the
"students" tried to bolt, running wild and confused (and sometimes, too
appropriately, barefoot) through their neighborhood or down the main
street.  Once, she and some of her girlfriends--they couldn't have been
more than nine or ten at the time--took a ladder from a set of bunk
beds and carried it through the backyard of a neighbor and across a
gully to some obscure part of the school's high fence.  It had been
about dusk on a summer evening and they had taken turns climbing up.
They stood on tiptoe, on the top rung, gripping the points of the
fence's wooden stakes, but what they saw made the effort worthwhile: a
half dozen teenage girls, most of them pregnant, listlessly tossing a
beach ball across a lush green lawn.

Eventually, one of the teenagers noticed the children, or perhaps one
of the children grew brave enough to call out, and the entire group
moved toward the fence.  At first they exchanged information politely,
with some of the cautious fascination of Martian to Earthling. "Hello!"
they said.  "Where did you come from?"  The unwed mothers, with their
hands on their hips and their bangs in their eyes, laughed each time
one of the children stepped down and another head appeared. It must
have been a kind of puppet show for them.  "And what's your name?" 
they'd ask each new face.  "And what kind of house do you live in?" 
The children themselves turning to look down--"What? What?"-taking
instructions from the invisible chorus below.

When some kind of rapport had been established, the teenagers asked for
cigarettes.  Of course the children had none, but yes, they had parents
who smoked.  Their parents

would never miss one pack, the pregnant girls assured them.

(And here our school officials should be commended for their foresight.
What might have happened to my own classmates had they included their
names and addresses when they wrapped their two cans of hairspray and
card of bobby pins in Christmas paper?  What requests might they have
received from the Wayside girls in return: Go into your parents' room
while they are sleeping.  Remove the following from your father's
handkerchief drawer .. .)

Two of the children said, almost immediately, "I'll be right back." The
others said, "We'll bring you some tomorrow."  And magazines, the girls
said, good magazines like Modern Romance, 16, True.  Could they ever
get them magazines?  The children conferred.  One climbed the ladder to
say her sister read 16 and Teen Screen.  She was forced down by the
breathless return of the others, who carried packs of Camels and Pall
Malls.

And makeup, the unwed mothers asked.  Could they maybe bring them some
makeup?  But suddenly one of them said, "Beat it," and the teenagers
scrambled.  The children crouched at the foot of the fence, mouthing to
each other, "Someone's coming."

When they climbed the ladder again, after night had fallen, they saw
only the yellow lights of the distant dormitory windows and the bloated
shadows of the girls who passed behind them.

The next morning, deprived of their ladder by an irate mother, the
children heaved three issues of Teen Screen over the fence and were
startled to hear the voice of some woman--a teacher or warden or
nurse--warn them that she would call the police if they tried that
again.

I could draw on my own experience to imagine how Sheryl felt in the
months before that night, draw detail and

scene from what I remember of my own brief pregnancy and from all the
awkward and untimely pregnancies of my friends, but I fear something
would be lost.  Unwed mothers at that time, at the time Sheryl joined
their ranks, were a specific group; they fell somewhere between
criminals and patients and, like criminals and patients, they were
prescribed an exact and fortifying treatment: They were made to
disappear.

So I would have to add to my own memories of my own troublesome
pregnancy not merely some sense of shame and a bit more drama but also
a different kind of fear: when her period didn't come (this would have
been late spring, not very long after she had stopped to talk to me),
when she found herself dizzy with nausea every morning, unable to eat
her cereal (she would get up before her mother and grandmother, pour a
bit of milk and a few crumbs of corn flakes into a bowl and leave it
unwashed in the kitchen sink), when she had to keep herself from
imagining the taste and the smell of the eggs, the frozen green beans,
the jars of peanut butter she rang up on her register and packed into
brown paper bags.

I would have to add to my own experience a kind of fear that another
fifteen years would make obsolete: the fear of a criminal with the
police at the windows and doors, of a patient trapped in some
unrelenting illness.

If she was pregnant, an unwed mother, she would have to be sent away.
In all her theories of love and dying and keeping one another alive, in
all her certainty, she could not have anticipated this simple,
insurmountable problem: if she was pregnant, she might never see him
again.

Another month passed.  Another period failed to begin.  Her breasts
felt tender, her stomach was no longer quite so taut between the
protruding bones of her hips.  Leaning with

him against his car, listening to them all talk and laugh, watching
some of the boys and some of the girls who had not yet become lovers
move toward one another, she might have wanted to beg for silence.
Please, just everyone be quiet.  Her cigarettes were beginning to make
her feel sick.  She would have to pretend to sip from her can of beer,
though the smell alone was enough to send her reeling.  Rick, beside
her, his arm heavy on her shoulders, would at moments seem a stranger,
as the healthy always seem strange and uncaring to those who are ill.
She would have to slip her fingers through his belt loop, pull him
closer to her, rest her nose and her lips on the arm of his cool
leather jacket.  Closing her eyes against the dim parking-lot lights
and the childish sound of their voices, she would have to breathe him
in, the odor of the leather, of his aftershave and, indistinguishable
from it, her own perfume, of the summer night, sun-warmed parking lot
and litter.

Later, she held the bag of Coke and rum as he climbed the jingling
chain-link fence.  She followed him, lowering the bag over the top,
pausing at the top herself to remember how her hands, even her legs,
had shaken the first time she had made this awkward turn, from the
outside of the fence to the inside.  Making it easily now, her fingers
knowing just how lightly to grip the thin wire, her toes finding just
the right spaces even in the dark.  Rick touched her legs as soon as he
could reach them.  Took hold of her hips with both hands.

At some point she must have considered telling him.  She must have
imagined their conversation.  They would be lying together on their
hill or sitting side by side like children, their knees raised, the
bottles of Coke in their hands.

"Rick, what if I got pregnant?"

"You won't.  We're careful."

"But what if?"

A shrug, but his eyes would be far away.  "We'd get married."

"How?"

"What do you mean, how?  I don't know.  You get a license."

"And move in with my mother?"

Another shrug.

"Or your father?"

"You could get an abortion."

"How?"

"I don't know.  I'd have to find out."  Laughing, "I could ask my old
man to do it.  You're not going to get pregnant."

She would have to whisper, "Not that it would matter.  It wouldn't
matter anyway."  But still he would see she had been wrong; it wasn't
just them.  There was also family and school, getting a job and getting
older.  There was all that long life that had become for her since the
day her father died a sentence, a burden.  There was all that long
life, all those years until she would see him again, years of family
and friends and school and getting a job and getting older-years that
would be double and triple, four, even five, times the years she had
already lived--and none of her promises, none of her assurances, could
shorten them or lighten their load or, as she had wanted to do,
obliterate them completely.  They loved each other and they would
continue to love each other, as they did on those dark nights when they
seemed alone in the world, even after one of them died, but what until
then?  How would they get through all the years until then?

She stretched beside him on the damp ground, aware of the tenderness in
her breasts, the weeks and days since her

 last period, a certain tightness at her waist.  She began at the edge
of the woods and worked outward: not this, not this, nothing else
mattered.

When she went into her mother's room that morning, she knew what she
was setting in motion.  Other girls in her school had suddenly
disappeared.  One, when Sheryl was a freshman, had been banned from the
school, actually turned away from her homeroom, because her pregnancy
had become too obvious to ignore.  She knew what would happen, and only
the speed of it all startled her.

While her mother rose and immediately went to the phone, Sheryl got up
off her knees and sat carefully on the edge of the bed.  The nausea
made her weak, made her limbs feel thick and sodden.  The sound of the
children's voices as they came through the open windows made her want
to put her hands to her ears.  Her mother spoke into the phone, and
Sheryl, in her thin summer pajamas, in the warm blue room, trembled.
Trembled once to think that the night before, when he'd said from the
bottom of the steps, "I'll meet you tomorrow after work," and then
turned and walked toward his car, was the last time in her life she
would ever see him.  Trembled to remember the morning she had come
downstairs into the kitchen where her father was taking a final gulp of
coffee before he kissed her mother and then parted her just-teased hair
to say, "So long, sleepyhead."  The last time in her life she would
ever see him.

I must add to my own memories of my own pregnancy-for mine was fifteen
years later and far too early in my marriage to be allowed to come to
term--her strange assurance: It would not be forever.  It wasn't
possible that people who loved each other could be apart forever.

In the days that followed the fight, while our fathers moved together
to share their wounds and rehearse their triumph, while we children
stepped back from the sidewalks and the streets to make way for
them--suspending our present, you might say, while they recalled some
part of their past--our mothers watched Sheryl's house as if they knew
something.  Passing behind their own windows, their own summer screens,
they paused, bent a little, glanced out.  Each morning they took their
coffee to the living room and drank it standing in the shaft of white
sunlight that came through their front door.  At night they kept vigil
in unlit rooms.  We would discover them quite by accident when we
flipped a light switch: they would be flattened against the wall beside
a drawn shade or crouched by a window, one finger still caught in the
slat of a blind.  Coming upon them, we would jump more than necessary,
yell, "Ah!"  or "Yikes!"  the way startled people did on television.
Our mothers would hiss, "Turn it off," as if they feared someone else
might hear.

Joining them in the darkness, we too would peer into the

 street, the white pools of lamplight and the pale gray stripes of
sidewalk and driveway, the yellow glow of our neighbors' windows. Under
the moon and the stars, there were identical rooftops and chimneys and
TV antennas, no minarets or onion domes, and the trees that caught and
muffled the lamplight were ordinary oak and maple.  A car would pass by
in its familiar hushing sound and stop as it should at the stop sign
(the headlights, for one moment, making the sign flash black and
silver) and then carefully go on.  We would lean against our mothers,
hear their breaths, smell the summer dust on the windows and the
blinds.  Even from our second-story vantage point there was nothing
exotic or unusual about the scene.  Except the night.  And in those
days that followed the fight, the night brought to our street as well
what it more famously brings to foreign cities and forests of pine.
Between the soft lamplight and room light there were dark places (we
now knew) where lovers threw back their heads and either grinned at the
stars or howled with longing.  There was the black flash of
uncertainty, the wet eyed smile of stealthy chance.  The sound, behind
the ordinary sound of a cough or a car or of dishes tumbling in a sink
full of water, of something receding, the low roll and tumble of
something we had not yet even imagined as it approached.

We felt our mothers draw their breath as another car went by.  We felt
them slowly ease again into a kind of waiting.  Standing beside them,
we would stare down into the street in dull amazement, wondering at our
fathers, who passed below, even lingered.

Early one evening during these days that followed the fight, Mrs.
Carpenter came up from the basement where she and her family lived to
glance once more toward Sheryl's

house.  Her husband was in the driveway polishing his car, and she
waved to him but he had already turned his attention to someone (my
father) across the street.  She was then free to look steadily over her
own driveway, and the Rossis', toward Sheryl's house.  That afternoon
she had seen, as we children had seen, as all our mothers had seen from
behind their windows and doors (a laundry basket on the chair beside
them or one hand held under a dripping spoon), an unmarked police car
pull into Sheryl's driveway and a weary plainclothes policeman climb
her steps.  She had seen," as all our mothers had seen, Sheryl's mother
come to the door and let him in, and although she had to hurry back
down to the basement where the Carpenters more or less lived to turn
off the running water, she was again at her window when the door opened
and closed and the car pulled out of the drive.  Her phone had rung
then, phones all up and down the street had begun ringing, but no one
could say what it meant.  Mrs.  Carpenter learned only that Sheryl's
mother wore a bandage on her wrist--she hadn't seen it herself--and
that she didn't look all that bad, considering.  It was hardly
enough.

She left her side door and climbed the two steps into her upstairs
kitchen.  It was yellow and white, spotless because it was, for the
most part, unused.  The Carpenters, Mr.  and Mrs."  Billy, Wayne and
Little Alice, spent most of their waking hours in their basement, and
it probably says more about us than them that this never really struck
anyone as queer or unusual.  It was a nice basement, after all, with
wall-to-wall carpeting and pine paneling and a television built right
into the wall.  There was even a kitchenette, a dining table, a bath
with a stall shower.  There were curtains on the tiny windows and
crushed-velvet throw pillows on

the sofa and the chairs, and these had been bought specifically for
the basement, not merely demoted there after long and faithful service
in the living room.  There was the requisite bar with padded swirling
stools and a ceramic drunk holding onto a lamppost, even a small
workshop behind the finished part where Mr.  Carpenter could pound
nails and the boys could shoot their pellet guns.  It was, by
neighborhood consensus, the finished basement of all finished
basements, and if a bomb wiped away all our homes, the Carpenters, it
was agreed, would hardly notice the loss.  This, however, was not what
they were practicing for.

The Carpenters lived in their basement because the rest of their house
was too beautiful to bear.  At least this is what the women who had
seen it (none of us children ever got beyond a glance into the upstairs
kitchen) reported on their return.  The first time Mrs.  Carpenter gave
her the full, shoeless tour, my mother came home holding her heart and
saying there was nothing else like it in the world.  The shine on the
dining room table was blinding.  The living room was all white and
gold.  The carpet, she said, felt like fur laid over clouds.  There
were flowers pressed in glass all up and down the staircase.  The
children's two bedrooms were papered and paneled and full of shining
brass fixtures, like something you'd see on a yacht.  The master
bedroom was a sultan's palace, deep green and pink and silver with
drapes hanging where there weren't even windows.  Not a thing out of
place, not a thing that didn't match.  A gold swan spouting water in
the bathroom sink, its wings Hot and Cold.

Upon her return from what seemed to us the enchanted, mist-shrouded
heights--the upstairs part of the Carpenters' house--my mother
threatened to break my brother's arm if

he didn't learn to hang up his coat, and she told me that the state of
my dresser drawers constituted the biggest disappointment of her life.
She claimed our house, too, had once been lovely and seemed to indicate
that its decline began only with our birth.  At dinner, she threw a
boiled potato at my father's head when he said he much preferred the
lived-in look.

While the men gathered at the foot of our driveway that evening of the
same day the police car pulled into Sheryl's drive, Mrs.  Carpenter
surveyed her kitchen, perhaps hoping the sight of it--the perfect
gossamer curtains, the bright pans hanging on the wall, the teapot
filled with silk flowers-would cool her curiosity, expand her patience.
She may have briefly considered calling my mother again, or Mrs. Rossi,
just to see if they'd heard anything, but the husbands were home by now
and it would be difficult to talk.  And they had already talked all
afternoon.

She walked through her kitchen and into her dining room.  Even in the
fading summer light, the waxed rectangular table shone like a black
lake and the two gold candlesticks were reflected in it like tapers in
a dark room.  In one shadowy corner was the china cabinet, and behind
the glass, looking a little ghostly, the floral patterned plates she
had taken downstairs and washed carefully every other month since her
wedding fifteen years before but had never, according to neighborhood
legend, actually used.  On the back of each plate, she knew, it said in
small red letters: Made in Occupied Japan, but she couldn't remember
when the phrase had begun to seem quaint, something from a time
surprisingly long past.  Her youth, perhaps.

Mrs.  Carpenter was not, could not have been, a naturally melancholy
person or else she surely would have recognized

long before this that her lovely rooms would wear and grow old despite
her, but the silence that seemed to have been left in the wake of his
cry, that night, made her more aware than usual of the weight of each
hour.  Like nearly all our mothers, Mrs.  Carpenter had set her life on
her marriage and her home and her children--if they go well, all goes
well--and so she sometimes, especially in the early evening or late in
the afternoon when no work presented itself, had the bored, distracted
air of someone simply waiting to see how things turn out.

Something Sheryl's mother had already seen, she knew.  For surely the
premature conclusion that her husband's death and her daughter's
pregnancy had brought to Sheryl's mother's career as a housewife was
for Mrs.  Carpenter and all the other mothers a glimpse into the
future, a report from the uncharted frontier that their daily lives
were slowly but inexorably moving them toward.

Mrs.  Carpenter walked into her living room, the thick pale carpeting
soft under her feet, even cool.  Through the open front door (and if
nothing else, air was allowed to circulate freely through this house)
came the men's laughter.  It had become a familiar sound during those
days that followed the fight, as common as the crickets and passing
cars.  She stood at the door and watched them.  Mr.  Rossi was just
crossing to join them.  Little Jake, hunched over his bicycle, his
large head rolling, turned up our driveway.  She saw my mother on our
porch and considered going over to speak with her, but the clutch of
men made her hesitate.

She turned again into the room.  The television was on downstairs and
the running and stopping rhythm of its voice reached her through the
carpet.  Her curiosity was like a

thirst.  She sat down in a small chair that even in this house, where
everything above the ground was ornamental, seemed ridiculous in its
impracticality.  Its delicate cherry legs were tapered to the width of
dimes and its small seat and back, the size of hand mirrors were pure
white, threaded with a touch of gold.  Even in the store where she had
bought it, she refused to sit in it, telling the salesman, "Oh, it's
not for sitting," as if she were the type of woman who could squander
chairs, couches, whole rooms of her house.

A bead of perspiration ran down her spine and she arched her back a
little more to keep the print of her shift (it was what we then called
a muumuu) from touching the fine material.

She was not a tragic figure.  She had been fortunate most of her life,
healthy and well liked.  She loved her husband (although no longer in a
way that merited a sultan's palace of deep green and pink and silver--a
square serviceable room would have done, a dark plaid, well worn), and
she will only occasionally be disappointed by her children: by Billy's
sloppy wife and Wayne's brief years as an underground (it's in the
blood) city poet, by Little Alice's halfhearted ambition to "do hair."
She was not foolish, either.  Her pride in her small rooms, her
rigorous house rules that no shoes should touch her carpet, no child
spend more than ten waking minutes in his bedroom, no guest go
unescorted, were merely part of a brave and determined effort to
preserve what she knew of Beauty from the ravages of drink-spilling and
ash-dropping Time.  More artist than eccentric, then.  But at this
moment, sitting as she is in her tiny chair, her back arched, her
ankles crossed, her light brown hair, which she wears above her ears,
puffed out and turned under like a buttermilk biscuit, she does seem
somewhat pathetic.  And

it might merely have been the hand of some benevolent being, as
concerned with order and perfection as she, that set the telephone
ringing then.

It was Sheryl's mother.  Her voice was both shy and determined.  She
was calling, she said, because she was going to be leaving town in the
morning, but she would like Billy Carpenter to continue cutting her
lawn--what was left of it--while she was away.  She wasn't sure how
long she'd be gone.  She would mail him his check from Ohio.

Mrs.  Carpenter nodded like a professional.  She said of course Billy
would do it.  Of course she would tell him.  And then she added, her
curiosity indistinguishable from what was, to her credit, true concern.
"Ann"--a pause that said, I don't know if I should be asking this, I
certainly don't want to pry--"is everything all right?"

If you want to see how far we have not come from the cave and the
woods, from the lonely and dangerous days of the prairie or the plain,
witness the reaction of a modern suburban family, nearly ready for bed,
when the doorbell rings or the door is rattled.  They will stop where
they stand, or sit bolt upright in their beds, as if a streak of pure
lightning has passed through the house.  Eyes wide, voices fearful,
they will whisper to one another, "There's someone at the door," in a
way that might make you believe they have always feared and anticipated
this moment--that they have spent their lives being stalked.

The doorbell rings at midnight and the household stops short in its
nightly primordial ritual of curling into itself, reverses it.  Knows
the news can't be good.  It lines up according to size and age and sex,
as if for some final reckoning, and heads down the stairs.  The
patriarch, the

matriarch, the strongest and biggest and first to marry, raises a
trembling hand and, with the very courage needed to be born, unlocks
the door.

Only once, and not again until my brother and I were teenagers with our
own Standard Time, had our doorbell rung so late, and that was the
night Mr.  Murphy's wife died.  He was a distant neighbor, barely known
to us, although my mother occasionally talked with his wife when they
met at the mailbox.  He appeared at our door with a little girl, his
daughter, one cold night just as my parents were getting ready for bed
and told them when they invited him into the kitchen, "Helen passed
away at eight o'clock," as if he regretted the pain this news would
cause them.  Before my father could ask, "Who's Helen?"  Mr.  Murphy
turned to my mother, "You were a friend of hers," his voice more
certain than questioning.

Both my parents were in a modest state of undress, belt less,
half-buttoned, their faces freshly washed, and there was still some
remnant of fear and confusion in my mother's eyes.  "I knew her," she
said.  But then she added, perhaps because she saw something pass over
the man's florid face, "She was from Massachusetts."

"Quincy," he said.  He raised the little girl's hand, bare in his
gloved one.  "She told me you knew her."  He glanced at my brother and
me as we stood together in the kitchen doorway.  He seemed pleased to
discover my parents had children as well.  Then he turned to my father.
"You know how it is," he said.  "You're at work all day.  You never
really know who's who in the neighborhood.  I knew Helen had plenty of
girlfriends.  She was always telling me this one said that and that one
said this."  He shrugged.  "You know how it is.  You don't really
listen."

He touched his free hand to his forehead and paused for a moment, as
if he were about to begin a lengthy explanation.  "When I got home
tonight," he said, "I didn't know what I was supposed to do next."  He
indicated the child again.  She was a homely little thing with those
dark, weary circles under her eyes that can make even a four-year-old
look like a dissipated, hung-over adult.  "So I take her outside and I
ask her, "Where do Mommy's girlfriends live?"" He pointed to our
refrigerator.  "I say to her, "Over there?"  and she says, "Yeah."" He
pointed to our kitchen sink.  "I say, "How about that house over
there?"  She says yeah again."  He smiled in amazement.  He had filled
our kitchen with a musty, unwashed smell.  "The little girl tells me
yeah at every house," he said.  "Every single block, she tells me yeah.
That's how many friends Helen has."

And then he began to cry, a thick, stocky stranger with short arms. The
child hid herself behind his thigh as if she had known this was coming
(and, indeed, we later learned that he had done exactly the same in
each house he visited).  My parents, still looking innocent and fuzzy
in the bright colorful kitchen, reached out to touch him briefly here
and there, on the shoulder and the arm.  They made odd, soothing,
inarticulate sounds, sounds that might have been made before language,
when our dumb and curious ancestors tried to coax into their hands
whatever night creature had found its way to their fire and their
light.

"Here now," my mother said.  "Now, now."

The man drew in long, painful breaths.  In the weeks that followed, we
would see him wandering with the child, drifting in and out of the
butcher shop and the candy store, the supermarket where our mothers
shopped, until the sight of him became so familiar we hardly noticed
when he no

longer appeared.  "And now I can't tell her," he sobbed.  "I can't
tell her I've met all her girlfriends."  When Mrs.  Carpenter rang our
bell, the night of the same day the police car had pulled into Sheryl's
drive, my mother had just filled the tub, preparing for their nightly
ritual.  My father was waiting for her in their room.  Sitting up in my
bed, I heard her open the bathroom door and run lightly across the
hall.  "There's someone at the door," she called in a loud, panicked
whisper.  I looked toward my open window, where the trees were silent
and thick with humidity.  I heard my father stepping back into his
pants.

Mrs.  Carpenter was still in her Hawaiian print muumuu, although she
had one curler in her hair, just above her forehead.  She seemed
startled to see all four of us.

"Oh," she said.  "I saw your light."  She looked beyond my father to
meet my mother's eye.  "I thought you were still up."

"Is anything wrong?"  my mother asked, but already I could see some
other communication passing between them.  Mrs.  Carpenter's eyes were
full of meaning.  "I wanted to talk to you about something," she
said.

My father stepped back to let her in, his every movement showing
controlled impatience.  "Neither rain nor sleet nor snow," he said.
"Nor dark of night."  He shooed my brother and me back up the stairs
and then turned to tell the women, "We'll leave you to your
discussions."

My mother said she'd be up in a little while.  Mrs.  Carpenter said,
"Good night."  I could tell they were both glad to be rid of us.

From my bed, I heard the tea kettle whistle briefly.  I heard the two
women's voices, soft and indistinguishable.  Not so much conspirators'
voices as the hushed, amazed

and nervous voices of two who had managed to drag something frightful
and extraordinary, some part of the dark and populated night, into our
ordinary kitchen light.

They stayed up very late.  I heard the kettle whistle once again, and I
fell asleep listening to the wordless rush of their voices.

In the morning, my mother at first refused to get out of bed and then
came into the kitchen looking unhappy and exhausted.  She sighed as she
made her coffee and sighed again as she lit her first cigarette.  I
asked her what Mrs.  Carpenter had wanted.  She looked at me through
half closed eyes, deciding something, and then said, "None of your
business."  She went to the window, which looked only into our
backyard.  I heard her say a disgusted and indifferent "Teh" as she
gazed out.  Once or twice she shook her head and shrugged her
shoulders.

At Diane Rossi's house, I put my hands to the screen door and saw Mrs.
Carpenter sitting with Mrs.  Rossi at the kitchen table.  I heard Mrs.
Rossi say something odd and poetic, or at least something overblown and
incomprehensible, something like "Tragedy completes all romance,"
before I interrupted her by ringing the bell.  She and Mrs.  Carpenter
looked at me, and at Diane when she had joined me, much the same way my
mother had: not with the proprietary air of the men the night before,
but with a sad, cautious assessment, as if they had learned overnight
that one of us was a traitor or an alien spy.  As if, it occurs to me
now, they had only begun to learn that while their love had been
sufficient to form us, it would not necessarily keep us alive.

Outside, the sun was bright and hot on the sidewalk and the leaves.  I
sniffed the air, as if to catch some scent of

whatever it was that had happened.  Half expecting to smell some trace
of Mr.  Murphy's fleshy, death-touched odor.  Wordlessly, Diane and I
strolled past Sheryl's house.  The shades were drawn and the tire marks
still fresh and violent.  I turned just in time to see my mother
stepping through Mrs.  Evers's side door.

On the morning after the fight, I left Leela and my mother and little
Jake in our kitchen and stepped outside, where Diane Rossi, Georgie
Evers and the Meyer twins were already searching the sidewalk and
street in front of Sheryl's house.  I knew precisely what they were
looking for, and without comment I joined them.  In each of our
basements and attics, in grimy shoeboxes and old footlockers, in paper
bags as limp as cloth, our fathers, we knew, had iron crosses and
silver swastikas, tarnished medals marked with bright red suns, heavy
foreign coins and black-and white postcards fading to yellow and brown,
and what we searched for that morning was in some way our own version
of those souvenirs: mementos of a battle, a night of high drama we were
not likely to see again.

As we searched, we discussed what had happened to Sheryl.

Diane said, "They got married secretly, her and her boyfriend.  And
when her mother found out, she sent her away."

"To Ohio," Georgie said.  He crouched to touch a piece

of mica that gleamed up from the road.  He already held a small shard
of black glass.  I held another.

"They didn't get married," one of the Meyer twins said, his voice full
of scorn.  "She's going to have a baby."

"Yeah," the other said.  Both of them had long, thin, freckled faces
and only the slightest brown fuzz of a crew cut.  Their voices, too,
were identical.  "She's pregnant," he said.

The word alone startled us.

We were silent for a moment and then, together, Diane, Georgie and I
said, "We know that," although I'm not sure any of us knew it with such
certainty until then.  The night before, parents all up and down the
block had offered their children short, contingency courses in the
birds and the bees, just as my mother had done for me and apparently
with as much detail and tact.  They were of that generation who spelled
the words they couldn't speak and followed strict rules regarding what
could be discussed in mixed company, so this morning, we, their
children, were more confused than ever about just what was involved.

We studied the tire tracks on the grass by the curb and then crossed
the sidewalk and stepped only one inch at a time onto Sheryl's torn
lawn.  We were all thinking about sex.

"But they got married, too," Diane finally added.

"No they didn't," the Meyer twins told her.

She paused and squinted at them.  "Yesss," she said.  "My mother told
me."

They stuck out their chins.  "Nooo," they answered.  "Your mother's
wrong."

She put her hands on her hips.  "How could she have a baby if they
weren't married?"

The Meyer twins stopped in their tracks and then slowly staggered
backward, their hands on their stomachs, their mouths wide open.  Then
they threw their arms around one another and whooped with laughter.

Georgie and I moved closer to Diane.  We knew she had made a terrible
mistake, but we knew our own parents, in explaining Sheryl's dilemma,
had said an awful lot about marriage as well.  ("When people get
married," my own mother had begun, "they do what Sheryl did .. ."  as
if it were Sheryl herself who had established the trend.)

"Don't you know anything?"  Mickey Meyer asked, still holding his
stomach but bending now, as if her stupidity had given him
appendicitis.

"How old are you?"  Ricky cried.  "Two or something?  You don't have to
be married to have a baby, dope."

"Yes you do," she said weakly.  She turned to me, "Right?"

Wanting to stay on her side but fairly certain she was wrong, I merely
shrugged.  This spun Mickey and Ricky around with delight.

"Two idiots!"  they cried.  I saw Mrs.  Rossi glance out her window,
and I told them both to hush.  "I know you don't have to be married," I
told them.

"You just have to go to sleep with someone," Georgie suddenly added.
"That's all."

But the Meyer twins were too delighted with our ignorance to let it go
at that.  "Oh yeah, sure," Mickey said.  He folded his hands under his
cheek, closed his eyes and pretended to snore--"gnaa-shew,
gnaa-shew"--then he opened his eyes and said in a high-pitched voice,
"Uh-oh, I'm going to have a baby."

Ricky threw himself on the edge of Sheryl's lawn and rocked with
laughter, touching his shoulder to one of the

ripped places on the grass.  His own marriage in another ten years'
time would be to a girl whom everyone, including his parents, had
believed to be Italian until a prenuptial barbecue in the Meyers'
backyard had filled our street with cries of "Mira, mira," and the
Meyers' lawn chairs with three out of five grandparents who were
definitely not white.

"You better take No-Doz," he told us now.  In another ten years' time
he would leave his parents and their house for good--choosing to be
dead to them, as his mother put it to mine, rather than give up the
love of his mongrel girl.

Georgie looked crestfallen and I, too, was confused.  We had both
thought sleeping with someone was a valid enough explanation but the
Meyers' laughter filled us with doubt.

Diane had chosen to ignore them both and had returned to her search.
She walked slowly along the edge of the curb, touching the toe of her
sneaker to every pebble or bit of debris.  Between her fingers she
rolled what had been thus far the morning's best find: the dark black
earpiece to one of the hoods' sunglasses.

Mickey Meyer was saying, "It doesn't take more than five minutes.  The
guy gets on top of the girl"--he slammed his fist into his palm three
times, imitating some adult--"and she's going to have a baby."

I thought of my parents and their breathless nights and early mornings.
Of Leela's ruined marriage.  "Maybe," I added.

"What do you mean maybe?"  Mickey asked.

"Not always," I said.  "It doesn't always work out."

From the curb where he sat, Ricky added, "Only if the guy sweats."

We all turned to him, even Mickey.  This was a new part of the
puzzle.

"What?"  Georgie said, returning some of the Meyers' own scorn.

Ricky shrugged nonchalantly.  "The guy's got to sweat, and the lady's
got to drink it."

Diane, who was still pretending not to listen, was the first to say,
"Does not," but we all quickly followed.

"Does," Ricky insisted.

"Who told you that?"  I asked.

"My father," Ricky said.

"He did not!"  Mickey cried.

"Yes he did," Ricky told him calmly.

"When?"  Mickey demanded.

"Once," Ricky said, vague and arrogant with our attention.  "When you
weren't around."

Mickey squinted at him.  "When wasn't I around?"  He said it as if the
very idea of his ever not being around was ludicrous.

"Last night," Ricky said regally.  "When Dad got home from the police.
You were sleeping.  That's when he told me."

"Baloney!"  Mickey cried.

Diane said, "That makes me sick just to think of it."

Ricky shrugged.  "Glad I'm not a girl."

Georgie suddenly sat down beside him, chunky and puzzled, his round
little mouth wide open and his brown shorts pulling against his white
thighs.  I recalled sometimes seeing light beads of sweat on his upper
lip.  "Is that what Sheryl did?"  he asked.

"I guess," Ricky said.

"She did not," I told them impatiently.  I knew the Meyers were
notorious liars, but I also knew they usually collaborated on their
tales.  Their disagreement had

given Ricky's story new authority.  "It doesn't happen like that,"" I
said.

"How, then, Miss Smarty?"  Ricky asked.

I was about to say they kissed each other and breathed a baby into life
but knew even before I spoke the words that it was a weak and fanciful
explanation.  I recalled my parents' voices, my mother's desperate head
stand Leela's tears and what Sheryl herself had told me.  I knew
something more difficult was involved.

Diane sighed loudly as if she hadn't wanted to reveal this but could no
longer resist.  "It has to do with where you go to the bathroom," she
said quickly.  "But you have to be married."

Now Georgie, his face lightening, changed his allegiance once more.
Yes, he said.  Diane was right.  When his mother had her babies they
tried to get out her behind, but the doctor cut open her stomach and
took them out that way instead.

Mickey Meyer, still subdued by the possibility that their father had
told Ricky something he hadn't told him, perked up a bit at this. "They
cut open her stomach?"  he cried.  "Didn't all the food fall out?"

"Stupid," Diane whispered, and Ricky once more commanded center stage.
"That's how they get out," he said.  "But I'm talking about how they
get in."  He leaned forward and made each word emphatic.  "The guy
sweats and the lady drinks it, I swear."

"They do not," Diane said again, and Mickey suddenly leaned closer to
her.  He wore that look he got whenever he had something disgusting to
show you: a blackened fingernail, a festering cut, a green opaque
marble that he could hold in his nostril.  "Maybe it's not sweat she
drinks," he

said, leering as effectively as a nine-year-old can leer.  "Maybe it
has to do with where you go to the bathroom."

We all cried out at this, suddenly moving around as if our revulsion
were physical.  Georgie stood and walked halfway up Sheryl's lawn.
Diane and I stepped up on the curb and then down again and then, to
show our true indignation, crossed to the curb on the other side of the
street.  Georgie then skirted Ricky, who was crawling along the grass
pretending to choke, and joined us.  Mickey danced after him (Diane and
I shouting, "Get out of here," all the while he approached) and then
Ricky followed.

Now Sheryl's house was before us and we held our small mementos in our
hands or rested them on our bare knees.  Sitting on the curb, we began
again, slowly and more seriously now, trying words the way a locksmith
might go through a large set of keys.  I said womb and seed and
conception, and Diane contributed kissing, petting and blood.  Ricky
insisted on repeating sweat, and Mickey would not give up bathroom,
although it had been Diane's contribution from the start.  (I recalled
my parents' hollow voices, the swish of tub water.) Georgie tried bed
and sleeping a few times but then conceded them when I said car and
darkness.

We stretched our legs, bare and summer-brown, out into the street
before us.  We touched each other at our elbows and shoulders as we
tried words as we might try key after key.  Across the street, the
ragged lawn and the drawn shades had already become for us just one
more desolate sign of that household's manlessness, and it was Mickey
Meyer who first said, "I wonder if she'll have a boy."

We paused to think about this for a moment, realizing for the first
time, I think, that whatever difficult and extravagant

feat had to be performed, whatever painful acrobatics, whatever
horror, we, the children, were after all the end, the desired
result--the culmination of our poor parents' most difficult task, their
very motive.

Georgie said a boy would be the right age to play with his youngest
brother.  Diane and I said we'd soon be old enough to baby-sit.
Although we'd heard it a hundred times, the Meyer twins began to
recount for us the elaborate story of their surprise birth, how in the
first minute of life, according to their father, they had both spat in
each eye of the doctor, who had failed to predict twins.

Slowly, we began to see what poor things our parents' lives would have
been had we not, after their urging and acrobatics and pain, agreed to
arrive, stumbling as we did upon the one consolation it seemed no one
had yet offered Sheryl: a child as marvelous as any one of us would be
born.

TWO

 It is only after a certain age, twenty-five or so, when the distance
between the child you were and the adult you have become has grown
great enough to breed wistfulness, that lovers feel the need to bring
one another home.  Or perhaps it is only a dare.  We have by that time
become aware of and even resigned to what part of our parents we will
never shake--the receding hairline, the petulance, the inability to say
and sincerely mean, "It's only money,"-and maybe we bring home this
stranger who has claimed love and fidelity simply as a test: Love me,
love my parents; love what I come from and what I will, with no more
choice or volition, become.  But teenagers know better.  They choose
parking lots and movie theaters and public playgrounds for their
meetings.  They do most of their courting in the historical void of a
moving car.  Fresh from the frustrations and humiliations of parental
I-know-all-about-you-but-it-doesn't-make-any difference love, they do
all they can to preserve, unsullied, this newfound land, this blank
slate of a girlfriend or boyfriend.

They pretend, until history and memory once again bind them to their
age, to be reborn at sixteen.

In the year Sheryl dated Rick, she went to his house only three or four
times and only when he had forgotten something, a jacket or a bottle or
a ten-dollar bill.  He never asked her inside.  Pulling up to the curb,
opening his door and putting out his leg even before the car had fully
stopped, he would mumble, "Be right back," and leave her, the engine
still running, the radio going.  She would sit still in the middle of
the seat, or occasionally lean over to tap the gas pedal with her foot
when the engine began to stall.

It would never occur to her that he should invite her in, introduce her
to his sister and his father, and his mother if she was there.  She
would not have seen any point to it.

On a dull afternoon during the single winter they spent together, Rick
stopped at his house for cigarette money or a stack of quarters to use
in the pinball machines at the alley.  It had been raining, that gray,
un poetic rain of midwinter in a dreary suburb.  The sky was a high and
solid mass of featureless clouds, the rain steady but unenthusiastic:
Sheryl could barely hear it on the roof of his car.  There were small
streams of water running along the ragged curbs, and the shingles on
some of the houses were stained like blotters with dark water lines  At
school that morning, the yellow lights of the classrooms had shone
dirtily into the rain and the parking lot and she'd been tempted to
skip, the sight of them so exhausted and discouraged her.  But she knew
Rick would be inside waiting for her by her locker.

The sound of the engine reared and the car shook a little.  Sheryl
touched the wheel and stretched her left foot to the gas pedal.  She
saw a white plume of exhaust rise into the rear-view mirror and watched
it dissipate in the rain.  Rick

took longer than usual and she glanced toward his door.  It was still
partially open, as he had left it.  She hoped his father wasn't
delaying him with his unending requests for another pillow or another
station on the TV, a glass of milk, answer the phone, and why can't he
bring his books home with him just once?  Her own father, she thought,
had been kind and forgiving and funny--everything she did, it seemed to
her now, had pleased and amazed him.  She tallied, as she had been
doing since his death, one life for another, who would have been missed
more, her father or Rick's.  Rick's was even older, she knew.  He
should have died so her father could have lived.  No one would have
felt that bad.

She looked toward the house, considered touching the horn, but instead
reached again for the gas pedal.  The exhaust cloud, pale gray but
lighter and brighter than the air and the sky, filled the rear-view
mirror once more and continued to grow, rolling and smoking as she
pumped the gas again and again, the engine yelling, threatening,
wanting to get away.  She watched the rear-view mirror: the street and
the black trees and the houses behind her were nearly obliterated by
the exhaust.  They reminded her of a child's botched pencil drawing,
now erased and made new again.  Here, start over.  Her father was alive
and Rick's had died, and since she hadn't met him yet, she didn't even
know it.

She took her foot from the gas and sat back to watch the vapor slowly
rise and disappear, the colorless street once again growing clear. Rick
was at the front door, but he was turned away, talking to someone. When
he stepped out of the house, she could see that he was angry. And then
a woman stepped out behind him.  She was small--Sheryl

had always imagined that Rick's mother would be tall and powerful,
thick and ungainly dead weight--and dark, like Rick.  She wore a
raincoat that she held tightly closed at the waist and she ran after
him in short, merry little steps.  Rick ignored her until he got to the
car and then he pulled open the door and said, "My mother wants to meet
you," quick and sullen.  He got in and slammed the door--for a second
Sheryl thought he was going to pull away--and then leaned forward to
turn off the engine.  He slumped behind the wheel.  Sheryl touched his
leather jacket, spattered with rain.  There was no time for her to move
to the far side of the seat.

The woman bent down to the window and smiled in at them.  "Hello," she
called as if they were a great distance from her.  "You're Sheryl."

Sheryl nodded and said hello.  Rick stared at the windshield.

"Well, I'm Rick's mom," she said.  She said it proudly, as if she'd
just been awarded the title.  Despite her illness, she looked younger
than she was.  Her straight brown hair was pulled off her face with a
velvet hair band but the ends of it fell over her cheeks as she leaned
toward them.  Her eyes, Rick's eyes, were dark and wide-spaced,
obviously weak and yet somehow alluring.  Only the deep vertical line
between them, as dark as a scar, and the raw yellow patch of psoriasis
on her forehead, as if to indicate the source of her troubles, reminded
Sheryl of where she spent her weekdays.

She continued to grip her raincoat.  Her pale throat was bare.  "You'll
have to forgive me for coming out like this," she said, her voice still
calling.  "But I just got home myself and I'm not resettled yet."

Sheryl nodded.  She saw a purple flush spreading across

Rick's cheek and jaw.  She wanted him to start the engine.

"I'm back and forth, you know," his mother said.

Sheryl said, "Yeah."  She thought of reaching for the keys herself.

"But getting better all the time," the woman said with a laugh.  The
rain was beginning to dampen her hair.  "Or so they tell me."  She
smiled.  "Or so they want to believe."  She suddenly looked up at the
sky.  "It's too bad about this rain," she said.

Sheryl nodded.  "I hate it."

Rick's mother dropped her eyes to the girl, seemed to look into her
face and her lap and then her face again.  A tremor, as quick and
delicate as a pulse, passed over her features, through her lips and her
cheeks and across her eyelids, so quickly it seemed a drop of rain had
simply moved like a shadow across her face.

"I hate it too," she said.  "It makes me think we've lost the sun and
don't even know it."

Rick shot forward then, as if he'd had all he could bear, and started
the car.  The cloud of exhaust rose like a sail behind them.  "We're
going," he said.

She stepped back from the door, still smiling, but didn't say another
word.

When they stopped at the end of the block, Rick said, "Did she go in?"
Sheryl turned to look over her shoulder and his.  She expected to see
her there for some reason, if only because crazy people were supposed
to be unreliable.  Were supposed to stand out in the rain.

Through the thin white exhaust she saw only the empty sidewalk and the
street.  "Yeah," she said.  "She's gone."  She saw him raise his dark
glasses and peer under them

into the rear view mirror, his eyes startling in their resemblance to
hers.

"She just asked me for money," he said when they had begun driving
again.

Sheryl sank down beside him and put her cheek to his wet coat.  "What
for?"

She watched the leafless trees pass and then the tall lampposts along
the boulevard.  "She wants to get out of here," he said, and they both
knew that he meant not merely out of our town or our state or the wet
midwinter climate, but the world itself.

When Sheryl arrived in Ohio, her aunt and uncle were waiting for her at
the airport, smiling reproachful but sympathetic smiles.  Her aunt
kissed her.  Her uncle took her flight bag, which was nearly empty and
marked with the name of another airline but which she had believed to
be as requisite as a ticket and a seatbelt.  "Well," her aunt and uncle
said together, recognizing in one word the severity and complexity of
her problem but saying also that they would make the best of it. "Well,
well."

Outside, the sun had nearly set.  Sheryl had to turn to look behind her
to see the clear streak of scarlet at the horizon and, pressing down
upon it like a hand, the dark blue sky.  In it, the evening star seemed
a tiny keyhole that gave promise of a wide, white-silver room.  She did
not wonder what Rick was doing at that very moment (he was pulling into
the parking lot outside the supermarket where she had worked, tossing a
cigarette from his window), if he gazed at the same star, but thought
instead that the sun set in the west and so this road took them east.
Faced her toward home.  She watched the road signs carefully as they
passed.

She had expected a farmhouse.  Not because her uncle was a farmer, she
knew he did something for GM, but because her mother had told her they
lived on four acres.  Sheryl had no clear idea of how large an acre
was, but she associated them with farming and couldn't imagine any
other reason for having four.

But instead they pulled into a long flat driveway that led to a new
raised ranch, sparsely landscaped and lit like a car lot.  Bright spots
illuminated the driveway and the garage and hung from under the eaves
all around the house: two shone on the huge front door.  With them, and
the flat treeless land that stretched unbroken for as far as she could
see in the new darkness, Sheryl felt for the first time that she had
been exiled, sent to an outpost, to the very edge of something she
could only define as home.

Her uncle slammed the trunk of the car and the sound seemed final and
remote in the summer air.

The front door opened before she and her aunt and uncle had reached it,
and their daughter, Sheryl's cousin Pam, called a mellifluous "Hello."
She was in her late twenties or early thirties, pretty and
wide-bottomed, with a round, dimpled face that for a moment as she
smiled in the spotlight seemed stark white.  She embraced Sheryl
lightly but kept an arm around her as she led her into the house.

Inside, the hallway had a high ceiling and ended in a pair of steps,
one that went down to a family room, another that led up to the rest of
the house.  Its walls were lined with family photographs, a gallery of
sorts, meant either to give a new visitor an immediate one-stop
introduction to the entire family and its history or to remind the
family members themselves, each time they passed through the door, of
the complex weave of faces and lives that had been spun to

THAT

produce them.  Sheryl saw her parents in their wedding clothes, the
familiar, old-fashioned studio portrait of her grandmother at
twenty-five, newly arrived in America.  And again her parents, sitting
on a couch somewhere, holding her, a toddler, between them.

Pam was talking about her obstetrician.  "He got me through three kids
and one almost," she said.  "He looks like Dr.  Zorba, doesn't he, Mom?
But he's as nice as he can be."  She said he had agreed to squeeze
Sheryl in tomorrow morning.

They went up the stairs and down a short hallway to the room, between
the kitchen and the bathroom, where Sheryl was to stay.  The TV room
they called it, although the TV had apparently been removed and
replaced by a small set of cardboard drawers covered in pink satin. The
fold-out couch had already been opened and made up, and someone had put
a can of hairspray and a number of half-empty perfume bottles on a
table near the bed.

Pam helped her unpack her clothes, pausing more than once to hold up a
skirt or a pair of jeans and to squeal, "How do you get into these?"
She herself wore a pale blue shirtwaist with a thin plaid belt, loafers
and white bobby socks.  Her hair was a perfect flip.  "Believe me," she
said.  "They won't fit much longer."

She asked if Sheryl sewed, and the girl shook her head.  "I'll teach
you," Pam said.  "It's not worth buying maternity clothes when you can
just run something up on the machine.  It'll be fun."

She sat on the edge of the bed.  She talked incessantly in a bright,
warm voice.  Her younger brother, she said, was away at camp for the
summer, a counselor.  The older one lived in St.  Louis.  Her own house
was just a mile or two

away.  She'd bring her kids over in the morning.  She couldn't wait
for Sheryl to meet them.  She said she knew three kids weren't that
many, compared to some people, but it was enough to make her feel she
could answer any questions Sheryl had.  "For instance," she said, "I
had a saddle block for the last one."  She arched her back and reached
behind her.  "That's when they put a needle right into your spine.  You
don't feel anything from the waist down and it's marvelous.  But you're
awake enough to actually see the baby be born.  I mean, if you want
to."

Sheryl watched her from the other side of the room, her brush in her
hand.

"Of course," Pam went on, "you can just be knocked out.  That's not bad
either."

Until this moment, Sheryl had not thought seriously about the baby to
be born.  Until now, she thought of the pregnancy itself as her
dilemma, as if it were, in itself, a complete fact, without
implication.  All she had feared in the past two months was the moment
she would have to walk into her mother's bedroom to tell her, and she
had considered her punishment, the consequence of her confession, to be
only the cold, humiliating examination she had had that morning, and
then this exile.

Now she saw it was endless.  It stretched infinitely before her, as
fully burdensome as all the years she had yet to live.

"Father Tom at the church," Pam went on, adding to it, "will put you in
touch with a wonderful agency, and you can be sure the family will be
Catholic.  He'll tell you all about it if you want.  Whenever you're
ready.  He's a doll."

Sheryl turned to place her brush on the flimsy dresser.

"I'll make some calls about your school situation.  You

can probably do something like a correspondence course while you're
here.  You could get books from the high school here in September.  I'm
going to see if a friend of mine can come over and help you out.  She
taught before her kids came."

Sheryl heard her aunt in the kitchen, dropping ice cubes into glasses.
She heard a sound, remote and faint, like the rumble of trucks on some
distant highway.  She would have to get up early to see where the sun
rose.

"What would you like to have," Pam asked softly just as the aunt
called, "Girls--iced tea!"  "A boy or a girl?"

Sheryl paused for a moment.  She had heard the word whispered among the
neighborhood women from time to time, on those mornings when my own
mother had returned from the hospital empty-handed, and had slowly come
to understand its meaning.  She had learned there was a sense of
disappointment in it, but no threat or damage.  It meant simply that a
certain future had failed to arrive.  That all had gone back to what it
was, to what it had been before.

She tossed her hair defiantly and turned to face her cousin.  "I'd like
to have a miscarriage," she said.

Even as Pam flinched, her mouth closing with the shock of the word,
Sheryl saw that she also forgave her.  "You say that now," she said
softly.  "But just wait.  You won't always feel that way."

"I will," Sheryl said, but she saw there would be no convincing her.

"Talk to me in six more months," Pam said.  "You'll see."

That evening, with her aunt and uncle safely in bed, Sheryl walked down
the stairs to the hallway with the photographs and then down the second
set of steps to the family room.  She placed a pillow over the phone
there, dialed the

number she had written in ink on the inside of her arm, the same
number she had dialed from the airport when she had told her mother she
was going to the bathroom.  Then it had rung and rung, but now it was
snatched up before the first ring had barely begun, as if someone had
been waiting for it.  Not Rick, though; it was a woman's voice that
said hello.  Sheryl asked for him in a whisper.

The only light in the room came from the bright spot outside and made
the linoleum floor seem black, threw bars of light and shadow across
the couch where she sat.  There was too long a pause before the voice
said another hello.  Sheryl realized that this woman, too, was
whispering.

"May I speak to Rick?"  she said again, raising her voice a bit.

The woman, his mother, raised hers a bit as well.  "He's not here," she
said.  "He's gone out."  There was another pause, filled only with the
hollow sound of the line, the distance between them.  Sheryl imagined
the woman in a darkened room like this one, cupping the receiver to her
lips.

"This is Sheryl," she said, and the woman softly repeated her name,
exclaiming it in a throaty whisper.  And then, as if they were
exchanging secrets, "This is Rick's mom."

"Will you tell him I called?"  Sheryl said.  The woman was silent, and
Sheryl rushed on, "Will you tell him I'm at my aunt's house," the
receiver so close to her mouth she wondered briefly if it might have
been stopping her words rather than carrying them, "in Ohio."  She
paused and listened for her aunt or uncle's footsteps.  On the other
end, beyond the static, she could sense Rick's mother listening to the
house behind her, too, touching her fingertips to the dry patch on her
head.

"Will you tell him?"  she said again, although she knew even then that
she would not.  "Will you please tell him?"  It struck her as familiar,
this repetition of what she knew already was a futile, a meaningless,
plea.

"I don't know where he is," Rick's mother whispered.  "I'm back and
forth, you know."

"I know," Sheryl said.  "But tell him, will you?  I don't know when I
can call again."

"Sure," the woman murmured, seeming to address someone else in the
room, although Sheryl was quite certain there was no one else there,
that Rick's mother had been wandering like a ghost through her own
darkened house when the phone rang; that she was as much a frightened
stranger in it as Sheryl was in this one.

When the woman hung up, abruptly and without another word, Sheryl
slipped quietly up the stairs and into her room, stopping for just a
moment at the closet in the hallway to search the pockets of the coats
hanging there for spare change, as Rick had told her his mother used to
do whenever she was preparing to leave them.

The four acres, Sheryl learned, were not all barren, nor did they
stretch evenly all around.  She saw with the light that there were
other houses on either side of her aunt and uncle's and, at the far end
of their property, a line of trees that marked the edge of a highway.
She was not certain if it was the highway on which she had come, but it
was a highway nonetheless and given enough time she could walk to it.

Pam drove her downtown to the doctor's office the next morning, where
the old man smiled at her with wet pale blue eyes.  When he had
finished his exam, he grasped her

forearm and shook it a little, then patted her shoulder (the one
gesture meaning bear up; the other, soon it will be over), just as so
many people had done the day of her father's funeral.

As they were leaving, he took her chin in his hand and ran a flat thumb
over a spattering of pimples there.  "Why do you want to hide such a
pretty face behind so much makeup?"  he asked her.

She lowered her eyes, her cheeks burning.  What she had done with Rick,
what had brought her here, had been done in darkness and without words
and had made her feel completely adult.  These men in their bright
offices seemed bent on reversing that.  As if humiliation, a
confirmation of her immaturity, were part of her treatment and cure. Or
as if their smiling ministrations would win her back her childhood.

When they left the office, Pam asked if she'd like to look at some
patterns.

Sheryl said, "I really don't care," and then followed her into a large
old variety store where the floors were wood and almost soft with wear
and the air smelled of plastic and popcorn.  Sheryl went to the makeup
counter first.  Her mother had given her a twenty-dollar bill when she
got on the plane, promising to send more later.  Sheryl's father used
to say that money burned a hole in her pocket, but when she handed the
bill to the cashier (she bought lipstick and turquoise-blue eyeshadow,
another mascara and a thick blue compact, daring her cousin to repeat
the doctor's words), she felt a real sense of loss, almost a fear, and
she quickly folded the change, the broken bill, into her palm.

In the notions department, Pam led her to three pattern books as big as
dictionaries, with thick, glossy pages.  She

flipped them over expertly, found the right section and then turned
the pages for Sheryl as if she were a child.

"Just stop me when you see something you like," she said, but then
paused at every other page herself to coo over the pastel drawings of
pregnant women in loose blouses and skirts, dresses as wide and roomy
as tents, all with bows and ruffles and appliques, all somehow
infantile.

"This would look cute on you," Pam would say.  Or, "Oh, I like this
one."

Sheryl stood at her side, watching silently.  At the end of the section
(Sheryl noticed that formals were next, prom gowns and bridesmaid
dresses, as if the pattern people had gotten their chronology as
backward as she had), Pam turned to her.  "Anything?"  she asked
brightly.

Again she merely shrugged.  Pam went to the next book and repeated the
process, but silently this time.  As she moved on to the third, she
said, her eyes on the pages and her voice low for what seemed the first
time, "You know, Sheryl, I'd really like to be your friend."  She
paused and there was only the sound of the store: a cash register
ringing and someone calling, "Miss, Miss."  "I know you're having a
hard time right now.  And I know you think you don't need anybody else,
but let me tell you, you do."  She laughed, almost bitterly.  "Believe
me, even under the best of circumstances you need a friend, a
girlfriend, to help you through what you're about to go through.  You
really do."  She turned to look at her.  Her small eyes were green and
there was a dimple in her round fleshy chin.  She had a fine yellow
moustache.  "I'm trying to be your friend."

Sheryl stepped back a little, aware already of all that had begun to
insinuate itself between them: her cousin and her uncle and her aunt,
their big house, this town, the baby to

be born, even the hours since she'd last seen him--all coming between
them when she'd promised it couldn't happen.

She spoke sullenly.  "I know it," she said.  "You don't have to tell
me, I know it."

She felt Pam watching her for a moment and then heard her sigh,
impatiently, and continue turning pages.  Suddenly and almost against
her will, Sheryl raised her hand.  She saw her own round finger on one
of the glossy pages.  She had not been spoken to so directly, had not
had anyone but Rick so directly meet her eye, since her father had
died.

"I like this one," she said quickly.

That night they gathered early, in the middle of a deserted dead-end
street by the reservoir.  This was the starting point for drag races,
the scene of a much talked about rumble between another set of
car-driving hoods and a motorcycle gang from the next town, the place
where many of them, Rick included, had once crashed through the high
weeds and fallen flat on their stomachs, walkie talkies and toy machine
guns in their hands.  (And one of them always stepped in dog dirt; one
of them always found something odd and evil: an old rubber glove, a
toilet seat, a damp and muddy magazine.) It was a no-man's-land, a
blank space in the neighborhood.  A street with a broken curb but no
sidewalks, no driveways, no homes.  Just tangled grass and trees and
tall yellow weeds and a high chain-link fence beyond which the earth
seemed to end, dipping as it did into the steep-sided and dried-out
reservoir.  Years and years ago, a child had drowned there and so all
the following generations of children--including my own--were told it
was off bounds.  It still retained that sense of the forbidden.

By now they had a plan.  First, Rick wouldn't take his own car.  The
old lady would recognize it in a minute and maybe call the cops.  He'd
ride in the back seat of the middle car.  They'd cruise by a couple of
times just to check the place out, make sure they were home.  They'd
drive real slow, just kind of loop around.  If somebody called the
police, no problem.  ""Hey, officer."" Rick held out his hands
innocently.  His dark glasses reflected the pale blue sky, the faces of
the others as they leaned over the opened doors of their cars.  ""We're
just practicing our driving skills, that's all.  We're just killing
time until the nine o'clock movie, that's all."  What are they going to
do, say you can't drive on this street--"Which street?  We've been on
every one of them.""

The other boys nodded, or simply stirred in agreement, as the fathers
would later do.

"And when do we make our move?"  one asked.

Rick turned his head slowly, looking at them all.  "Let's just see," he
said.  "Let's just get over there and check it out."

They slapped the roofs of their cars.  "Right," they said.

C'mon.  Let's go.

Rick slipped into the back seat of the middle car.  Two boys slipped in
on either side of him.  Already he was staring straight ahead, like
someone trying to out psyche a roller coaster.  The two boys glanced at
him and then at one another.  One of them touched the chains piled on
the floor with the toe of his black boot.

"We're out of here," the driver said.

They followed the side streets toward Sheryl's house, looping around
them, doubling back.  The streets near the reservoir were a bit less
prosperous; there were smaller, prewar houses

with high windows and doors, narrow alleyways between them.  There
were gnomes and bird baths in many of the front yards, or statues of
Mary or Saint Francis tucked into egg-shaped grottoes painted sky blue
within and covered without by sea shells pressed into the cement. There
were clotheslines, like the skeletons of umbrellas, stuck into every
side yard.

It was still dinnertime and so there were few people on the street.
Whiffs of garlic and grilled meat came across the summer air.  A young
woman wearing a plaid bathing suit sat in a lawn chair on her narrow
driveway, a baby with a saggy diaper standing before her.  She looked
up as they passed.  They circled her block and went by her again.

They headed east, away from the sun, which was still fairly high.  Past
a man in a brown business suit who was closing the gate that crossed
his driveway, his car humming behind him.  Past three children riding
tricycles along the sidewalk, who only slowed their pace as the cars
passed, in an odd counterpoint.

South now, through the oldest part of town, passing within two blocks,
and then one, of Rick's father's old office.  And then back again,
briefly paralleling the boulevard.  Inside, they were uncomfortable
without their radios on, with the windows only partway down.

Now the neat and shaded streets.  More dinnertime smells.  They passed
a grandmother standing out on a lawn, watering a flower bed filled with
bright impatiens.  She watched them over her shoulder.  "Yeah, you
too," one of the boys whispered.

At the next corner, they turned onto our block.  As they approached her
house, only Rick, pushed back between them, turned his head.  The front
door was wide open; the window fan was moving.  There was no sign of
her.

They paused at the stop sign, moved around the corner, one, two,
three.

"Nothing," one of the guys said.

Rick said, "It's all right.  Keep going."  He folded his arms across
his chest, his leather jacket creaking a little, popping as it pulled
away from the shoulders of the other two boys.  The car smelled of
musk.

They continued on, around two blocks, turning off onto another.  There
was an ashtray built into the back of the front seat, and one of the
boys suddenly leaned forward and popped it open, then pushed it closed.
Rick looked at him, his mouth drawn.

"Just checking for scumbags," the boy said.

Rick gave a half smile.

"Left?"  the driver asked.

"Yeah," Rick said.  He watched him make the turn.  "You ever get laid
in this back seat, Victor?"  His voice was low.

The driver glanced in the mirror.  "Yeah," he said.  "Every night."

"By what?"  the boy beside him asked.  "Your dog?"

"By your mother," Victor said.

"Victor gets laid," Rick told them generously.  "He gets laid by all
kinds of girls.  He gets laid almost as much as I do."

They all chuckled, a little embarrassed, sensing he was hardening his
heart.

Victor looked in his mirror again.  "Nobody gets laid as much as you
do, Rick."

It was no less a consciously kind statement because it was, or had
been, true.

They turned onto her street again and made a left this time.  A bald
man stepping out of his car paused to look at them.  Further down, a
woman holding a white cake box

and filling her back seat with little boys did the same.  They passed
the grandmother again who was now talking across a hedge to her
neighbor, the green garden hose curled neatly against the side of her
garage.  They passed Angie's house.  Its wrought-iron railing and front
door and drainpipes were painted pale pink.  Her father was out mowing
the lawn.  They made a group of kids playing baseball in the street
step out of their way.  The kids moved only as far as they had to. 
They looked into the cars like curious, defiant natives, knowing that
they would soon be teenagers too, that they would replace them.

They continued on, repeated another circuit and then headed back the
way they had come, doubled back, added a few new streets to their
route.  They no longer missed the sounds of their radios.  There was
the hard, ripping drone of their engines.  They could feel it in their
feet and all up and down their legs.

The next time they passed her house, the boy in the front passenger
seat of the first car gave the gathered audience his enormous Sergeant
Bilko grin.

Rick sat low in his seat, staring out past the shoulders of his
friends, through the green-tinted windshield that his own dark glasses
made black.  He was only vaguely aware of the passing shadows of trees,
lights coming on here and there.  He no longer thought of all the other
days and nights he had passed by these houses and along these streets.
None of it was familiar to him now.  He saw it only from the corners of
his eyes and what he saw seemed vague and indifferent, and somehow
threatening in that indifference.  Nothing else seemed to know that the
world had changed in the past few days.  Or not even changed, he
thought, but become again, with a vengeance, what it had been before he
met her: flat, uncaring, withdrawing all that it offered

every time he put out his hand.  Handing him jokes.  He remembered a
movie he had seen once as a kid, a scene from it that had bored itself
into his nightmares: a little girl holding a bundle, a baby in a
bonnet, squirming and crying.  She tries to quiet it, begins singing a
light song.  The crying grows louder and louder and the squirming more
violent.  You wonder how a little baby can squirm so much.  You're
afraid she'll drop it.  Then there's a nose, a little hoof flinging
itself from the blankets.  The girl looks down and sees it's not a baby
at all but a pig--the baby has turned into a pig, or it had been a pig
all along.  She drops it with a start.  The creature runs off, the
satin bonnet flapping against its hide.

Everything he was handed withdrawn or suddenly, inexplicably,
transformed.  Waking from a nap, coming home from school or in from
play to find that nothing in the flat, indifferent world had changed:
the television might still be on, wet clothes might still be in the
washer, a piece of meat left on the counter to thaw: only she had
disappeared.

He could feel the sweat on his neck, smell the musky odor of the car
and, mingling with it, the odor of cut grass.  He could feel the heat
of his friends pressed beside him.

"Right?"  Victor said, and he nodded.  The world swinging slowly across
the dark windshield: house, lawn, lamppost, street.  He would simply
walk up to her front door.

"How much longer?"  one of them asked.

"Give it time," he said.  The streetlights were touching the cars, the
back windshield of the car in front, the hood and doors of the one he
rode in, the one behind, rolling over them again and again.  His
friends shifted their feet; the chains on the floor made a small
clink.

"Not too late," one of them was saying.  "You don't want it to be too
dark."

"No," Rick told them.  "I know when."

He would simply walk up to her front door.  He'd done it a million
times already.  He would make everything be the same, push back the
time, wrestle whatever had changed to the floor.  He didn't care if it
took a million friends, a hundred cars, chains the size of boulders. He
would make it go back to what it was.  She had said it herself, she had
promised him: nothing else would matter to them, friends, family,
getting older, good luck or bad.

The lights were passing slowly over the cars.  The engines were
straining to keep their slow and steady pace.  They moved invisibly
now, no one watching, no one coming to their windows or their doors.

He would simply go into her house and pull from it what had been.  He
would say no for the first time.  He would say, No, I'm not taking it,
I'm not taking this.  His mother disappearing, standing right before
him and disappearing, taking with her that part of him she had filched
when she was well.  His father drawing in, curling into a ball, his
skin, hair, bones, voice growing thinner and thinner by the hour, his
father getting ready to disappear.

As a kid, he had imagined forcing open her mouth, reaching his hand in,
pulling his real mother out the way the hunter had pulled the swallowed
citizens from the wolfs stomach.  He had imagined, just yesterday, just
this morning, kicking the crutches out from under his father's arms,
bending his back straight, forcing him to return.

It was the same: He would walk calmly up to her front door.  He had his
friends, the wide engines of these three heavy cars, the chains.  He
would make it go back to what it was.

They turned slowly, one, two, three, onto Sheryl's block.  Victor
gripped the wheel.

"You know what to do," Rick said, encouraging him.

Victor nodded.  "We know."

He pressed himself into the seat, between the fat leather shoulders of
his friends.  He would simply walk up to her front door: nothing's
changed.  The other boys were tense and silent.  Their scent suddenly
moved like a draft through the car.

The sound was violent, blinding.  The first car gunned and spun and
Victor's arms were moving in wide, quick arcs over the steering wheel.
They felt the leap, the banging over the curb, the sound.  The sound of
it seemed unbelievable.  And then the doors on one side swung open.
Everything outside was still.

He knew he had done it as soon as his boot touched the walk.  The
exhaust hung in the air like gunpowder, like magician's dust.  He had
done it.  Wasn't the house there as it always had been before?  Wasn't
he walking toward it as he had done a million times before, the sound
of his heels neat and confident?

He calmly mounted the steps, politely rattled the front door.  He
slipped his hands into his back pockets, waiting.  Then he leaned
forward, cupping his hands to his eyes.  There was the familiar living
room, dimmed by the screen, drained of color.  In a minute, he would
enter it, as he'd done so many times before.  In a minute, she would
come, smiling to see him.

Something moved in the shadows.  He stepped away.  Hadn't he done it?
Wasn't he back?

That night Sheryl and Pam laid out the pattern they had bought on the
living room floor.  Pam showed Sheryl how to use the dart wheel and
tracing paper, how to cut in a

straight line with pinking shears, to match fabrics and base seams.
She set up the ironing board and ironed the material with every step,
the smell of old starch and steam filling the warm air.  Pam's husband
and children were down in the family room with her parents, watching
television, but Roger, the youngest, kept wandering up to see what his
mother and Sheryl were doing.  Eventually, he stayed.  He stretched out
on the floor beside them as they cut the material, and then fell asleep
while Sheryl guided the material through the machine, Pam standing over
her.  He slept like an infant, his cheek flat against the carpet and
his mouth open, his arms straight at his side, the back of his small
hands to the floor.  When the dress was finished but for the hem and
buttons, Pam went into the kitchen to make popcorn and pour Cokes for
everyone.  Idly, Sheryl knelt beside the sleeping child, running her
hand back and forth through the thick carpet.

At about ten o'clock, Pam and her husband got ready to go home.  Her
husband was tall and blond, not handsome but somewhat sweet and comical
in his Bermuda shorts.  Sheryl watched him as he gently lifted Roger
from the floor.  The child whimpered a little as he rose through the
air, but then settled against his father's body as if it had been made
for his rest, the shoulder carved to fit his cheek, the arm bent simply
to cradle him.

This evening, each time she had gone into her room to try on the new
dress, Sheryl had noticed the swelling in her stomach and breasts.
Lulled for the moment by the calm industry of the evening, but the
pleasant house filled with more family than she had ever known, she had
thought with some curiosity and a kind of pride of the baby she
carried, the child she would be mother to.  She had even

stood sideways before the mirror, her hands on her stomach, her eyes
meeting her own in the mirror, large and soulful, the classic pregnant
madonna pose.  She had even smiled.

But now as she watched her cousin's husband turning casually and only a
little stiffly to see where the other two children had gone, the little
boy asleep against him, she felt only a dazzling and depthless loss.
Not because her own child would never know its father, the father never
know what rest his body had been formed to give, but because she was
not the child she had once been but would never be again.  Because the
shoulder and chest and arms that had once so casually and so thoroughly
held her had left the earth long before she had lost her need for
them.

She cried out, a short, breathless shout, or, in the bustle of their
departure, merely stood silently, tears in her eyes.

Seeing her, hearing her, Pam turned and said, "Oh, honey," as if
something precise and delicate had toppled over, so close to its
completion.

Sheryl turned from them all and went into her room alone.

At eleven-thirty, her mother called to say, in a thin and angry voice
that made her seem a stranger, "Well, we had a visit from your
boyfriend tonight."

Sometime later, when most of the lights had been extinguished around
the house and Sheryl lay awake in her strange bed, Pam came into her
room.  She was back from her own house, where she had gotten her
children to sleep, and then returned just to speak to her.  (For in her
fierce sympathy, her boundless energy, she had made Sheryl her project,
her quest, had taken her on as a few years later she might take on a
career, a degree, a lover, a few years later when the chasm that was
now at the heart of her life as a

mother and a wife had been revealed to her as something shared and
justifiable and capable of being healed only by a virtuous
selfishness.)

Seeing Sheryl was awake, or hearing her crying from the hallway, she
stepped into the dark room.  From the window came a pale blue light,
the outer edge of the one light that was kept on throughout the night.
It fell through the corner of the shade in a straight bar.  She stood
by the girl's bed, a reverse silhouette, pale against the darkness but
without detail.

Whispering, she asked if she could stay, if she could speak.  Sheryl
only turned toward her, her eyes alone catching the bit of light and
shining briefly with it.

The squeak of the thin bedframe, the heavy weight on the mattress and
the rustle of Sheryl's legs beneath the sheet as she moved them away.
The house was quiet but for the distant rumble of a passing truck.  The
air was hot and humid.

"Honey," she began.  She began with a gentle attempt to convince the
girl that she understood perfectly what she was feeling.

"I know how hard this is for you."  "I know this is a difficult time."
"I know this isn't easy."

And then, to win her to her side, "I know how much you must have loved
your boyfriend."

The blue light lying like a bandage along the side of her face, along
the fleshy shoulder and bare arm.  "You probably miss him a lot.  Your
mom said you saw him every day.  It must be terrible, suddenly being
separated like this.  I remember."

The story she then told was as all attempts at sympathy are: an effort
to match in form and size and detail what another has known: to hold
one experience next to another

the way lovers and children match fingers and hands, as if these two,
side by side, are linked by their likeness, are both identical and
unique.

"I was once in love with a boy, too.  When I was just about your age.
And we were separated.  And I thought I would never be able to go on
living.  I thought I'd kill myself or die of a broken heart--just not
wake up some morning after crying all night."  There was a
facetiousness in her voice that Sheryl could not fail to hear.  The
smirk behind the words of an adult who has too readily joined a child's
game.  Her cousin was old enough, had been married long enough, to know
that this sort of love was not it, this romantic love for a boyfriend
or young husband was not, after all, what lasted; that it was foolish,
even adolescent to believe it might.  She was young enough in her life
as a mother to feel quite certain that only the love she had for her
children was worth the drama and intensity the young gave to one
another.  It was what she had meant when she told Sheryl, just wait: it
was the only love that could even begin to match the other's foolish
claims.

"But every morning I did get up," she went on.  "I didn't die.  And
days kept on, one after the other, and things slowly began to change. I
began to feel better, little by little.  Little by little, I thought of
other things.  I met someone else.  I got over it."

In the dark room, in the single shaft of the blue night light--the
light kept burning merely to demonstrate to the night that the family
in this house is watchful, determined to be safe--it is the only wisdom
an adult can offer the child.  It is both an incantation and a prayer:
You will and you must.  Not merely get over the loss, but also learn
that its insult is not nearly as great as it once seemed.

"I know it doesn't seem possible now, but in a few years

you'll be different and what seems like a terrible loss to you now
will only seem natural, a small part of your life.  You'll have trouble
remembering just how you feel today and why.  You'll meet someone else.
You'll have other children, lots of them, and then you'll see.  You'll
be happy."

What she couldn't have known, in her sympathy, her easy wisdom (for she
was right, it would happen even to Sheryl exactly as she had said), was
how the girl had linked her father and Rick, the way she had determined
to love them.  She couldn't have known that for Sheryl, bereft as she
was, peace was annihilation and to say that love could fade, that loss
could heal, was to admit forever that there would be no return of the
dead.

That night Sheryl got out of bed while the pale blue light still shone
through her window.  She dressed in a tight pair of black jeans and a
loose yellow shell that was stretched out enough to cover her open fly
and the thick rubber band she now used to fasten her waist.  She put on
her makeup in the dark, brushed and teased her hair, then filled her
pocketbook with her comb and her makeup, a can of deodorant and one of
the half-empty bottles of perfume.  She left her room with her shoes in
her hand.  In the living room, the windows glowed with a vague light,
but the center of the house, the hallway before her, the carpet beneath
her feet, was dark and indefinite.  She could hear the distinct,
inharmonious sounds of her aunt's and uncle's breathing, one sighing
long sighs that seemed to end each time with a click or a kiss, one
sawing hollow logs, angry and insistent.

She went again to the hall closet, carefully slid open the door and
reached inside.  She moved one hand down the length of each coat sleeve
and into each pocket, hoping

each time to be surprised by the feel of a coin.  She found a dime in
her aunt's raincoat, a quarter and a nickel in her uncle's slick
windbreaker.  She now had nearly twelve dollars.  This evening when her
mother had called, shrill and tearful with the tale of Rick's visit,
Sheryl had asked her to send more money.  She dismissed the request
impatiently.  "What do you need money for?"  she'd snapped.  "Haven't
you got everything you need?"

Sheryl couldn't say, "I need it to get out of here."

There was a small high window in the front door, and as Sheryl turned
from the closet, she saw that the pale light that came through it
caught some of the picture frames on the opposite wall and made the
glass shine blankly, as if the faces and figures beneath had somehow
vanished.  But she knew which one she wanted simply by its shape, and
she lifted it carefully and slipped it into her bag.  She turned
quickly and descended the next set of steps.  She crossed the family
room, the linoleum cold against her bare feet, and quickly opened the
door.  She had already begun to perspire, but the air was cool and she
felt a wave of nausea as she hit the grass.  She began to walk toward
the spot where she knew the sun would rise.

It was still dark, but what stars there had been were nearly gone and
the air seemed close.  She held out her hand as she walked,
occasionally brushing at her cheeks and her bare arm as if she felt
someone's breath upon them.  The ground, which had looked flat and
fairly even from the house, was riddled with sockets and hills and
small weeds that scratched at her bare ankles.  She stumbled once or
twice and began to feel frightened.  But then her eyes grew accustomed
to the darkness and soon she could make out a distant line of trees.

When she had gone a good distance from the house she

put her pocketbook down, slipped the rubber band from the button at
her waist and squatted.  She could see the spotlight on the side of the
house, white and sharp as a low star.  She tried to make herself
believe she would never return to this place, that it would be forever
a small and ever fading part of her past, but her time there had been
too short, her memory even now too new and indistinct.  It seemed more
a future she had only, briefly, glimpsed than a part of her history,
left behind her.  When she stood again, she saw how round and white her
belly was in the darkness.

There was a heavy underbrush beneath the trees and she could hear birds
waking as she passed.  She put her pocketbook on her head to keep the
bats out of her teased hair and raised her legs high with each step as
if she were walking through snow.  She caught her foot in a vine and,
stumbling, swung her pocketbook into the trunk of a tree.  There was
the sound of metal and glass.  A dog barked somewhere in the
distance.

There was a high fence at the edge of the trees and she climbed it
quickly, the metal singing, the wires familiar in her fingers--the
heady swing over the top.  Then down a steep hill, which she took at a
run, and she was at the edge of the highway.  It was deserted and,
except for her own heavy breathing, silent.  Just across it, the sky
was turning a weak orange, but the wide road itself was still deep
gray.  The grass that split it and continued on the other side was
still as dark as the sky behind her.  There was a high white light off
to her right and a single star at the horizon.  She stood for a minute
trying to catch her breath, to figure out what side of the road she
should stand on.  She had imagined it would run east and west; north
and south was no good to her.

She backed up a little and lowered herself onto the grass.

Her hand was trembling when she lit a cigarette, and when she wiped
her wrist across her forehead it glistened with sweat.  Her shoes were
damp, and she rubbed a line of mosquito bites along her ankle.

In the darkness and the silence, she tried to think of Rick but knew he
would be asleep now, unconscious; his anger or his fear or whatever it
was that he'd felt as he pulled her mother from the house would be as
good as forgotten at this moment.  She recalled a night last winter
when they'd both fallen asleep in his car and had woken cold and
startled, lost in the world and momentarily strangers.  If he were
woken now, at this minute, if she called him on the phone at this
minute, he couldn't say where she was or even that he thought of her.
No one could.

She heard a car approaching on the opposite side and for a second
believed it was Pam, out looking for her, already determined to
retrieve her.  But the car passed quickly with a flash of headlights
and Sheryl could see nothing beyond its black windows.

There was a kind of loneliness in its wake, a tense new edge to the
silence.

In the minute before he died, her father had pulled his car to the side
of the road, loosened his tie and raised one leg to the seat beside
him.  He must have thought of her and of her mother, but they hadn't
known it.  She was drawing elaborate butterflies in the margins of her
algebra exam.  Her mother was on the phone with Mrs.  Sayles when the
policeman came to the door.

Sheryl tossed the cigarette into the road and rested her chin on her
hands.  His bracelet gleamed in the half light, but when she put her
cheek to it, it seemed ice-cold.  She sat back suddenly to ease the
strain of fabric against her

waist.  She searched the horizon for that one star, but it had already
faded in the growing light.

Had they been more vigilant in their love, she was certain, they would
have saved him.  The car in the driveway would have signified his
return.

Another car approached, on her side this time, and she stood quickly
and held her thumb out.  It sped by her, the grit and the hot air
stinging her eyes.  Again she hadn't been able to see anyone inside,
and the ensuing silence made her feel she was dreaming.  She had an
urge to shout, to test her voice.  She felt a rising panic in her
throat.

Three more cars passed, ignoring her, but the fourth stopped a good way
down the road and then backed up as she ran toward it.  She saw the
driver through a haze of stinging tears.  He was young, with a dark
crew cut.  He had to lower the radio to ask her, "Where you headed?"

"East," she said.

He leaned across the seat to open the door.  Their sudden speed struck
her as miraculous.

By the time the sun began to set, she had almost completely lost her
bearings, and although her last ride, two teenage girls about her own
age, had assured her that the exit where they had left her led to a
road that traveled due east, she hesitated trying it.  By now she was
certain her aunt and her mother had the police out looking for her and
she would have to find some back roads to make her way on.  She'd had
nothing to eat all day but the few potato chips the girls had shared
with her and a bottle of Coke a trucker had bought her in West
Virginia.

She turned back to the road the girls had taken, a smaller tar road
that seemed to have risen in the middle like a loaf

of bread.  She walked along a dry gully at its edge, the afternoon
heat still burning through the soles of her shoes and making everything
ahead seem to shimmer.  Thick trees lined the road beside her and
through them came an occasional yellow and blinding glare of the
setting sun.  It was the time of day and of summer that made her think
of barbecues and sunburn.  Going upstairs to dress for the hot summer
night ahead.  Dotting perfume behind her thighs.

She walked slowly, the pocketbook heavy in her hand.  The cars that
passed her seemed dangerously close; some tooted their horns as they
went by her, but she tried not to veer.  She felt a blister forming on
her heel.  The time of day and summer when she would lean across the
tiny child's desk she had transformed into a vanity table with sheer
white curtains, lean into the plastic mirror lined with round bulbs,
the movie-star mirror she had gotten for her thirteenth birthday (her
father looking truly puzzled when she opened it, looking across the
dining room table, across the remnants of cake and ice cream to ask,
"No more dolls?"), and draw perfect black lines across her eyelids.

She walked steadily through the dust and the heat, uncertain of where
she was going but knowing that sooner or later she would come upon
something.  A place to rest and to eat.  It had to be.  There was the
smell of hot tar in the air, the lingering odor of passing cars.  The
sun shot through the trees, red now, lower than it had been but still
bright enough to make her squint.  The time of day neighbors came out
to their porches and their driveways, patting their bellies and sucking
their teeth.  When she would wait to hear Rick's boots on the steps,
the thrilling rattle at the door.

The darkness had begun to come in like water, filling up the wells
already formed by the shadows of trees and leaves,

when she saw a white sign at the edge of the road ahead and then came
upon a small restaurant, squat and low with brown shake shingles and a
wide, dusty lot.

There was a cigarette machine in the entry and a long, green-topped
counter across the far wall, red plastic booths and stools.  The
waitress who leaned against one looked up as she came in.  Just over
her shoulder, there was a narrow pass-through window from the kitchen.
The cook behind it looked at her, too, only a nose and a pair of
eyes.

Sheryl walked quickly to the furthest corner and slid into a booth,
refusing to meet anyone's gaze.  She lit a cigarette and immediately
turned to the window.

The waitress was about her mother's age, short and plump, and she said,
"Isn't it hot?"  as she swabbed the table with a gray rag.  She wore a
charm bracelet and a thin wedding band.  Her arm was freckled.

Sheryl said, "Yes, it is."

"Is there just going to be you?"  the woman asked.

Sheryl paused for a moment, uncertain.

"Are you waiting for someone?"  the waitress said.

Sheryl shook her head.  "Oh," she said.  "No."  And she began the lie
she had rehearsed: "My mother dropped me off."

But the waitress merely nodded and set one napkin before her.  "You
want a Coke?"

Sheryl said yes.  When the waitress brought it, she ordered a hamburger
and french fries and then asked, "Is it all right if I use the
bathroom?"

The woman laughed.  She had a small flat nose and narrow eyes.  "Sure.
I won't let anybody sit here."

In the bathroom, Sheryl dug out her makeup and saw the glass over the
picture had cracked in two places.  She

ran her index finger over one of the cracks and was surprised to see
blood streak the glass.  She looked at her finger and only slowly felt
the pain.  She put the picture on the sink and ran cold water over the
cut.  In the photograph, her mother and father were young-looking and
smiling, her father with his mouth open a little, as if he were saying
something.  She, a toddler, was sitting between them.  There was
something old-fashioned about their clothes, her mother's plaid skirt
and her father's white socks and black shoes.  Something old about the
chalky colors of the picture.

Months after her father died, her mother had said suddenly at dinner
one summer evening, "I can't remember what Daddy sounded like."  She
seemed about to panic, as if she had just lost the memory and knew it
could not be retrieved.  "I can't think of how he sounded, can you?"

Sheryl had said of course she could.  She would remember it always. But
what she really remembered, she knew, were the words he had used, "Holy
cow," and "Let's everybody keep a level head."  The sound she gave him
was the sound of her own voice, repeating the words he had used or
merely imagining others.  His real voice and the words he had actually
used, what he'd been saying the second the photograph was taken, for
instance, was lost to her, although she hadn't realized it until her
mother asked if she could still remember.

She returned the picture to her pocketbook and slowly reapplied her
makeup, studying her eyes and her lips and her round flat face to see
what the people she had ridden with today had seen, what the waitress
and the cook saw.  If, adrift as she was, she had changed.  She lifted
her arms and sprayed herself with deodorant.  Combed her bangs and re
teased her hair.  Her shell rode up over her belly and as

she pulled it down she saw the imprint of her open fly.  She lifted
the blouse, tucking the hem of it under her chin, and tried once more
to pull up her zipper, to close the button at her waist.  But even
though she held her breath, the rubber band merely buckled a little,
her belly only strained against it.  She pulled her blouse over her
waist again and saw clearly that she hadn't fooled anyone.

She left the bathroom carrying her pocketbook before her like a
child.

Back at the table, she ate slowly, feeling the others watching her.
Each time the cook finished an order, he glanced through his window
toward her.  An elderly woman in the next booth smiled at her each time
she looked up from her plate.  The men at the counter turned
indifferently to glance at her over their shoulders.  There were some
teenagers at a table in the opposite corner, two teenage couples and an
extra boy.  The girls giggled continuously while the boys grew louder
and louder in their talk.  Sheryl gathered they were all going to a
movie nearby.  She knew the single boy had somehow lost his date.

She ordered coffee simply to seem older and then apple pie, although
she would have preferred chocolate cake, for the same reason.

"Your mom going to pick you up?"  the waitress asked.

Sheryl shook her head.  "No.  I'm supposed to meet her down the road.
At the gas station.  Our car broke down and she had to take it there to
get it fixed."

The waitress frowned a little, and Sheryl added, as she had rehearsed,
"She doesn't know anything about cars.  She's a widow."

The woman threw back her head.  "Tell her to learn,"" she said.  "I'm a
widow, too, and not three weeks after my

husband died some mechanic took me for a hundred dollars.  Tell your
mom to take an adult ed course or something.  Where you from?"

"Ohio," Sheryl said.  "Columbus."

"Tell your mom to see if they have a course at your high school.  I
know.  It's tough when you're alone."

Two more teenagers came in and the waitress went to them.  When Sheryl
stood to leave, she felt the eyes of the faceless cook follow her to
the register.  The waitress took her money and gave her her change.

""Night now," she said, looking at her carefully.

Sheryl said, "Good night."

A small decal on the door said the place closed at ten.

She returned to the road, continued walking.  She had thought she might
simply walk all night, but the blister on her heel was sharply
painful--she paused to wedge a tissue between it and the back of her
shoe, but it didn't help-and the road was so black she occasionally
missed her step, thinking the earth rose where it did not or failing to
see where it fell.  There was a thin moon skimming the trees, gray and
marbled like a worn shell.  She turned and walked back to the diner.

Behind the parking lot were the remains of a rotting stockade fence. It
was surrounded by high grass, and as soon as she made her way around
it, she could hear the shrill drone of a mosquito in her ear, but there
was a safety in it.  She sank down in the grass, her back to the damp
wood.  The stars above the trees looked pale green.  The moon rose
higher.  She listened to the cars coming and going over the dirt, the
footsteps and the voices, simply waiting.  She never thought that
tomorrow she would be back home, with Rick, all returned to what it had
been.  She settled instead for a smaller return, to a place where she
had rested and had

something to eat.  She would simply be grateful to see the sun once
more, the night over.  A day like the last beginning again.

There was a good half hour of silence, broken only by the sound of the
cars passing on the road out front.  And then she heard what she
recognized as the waitress's voice as she laughed and said, "No
kidding."  Sheryl leaned over to peer around the bit offence.  She saw
the waitress in her white uniform and the cook in his white pants and
T-shirt descend the steps that led from the kitchen.  At the bottom,
they embraced for a long time, formed in their white clothes one
shapeless image in the pale moonlight, then separated and walked in
opposite directions toward their cars.

Sheryl listened to both engines as they started, saw both sets of
headlights come on.  They were gone a good while before she could shake
off her sadness and stand.  She limped across the lot to the
restaurant, climbed the stairs and halfheartedly tried the back door.
Then she sat on the concrete steps.  She rested her pocketbook on her
lap, folded her arms across it, her elbows in her palms.  She leaned
against the shingles that covered the cinderblock wall.  His bracelet
was black in the shade of her arm.  She closed her eyes and willed
herself to dream of him, but the night grew damp and chilly and her
sleep was shallow.  Twice she heard the metal clatter of a garbage-can
cover, the skitter of tiny feet on the gravel.  Even in her half sleep,
she was aware of the slow pace of the night and the slow, reluctant way
it was lifted.

When she woke for the last time, the air was gray and there was a pale
mist through the trees at the edge of the lot, mist draped like ragged
bits of cloth over a black line of distant hills.

It was not logical for love to come to nothing, but she

must have admitted then, for the first time, that it was certainly
possible that it could, like grief, grow forgetful and weary and slowly
wear away.  She would get older.  She would love someone else.  She
could not live her own life, live through all the coming years of
school and friends and marriage and a job, live through the birth of
this child she carried, without growing forgetful at times, weary of
the pledge she had made.  She could not both live and continue to keep
them alive.

And yet she could not believe that all her love would come to
nothing.

When she began walking that morning, she had only a vague idea of her
destination, a vague sense of the challenge she was about to propose.
She would choose a public place, but one where only a stroke of luck, a
miracle of sorts, would save her.

She would either see him again, refusing all her long life, or she
would learn something about the vigilance of the dead.

In the days that followed the fight, he was kept in the jail rooms
behind the local police headquarters.  It was a new building of orange
brick, wide and low, much like a small grammar school, and the police
who worked there and dealt mostly with hoods and drunks tended to treat
all their guests as incorrigible students with after-school detention.
They called Rick Lover Boy and said of him, well within his hearing,
"He's seen too many movies."

He spent his days there lying on his cot, breathing through his mouth.
His nose had been taped with a wide cross of white adhesive and stuffed
with cotton, and his already fuzzy vision (the sunglasses were
prescriptive and the police had

failed to give him the small horn-rimmed pair his sister brought) was
further distorted by the swelling and the pain.

That night, when the arresting officers had brought him to the
hospital, the emergency-room nurse had pulled his fingers from his face
with a provocative, sexual gentleness, all the while cooing softly, as
if to a child.  Back in the police station, his father had taken his
chin between his thumb and forefinger and examined their work.  Even
half blinded, both by the swelling and the station-house lights, Rick
could see the way his father drew his lips together and, with his head
back, peered at him from under his lids.  It was his doctor's face.
Rick and his sisters used to imitate it--holding out a thumb at arm's
length, squinting at it.  "Who am I?"  "Daddy!"

His father carefully touched the adhesive and the cardboard splints and
then ran his thumb down both sides of Rick's face, lightly and quickly.
In the bright station house, it was as close as he could come to a
caress, and in the second it provided him to look into his child's face
he saw his own wild disbelief, lingering still after more time than
should have been needed to accommodate it, that anything he had wanted
with such passion could so easily slip through his hands.

Rick turned from his father toward the officers who had brought him in.
The father turned from his daughter as she offered him her arm.

In his cell, a small high window let in only a blur of orange sky.
There was a parking lot just outside, he knew, then the police garage,
then a road and a supermarket.  The sounds he heard that first night,
an occasional car passing, an occasional car backfiring, burning
rubber, were the same

sounds he might have heard from his own bedroom at home.  But lights
were on all through the corridor, and although he could barely
distinguish the source from the reflection, he could see the way the
light spread itself over the linoleum beside his bed.  It was the kind
of light he had seen in the hospital, the loony bin, where his mother
stayed.  He wondered briefly if now he would be just like her.

There were low voices down the corridor.  He heard someone say
ninety-eight degrees.  There were footsteps and a dry hot whisper that
was his own breathing.

That night, he dreamed of public places, parking lots and school
corridors, the emergency-room nurse leading him by the fingers he could
not take from his face.  Nothing of Sheryl, nor of the moment when he
saw her mother appear behind the screen and knew for certain she was
gone.  That none of it was true.

The next morning, he asked the attorney they had sent him if he was as
much a lawyer as his father was a doctor, but the man only said, "I
certainly hope so," unsure whether the chin-out, head-back stance was
swagger or mere compensation for the two black eyes.  "But you've got
yourself quite a little mess."

Rick saw a pink, bald face and a wide white shirt front slashed with a
startling string of black.  The man said, "First tell me what happened,
from the beginning," and as Rick began to speak, reluctantly, and in
mumbled half sentences, he felt he had dreamed this too, that he had
been in this room, talking like this before.

At one point, the lawyer leaned forward and eyes emerged from what had
been two sockets of shadow.  And what would he have done, the lawyer
asked, his voice puckered

with disdain, if she had been there?  Elope?  Kidnap?  Kill her?

Rick shook his head.  It occurred to him that he would not be treated
this way if he had killed someone.

"Were you planning to hurt her in any way?"

"No," he said.  The man waited, seemed to study him.  Rick became aware
of the labored sound of his own breathing, the dryness of his mouth. It
seemed a great advantage to be able to breathe silently, through your
nose.

"What, then?  Drag her into your car?"

"No."  Frowning, insulted, but uncertain if he should say, I wouldn't
hurt her, or I'm not that stupid.  "It wasn't even my car."

"Threaten her?  Scare her?"

He said no again, impatiently, trying to get as much expression of
disgust into his eyes as he could.  "I just wanted to talk to her."

He heard the man sigh, and his sigh, too, was tainted with dislike.
"You drive three cars up onto her lawn," the lawyer said slowly.  "You
bring all your friends armed with chains, you nearly break her mother's
neck, just 'cause you wanted to talk to her?  You expect anybody to
accept that?  You want me to believe that?"

It was the voice, the eyes, the blurred, nearly glossy face of whoever
had watched him: that day in the mall, that night in the bowling alley
when the bowlers had turned, startled by his cry; the voice, the eyes,
of whoever had seen his dream--the baby turned into a pig--who had
known the foolish, unaccountable terror it filled him with.  Who knew
the high feminine sound that escaped from his throat when he made love,
who had seen him bare-assed and grinning in the park, coming helplessly
at her first touch.

The voice, the eyes, the jellied, ill-defined face of whoever watched
him, knowing the truth: that he would not escape his life, not even
with love.

"Well, I couldn't get her on the phone," he said, and the lawyer put
down his pen, ran his fuzzy pink hand down his face and then, holding
the thin stripe of his black tie, began to laugh.

Rick bowed his head, breathed a single puff of air through his open
mouth and then, closing it, crossing some gulf, slowly, wisely, began
to grin.

"So I overreacted," he said.

"Brother," the lawyer said--and hadn't some of the disdain left his
voice, weren't they laughing together now, fraternal.  "Did you
ever."

Rick sat up, held out his hands.  There was no doubt in the lawyer's
mind what the raised chin was meant to indicate now.  The sudden
swagger relieved him.

"So what are they going to do to me?"  Rick said, as if he were
prepared for an easy fistfight.  "What are they going to charge me
with?"

"Melodrama," the lawyer said.  Hoods he could handle.  "Making a scene.
Stupidity.  The whole damn neighborhood saw you."

Rick threw himself back in his chair, the grin giving way to a look of
impatient dismissal.  Of course she was gone, changed forever.  And
this was what his life would be like.  "I'm sorry," he said in his best
sarcastic voice.  "I apologize, all right?"

The man smiled, playing his own ace.  "Don't apologize to me," he said.
"She's the one you got in trouble."

That night or not long after, he woke himself from another nightmare
and found that the shame, the sense of

embarrassment and profound regret that had broken through his sleep,
was no longer at his failure to claim her, to set back the time, but at
his attempt.

In the days that followed the fight, a woman pulled into a small gas
station somewhere between here and Ohio and asked quickly for the
ladies' room.  She headed for the back of the station at a run and in
her hurry pushed into the door without knocking.  She found Sheryl
standing at the sink, her wrists held under the running water.  She had
leaned over and placed her chin on her forearm and at first the woman
thought she was about to faint, but she had done it merely to keep his
bracelet from the water and the blood.

The woman turned back into the sunlight and called for help.  When she
turned again, Sheryl was sitting on the floor, her wrists on her
thighs, the blood making her black pants shiny and staining the dirty
pink tiles.  She looked up at the woman somewhat sadly.  There was a
dark line of blood up the side of her yellow blouse and over her
shoulder, made when she had raised her arm to toss back her hair.

The woman took a sheaf of paper towels and nearly covered her with
them.  Behind her, one of the attendants appeared in the doorway and
said, "Jesus Christ."

The small white sink was full of blood.  On the ledge between the
faucets there was the photograph and a long thin shard of glass.

The woman, who had four children of her own, could not keep the anger
from her voice as she wrapped Sheryl's arms in the rough gray towels
and asked her over and over, "What were you trying to do?"  as if she,
or Sheryl, had been somehow mistaken.

At the hospital, someone dialed the phone number Sheryl gave them and
found it had been changed.  They called the local police station
instead.  An officer there who had been to that address twice in the
past year suggested that a police car would alarm the mother
unnecessarily: the girl, after all, and by a sheer stroke of luck,
would live.  A plainclothes detective, just back from lunch, was asked
to do the job instead.

The suburb where we lived, like most, I suppose, was only one in a
continuous series of towns and developments that had grown out from the
city in the years after the Second World War.  They were bedroom
communities, incubators, where the neat patterns of the streets, the
fenced and leveled yards, the stop signs and traffic lights and
soothing repetition of similar homes all helped to convey a sense of
order and security and snug predictability.  And yet it seems to me now
that those of us who lived there then lived nevertheless with a vague
and persistent notion, a premonition or memory of possible if not
impending doom.

We had among us even then, for instance, families (the Meyers were one
of them, I think, and the family that lived behind the Rossis) who had
fled here from other, older, suburbs to our east and who spoke to us
now like bitter, breathless exiles of what had occurred.  Families who
assured us that despite their best efforts, their love of the land they
had owned there, of the solid brick house that had sat upon it, despite
their determination to live out their lives in the

very place where their eldest child had first smiled and tumbled, the
neighborhood--and here they shook their heads, defeated, resigned--had
changed.

We had parents who spoke to us and to each other of the city streets
where they had spent their childhoods as lost forever, wiped from the
face of the earth by change; who said of their old neighborhoods, "You
can't go there anymore," as if change had made a place as inaccessible
as a time.  Parents who had come from "what used to be the country,"
from farmhouses on dirt roads that we could still see (they told us)
were it not for change.  Who would point to a supermarket or a school
or a highway overpass and say, "There, there, that's where it used to
be," until it seemed to us that another world had once existed right
beneath our feet, that another world had vanished from the very air we
breathed.

We had grandparents, some of us, who remained in embattled city
apartments or dilapidated houses buzzed by highways like flood victims
clinging to chimneys and roofs, caught by the quick and devastating
course of change.  We could hear our parents shouting to them through
telephones as if through time, "Mama, when are you going to get out of
there?"  "Dad, they want to tear it down!"

Enough, too much, has been said about the cowardly incompetence of
memory, how it can be pushed around by time, bullied by desire, worked
over by our intractable ability to see what we want to see.  Even
children know you cannot separate the tale from the teller.  And yet it
seems to me that even in those snug and orderly days the word carried a
threat that seemed to boil and echo and slowly, inevitably, approach
the street where we lived as surely as the sound of their engines had
moved toward us that night.

And it seems to me that, just as we had done with the boys in their
cars, we ignored it.  No less than those stubborn and curious people
who build and rebuild their homes on fault lines or slippery mountain
slopes or at the edges of ever-eroding rivers and lakes, we seemed to
live from day to day either resigned or indifferent to what we knew was
coming.  We lived from day to day as if the years were circular and the
return of a summer or fall just like the last clear evidence that
whatever was would last.

Sheryl's father died on the way to work one morning and we shook our
heads as if for that family alone things would never again be quite the
same.

Just a few years ago, after sodium lights had been placed on the
boulevard, giving the present that bright, unreal tinge that more
properly belongs to nightmare or memory, and neighbors had begun to
gather to form crime patrols (black and white now, although the change
that had been spoken of had once meant integration as much as anything
else), my parents retired and put their house on the market.  I was at
the end of my own marriage then, living unhappily in a similar town ten
miles away, and when winter came and the house had not yet sold, I
agreed to move in so my parents could go south.  In the last few years,
we had learned a Bible's worth of wisdom regarding muggers and rapists
and thieves and one of the tenets of this code was never to let any
house, ever, give the appearance of being unoccupied.  It was
necessary, then, I explained to my fading husband, that I be there
whenever a real estate agent brought someone through and that I keep my
car in the driveway at night.

I was aware at the time that it was a retreat for me, not so much to
the security of my past as away from the awkwardness

of my future, but what was cowardly about it was well disguised by
what seemed dutiful.  My husband nodded as if he believed I would be
back.  We had by then reached that point in our marriage where we
seemed to have lost our capacity for nostalgia, where what we'd shared,
that part of our past together that had sustained us until now, had
finally worn thin, and only an imagined history, or future, held any
promise.  We had begun to say we should have moved farther from our
parents when we were younger, tried life in another city or state,
switched jobs years ago.  We should have married later.  We said, "Of
course, if we'd had children," pretending to be grateful for the
freedom our decision, our caution as we had called it, had earned us.
If there were children, we could not so easily and amicably part.

I stood at the front door waiting for the real estate woman to arrive.
It was February or March, one of those limp, colorless days of late
winter.  The lawns seemed threadbare, the hedges and trees tangled and
pale white.  The houses themselves, persistent in their bright colors
and definite stripes of aluminum siding, were foolish-looking without
an accompaniment of snow or flowers or leaves; they seemed somehow
abandoned, washed up on a desolate shore of dry yellow earth and
branches the color of driftwood.  Across the street, in the driveway of
what had been the Rossis' house, the new people had a small boat
propped up on cinderblocks and covered with pale green canvas.  They
had put black bars across their windows--foolishly, we said; things
hadn't gotten that bad.  Next door, the Carpenters had brown burlap
wrapped carefully around each of their small bushes and trees.  In
Sheryl's old house, the windows

&

were all covered with thick, clear plastic that occasionally caught the
dull white sky and then lost it with the next breeze, leaving only
black glass.

As the woman pulled into our driveway in her shiny real estate salesman
car, I saw that she had the usual couple squeezed into the front seat
beside her and some children in the back as well.  I took this as a
good sign; the ad we'd run in the Sunday paper had been headed, "Bring
the Kids!"

The man was the first to emerge and he got out of the car slowly,
looking, as they always did, first up at the house and then to his left
and right.  It was a cold day, but he wore only a short leather jacket
with wide lapels and designer blue jeans.  There was a hand knit
muffler cast in various shades of brown and gold at his throat, and he
had his fingers in his shallow pockets.  He only nodded when I let him
in, the real estate woman with her card and her clipboard leading the
way, the children still behind them in the car.  I put him in his
mid-forties at first, but if I count the years more carefully, I would
have to believe he was younger than that.  He had dark hair and a
moustache and pale, somewhat sallow skin.  That abrupt, bent, furtive
manner of an adult trying not to be shy.

Behind him, his small wife grinned as if she were entering a party
where she knew neither the hosts nor the guests nor why she had been
invited.  She shook my hand when we were introduced and said, "This is
nice."

There are, of course, as many different ways for a prospective buyer to
look at a house as there are prospective buyers and houses, but I don't
think I'd be compromising my belief in the infinite variety of human
potential by saying there are, in general, three or four kinds of
lookers.  There are the studious ones, who begin in the basement, pace
the

dimensions of each room, try all the faucets and doors and poke their
heads into the attic; the dreamy ones, who walk through each room like
well-behaved tourists, noticing what they are told to notice and
keeping their hands to themselves; the impatient or embarrassed ones,
who seem to need only to confirm that there is, indeed, a house on the
inside that more or less conforms to the house on the outside and will
gladly take your word for it that there is a basement below and three
bedrooms up; and my favorites, those creative, seemingly homeless types
who make the imaginative leap to ownership as soon as they walk through
the door and spend their entire inspection placing their furniture,
setting their table and so thoroughly immersing themselves in their
domestic life in this home that they will discuss whether the
television in their bedroom will keep the children awake on school
nights before they ask how the house is heated or even its price.

Rick, however, when he came through our house that day, was not quite
any of these.  He followed the real estate agent dutifully, like a
dreamer, but then would suddenly break away from her to return to the
living room or to reinspect the master bedroom.  He asked few questions
but answered most of the saleswoman's statistics with "Yeah," or "I
know."  He neither tapped the walls nor tried the lights nor shoved a
screwdriver into the floor joists, but in every room he went first to
the windows and carefully, studiously, took in the view.  The
saleswoman, picking up on this, said a great deal about exposure and
sunlight and north winds, but it was clear this did not interest him.
Later, in what had been my brother's bedroom, he stood for a good while
at the front window, looking out over the driveway and the street, his
arms straight at his side.

A

He was not good-looking.  His dark hair was long in the back and poorly
cut, his shoulders were narrow and bent.  The jacket he wore was cheap,
the smell of the leather overcame even the real estate woman's perfume,
and he was just heavy enough around the hips to make the pockets of his
jeans bulge out a little, showing their white lining.  His legs were
short, and he wore black socks and scuffed black shoes with silver
buckles.  He also wore a thin silver wedding ring and there were dark
hairs on the back of his thick fingers and hands.  Watching him from
the hallway just outside the room, where I lingered to answer questions
and keep an eye on everything in the house that a prospective buyer
might pocket, I thought he seemed like an earnest, ignorant family man
who was, would always be, beset and besieged by money problems.  Not
unlike my own father, I supposed, like all the men who had lived here
when I was young.

He turned to me as he again looked around the room.  The afternoon
light through the windows only emphasized the shadows under his dark
eyes. There was a small, pale scar beside his nose, and under his thin
moustache one of his front teeth was yellow.  "How long have you lived
here?"  he asked me.

I said, "Until I was twenty-three."

The saleswoman added, "The house was built in '49."

He looked at her and nodded before meeting her eye.

Across the room, his wife, who was the thorough sort, closed the closet
door as if she had made up her mind about something and then announced
that she was going out to check on the kids in the car.  She had a
narrow face and a head of thick frosted hair.  Earlier, in the living
room, her husband had asked her, "Do you think it's big enough?"

and she had slowly raised her eyes to the ceiling, as if the room's
dimensions were written on the rafters.  "Big enough for what?"  she'd
said finally, and I recognized the sudden tension between them, the
bitterness on her part and on his, the long, weary effort to please.

"For living," he'd answered.

Now he put his hands in his pockets and turned to me again as she left
the room.  "You ever know Sheryl?"  he asked.  He motioned toward the
window.  "She used to live over there."

I nodded.  "Sure, I remember her."  And then I added, because I hadn't
quite made the connection, "Did you know her?"

He pursed his lips just slightly, as if to retard a smile.  "Yeah," he
said.  "I dated her in high school."  He said it with a bit of a
swagger, and yet coming from a man his age, the expression seemed
innocent and quaint.  I dated her.

He looked at me carefully, his eyes dark and myopic.  "I dated her for
over a year," he said.

I smiled, failing to recall for just one moment the details of that
night because, for that moment, I was embarrassed for him.  He was
bragging.

"You do know this neighborhood, then," the real estate woman said.  She
brushed past me into the hallway.  "Great."

He followed her somewhat reluctantly, but then turned.  I suppose he
was trying to determine how old I was, or would have been then.  "Were
you a friend?"  he asked.

I shook my head.  "She was much older," I said.  "Or at least then she
was older.  It wouldn't seem that way now."

\

The woman had paused in the hallway, the clipboard to her breast.  She
smiled at me patiently.

"People who seemed much older when you were young have a way of letting
you catch up with them," I went on.

She held out her arm to indicate that we should head back downstairs.
"Don't they?"

Rick glanced at us both as if we had somehow agreed to thwart him, and
then turned to once more lean into the bathroom and reinspect the
master, where my parents had slept.  Already I had begun to recall the
way he had bent, driven his fists into his thighs.  Already I had begun
to wonder if it could be possible, if he had come back, not merely
inadvertently found himself in a place that shocked and surprised him
with its significance, but somehow planned, even manipulated this
return.  Downstairs, I saw him glance at the street again, at what I
imagined was her house.  I imagined I understood his persistence.

In those days while I waited for the real estate agents to come and
lead strangers like judges through our house, empty now of all but the
furniture that was to be forever left behind, I found myself recalling
again my mother's potions and formulas and earth-bound acrobatics and
what they had come to; what Leela's efforts had brought her, and Mrs.
Rossi's, what the efforts, the very lives of any of our mothers had
finally come to when they looked casually over the heads of their
children in the middle of a busy day and saw that even the love that
had formed them would not necessarily keep them alive, and yet still I
could not quiet the drone of regret that had begun to follow me in
those days, the persistent, illogical belief that still, something
might have saved us.  If there were children, we had said, my husband
and I. The very child we had not managed to keep

alive.  I could not quiet the thud of this old longing not merely to
stop time and bring the dead back to life but to discover forever what
part of love remains.

As he was about to follow the real estate agent out to the yard, I
asked him, "Do you know why she moved away?"  There was a coy hint of
gossip in my voice that I hadn't intended, a caution, I suppose,
against seeming to remember her with too much seriousness.

"The owners?"  the real estate agent asked, but Rick turned to me, his
hands in his pockets.  I suppose I wanted to see him blush, to see
tears come into his eyes.  Or better yet I wanted him to ask, "No,
why?"  so I could step into their little drama for the first time,
finally deliver the note I'd planned to write.  I could imagine putting
my hand on the bare bit of wrist that showed above his pocket, under
his leather sleeve, behind the ugly, uneven scarf.  I could imagine
telling him, "There was a child," as if it would prove something.  A
child as marvelous as any one of us.  "Sheryl, I mean," I said.

His hands were in the tight, shallow pockets of his jacket.  He didn't
move them as he shrugged.  "Oh yeah," he said, and what sadness was in
his voice was not private, or even personal, but only an acknowledgment
of what he knew we all had once shared.  "I remember," he said, and
nothing more.

When they had made a quick circuit of our yard, the real estate woman
climbed the steps to tell me he was interested.  "But you'd have to
come way down in your price," she said.

I told her I would speak to my parents.  When they'd first put the
house on the market, my father had been shocked and amazed to discover
what it was now worth, and for days

\

and weeks after, he spoke only of what he had paid for the house and
what it had come to be valued at, as if they were two halves of an
equation that defined the extent of his success.  I suppose he was
prophetic in this: he died in his sleep, in the coral-colored bedroom I
had not yet seen, just two months after the transfer of ownership.

She shook her head.  She was an attractive woman with a small, hard
mouth, a housewife returned to the marketplace now that her children
were gone.  She had the impatient air of someone trying to make up for
lost time.  "Wait on that," she told me.  "The wife's not enthused and
I've got some people coming by tomorrow who might be better for you.
More cash on hand."  She checked her clipboard for their name and I
looked beyond her to the driveway, where Rick and his wife were leaning
against her car.  Their children had all gathered to the window at
their elbows, were putting their mouths and their noses and the tips of
their fingers to the narrow opening in the glass.  Through the
windshield's yellow reflection I could see someone else was sitting
with them, a small, slight old woman with short cropped hair.  She
seemed to absorb the blows of the children's elbows and feet as if she
were lifeless.

The real estate woman named the couple she would be bringing by
tomorrow--the couple who would, indeed, prove to be our buyers--and
then turned to see what was happening in the back of her car.  She
waved her hand in the air.  "Let's watch the upholstery, dears," she
called, and then, to me, "Let me get them out of here."

There was a general opening of the doors as she approached, and the
biggest child and her mother got into the front seat beside her.  Rick
slipped into the back, lifting a smaller one onto his lap.  As they
pulled out of the

drive, he glanced at her house once more.  Then his wife twisted in
her seat to say something and I saw him press the child's head against
his chest as he leaned forward to hear her.

When Billy Rossi died, the front doors all up and down our street
remained closed.  It was late winter, warm enough to go outside, but
the only person I saw on the sidewalk all that long weekend was a
reporter for the local paper, who climbed Mr.  Carpenter's steps, spoke
briefly to him through the door and then, like a contented
trick-or-treater, proceeded to Sheryl's old house, where the no longer
new owners added, "You couldn't have asked for a nicer kid," to the
short potpourri article that appeared the next morning.

We, the neighborhood people, the mothers and fathers and teenage
children (there were plenty of us by then), didn't speak together until
we met at the funeral parlor, where the carpet and the draperies, the
formality of the boy's full name--William Benedict Rossi--on the
directory at the entrance and our own Sunday clothes made us all
awkward at first, unable to think of anything to say.  The coffin was
closed, flag-draped.  The picture of Billy in his uniform had been
taken from the top of the Rossis' television set and propped against
the wall.

Mrs.  Rossi's black jersey dress would be costume in another year.  It
had padded shoulders and a wide cinch belt with a rhinestone buckle.
She'd had her hair done and wore too much perfume, almost as if she had
confused anniversary dinners with this other standard of our social
lives.  The thick lenses of her black harlequin glasses flashed under
the light, but she was not crying.  She seemed instead to be dried out,
scooped hollow by her grief.  I don't think any of

us spoke a full sentence to her, or even a complete phrase, but she
seemed to forgive us for it.  She seemed, in fact, not to expect very
much from any of us.

Diane stood beside her in a dark miniskirt and granny glasses, looking
sullen and politically well versed, keeping us all from saying whatever
inane expression came to mind.  Mr.  Rossi, as I remember, spent most
of the wake on the front porch of the funeral home, talking with his
own father, a sprightly old immigrant with dyed hair.

Later, we sat with our fathers in what had somehow been designated as
the neighborhood's two rows of folding chairs, while our mothers, who
were better at this sort of thing, made a tour of the floral
arrangements that lined the walls.  They proceeded singly, standing
before each arrangement as you might stand before a painting in a
gallery, and then, briefly, as if to confirm what they already knew,
checking the card.  I saw them pause especially before one arrangement,
even hesitate so that there was a snag in their progress, a chance for
one to motion toward the card and for another, frowning, to lean
forward and then whisper, her mouth and eyebrows showing surprise, What
do you know?

They returned to us quietly, demurely, although there was something
nearly breathless in their manner as they placed themselves in their
seats and, almost simultaneously, leaned together.  Apparently, they
said, Sheryl's mother still had friends or in-laws in town, someone who
must have told her about Billy, maybe sent her the article.

We all turned to look at the arrangement Sheryl's mother had sent and
then I saw the men cast down their eyes, as if anticipating some
compliment.

"Do you remember that night?"  my mother was the first one to ask it.
"Wasn't that some night?"

The men moved to the edge of their seats as they spoke, and the women
turned to one another to nod and shake their heads.  Georgie Evers sat
just in front of me, and I tapped him on the shoulder and whispered,
"Remember how you cried?"  I saw the overflow of fleshy neck that
capped his shirt collar turn bright red.  (Not long after this, and no
doubt because of it, he asked me to undress for him.  Life, he said,
was very short.) Mr.  Evers raised his arm to demonstrate a grip he'd
used that night.  My father lifted his leg and pointed to a spot on his
shin.  Wasn't that some night, we whispered.  Wasn't that some
excitement?

"You know, I've seen him around," Mr.  Evers said, and his wife added,
"Remember how he screamed?"

"Where?"  I asked, but she answered, "Out on the front lawn, that
night," placing herself, as she had begun to do, between her handsome
husband and whoever was young.  "I think he was on LSD or something."

"Not then," my father said.  "There wasn't LSD then."

"Then they just had beer," my mother said.  "And maybe pot."

Mrs.  Rossi joined us before I could ask Mr.  Evers again, and we fell
back into our embarrassed, inarticulate consolations.  Finally, my
mother mentioned the flowers.

Mrs.  Rossi looked toward them.  "Yeah, wasn't that nice?"  Her voice
was thin and careful.  "She called me up, too.  Last night."  She sat
down next to me and I had to lean back so the others could hear.  "You
know what she told me?"  she whispered.

The women bent forward, eagerly, I think.

"She told me to move out of my house.  That was her advice.  She said,
Believe me, I've been through it.  She said if we didn't, we'd always
expect to see Billy, in his bedroom or in the kitchen or something.
We'd always be hearing

NIGHT

him coming home at night or walking up the stairs."  She looked at us
through her small, thick lenses.  She shrugged and laughed a little. "I
don't know where she expects us to go."

"That's silly," Jake's mother said.

(But when we got home that evening, we would all close our front doors,
turn on the television before we'd even taken off our coats.  We would
speak to one another in loud, nearly gay voices, aware that we were
thus far free of the kind of longing that would forever haunt the
Rossis' house, that persistent, unshakable longing for an irretrievable
past.)

"Did she mention Sheryl?"  Mrs.  Carpenter asked.

Mrs.  Rossi touched her beads and held them.  We had already begun to
look at her differently.  That future our parents had set their lives
for had come to her as it had once come to Sheryl's mother and her
completeness set her apart.  "Yes," she said.  "She's married.  To
someone from out there.  She's got two kids and a house and all." There
was a pause during which the other women, still sitting forward in
their seats, seemed to be waiting to be told something more.  It was
clear that they had hoped or imagined something more for Sheryl: the
door flying open and rilling the dirty, bloody room with hot sunlight
was not miracle enough if it brought her only a life like theirs, two
kids and a house and all.  Not now, when the poor consequence of that
life was so much before them.  When the news of whatever she had gained
in the time between then and now made them think only of what might be
lost.

Mrs.  Rossi held out her hands, the large glassy diamond and silver
band, a huge blood-red ruby.  The gesture seemed to say, Make of it
what you will.  "I guess everything turned out fine for her after
all."

IPam wanted to fill her arms.  She thought of flowers and candy, a
huge stuffed animal--a giant panda, for instance--or even a potted
plant, but in the end merely bundled up her own three children and slid
them, protesting, into the cold back seat of the car.

At her parents' house, Sheryl's mother was already waiting by the front
door.  She frowned when she saw the three children and said, "One of us
will have to wait downstairs with them."  But Pam walked briskly past
her into the hallway and called to her own mother.  She bullied her
grandmother into shoes and a coat.  "We're all going," she announced as
she turned the old woman around and tied a muffler at her throat.  "I
think it's important to have a crowd."

As they'd been doing since Sheryl's return, the three women gave in,
believing that Pam, being younger or smarter or just more full of
energy than any of them would ever be again, knew best.  The
grandmother patted her hand and softly murmured something in Polish.
Pam shouted at her, "You'll be warm enough?"  The old woman nodded,
sighing

deeply.  Pam could smell her sharp breath and her aunt's sweet perfume
and another fragrance that told her they both had been crying.  "You'll
be all right?"  she asked the grandmother.  The woman continued to nod.
On the wall behind her was the photograph she'd had taken when she'd
first arrived in America.  When she'd arrived in Ohio six months ago,
she had seen it as soon as she'd entered the house and, ignoring all
the other portraits of her daughters and her grandchildren and her
great-grandchildren, burst into tears.  It took some time before the
others could discover that the word she was crying meant refugee.

"She'll be all right," Sheryl's mother said for her.

Out in the car, Pam told her, "This is the last of it, Ann."  (She had
dropped the "Aunt" some time this fall, recognizing her own new
authority.) "Tomorrow we can begin to believe it never happened."

Sheryl's mother nodded.  She had rented a house in a nearby suburb, and
Sheryl would begin school there after the winter break.  Her house back
east had been sold and the furniture was on its way.  She had found a
job in Columbus as a receptionist.  Six years from now she would tell
Mrs.  Rossi, Leave or you'll always hear him coming back, because in
her sister's house she no longer woke in the middle of the night
believing he was back and beside her.  In the basement family room
where she and her mother slept, she woke only to confirm that the
floodlight still shone brightly into the yard and that her ideas about
what to do with her life had not left her.  That she was getting
better, getting on.

At the hospital, Pam asked her mother and grandmother to stay in the
car with the children and then took Sheryl's mother's arm as they
crossed the parking lot.

"I'm all right," she said, but Pam held her arm anyway.  Tomorrow they
might no longer need her.

Sheryl was dressed and sitting in a chair in one corner of the room.
The other three beds were empty.  Her labor had been long and
difficult, but she had gotten through it quietly.  The doctor had
praised both her courage and her youth.  She was wearing one of the
plaid maternity blouses Pam had made for her but the change in her body
was clear, and although she still held her hands over her stomach, as
she had taken to doing during the past few months, her face, suddenly
thinner, suddenly seeming to fit properly under the heavy makeup, told
them that she was finished with the ordeal.

"I have to ride down in a wheelchair," she said as they entered, and
Pam answered--she had been in this hospital herself when her own
children were born--"That's standard procedure."

"They don't want you to fall," her mother added.

Sheryl held out her hands to show them she was not carrying anything.

She hadn't wanted to see the child.  She'd told them there was no point
in it.  But Pam was persistent, certain it was this, the children she
had held in her arms, that carried her into her own future when the
chasm at the heart of her daily life drained her of hope.  She asked a
nurse she remembered to give the girl another chance.

Sheryl had just finished her first breakfast when the nurse walked
halfway into the room.  "Just a peek?"  she asked.

Sheryl merely nodded.

The thing was incredibly small and ugly and would not open its eyes.
Sheryl unwrapped it and touched its elbows and knees, the waxy remnant
of its cord.  His skin was pale

and tinged with yellow and his fingers were tightly closed.  She
pressed her lips to the top of his head, brushed them against the fine
dark hair, touched the eyelids and lips in a kind of blessing.  Then
she closed up the blanket and handed the child back to the nurse.  The
first and last time she would see him.

They brought the wheelchair to the door of the room, and Sheryl stood
slowly, her cousin and her mother at her elbow.  "I'm all right," she
told them.

Out in the corridor, other women in nightgowns and slippers, blue or
pink ribbons in their hair, walked slowly up and down, touching the
walls.  They looked carefully at Sheryl, only a small suitcase in her
lap.  She was wheeled the long way around to the elevators, avoiding
the nursery.

Pam ran ahead to pull the car up to the hospital's entrance.  Sheryl
and her mother and the orderly who pushed her waited together in
silence. She was surprised to see her aunt and her grandmother and the
three children in the car.  She could tell already that her grandmother
had tears in her eyes.

There was a great fuss about who would sit where, and Pam swept all the
children out of the car as if she were rearranging the luggage in a
small trunk.  She sent two of them around to the other side as the
grandmother moved into the middle and then, as Sheryl got in, lifted
the youngest child into her lap.  "You don't mind," she said.  "Watch
your fingers," and shut the door.

Sheryl's mother and aunt rode in the front seat beside Pam.  Her
grandmother's fleshy elbow pushed into her side.  The child squirmed on
her lap.  Outside, the streets they passed were dull with winter, the
lawns gray, and the remaining Christmas decorations, strings of lights
and plastic

Santas and Nativity scenes littered with scraps of snow seemed, as
they always seemed in those days after Christmas, colorless and limp.
Next year they'd look new again.

Her little cousin felt the tag on her wrist and began to finger it.
Next year she'd be in her new house and her new school.  The
child--traveling now in another car, in the arms of a woman who, Pam
had told her, had nearly given up hope--would be nearing its first
birthday.

She bowed her head and put her lips to her cousin's fine hair.  The
woman who had nearly given up hope, Pam had told her, would be pushed
from the hospital in a wheelchair, the baby in her arms, just to make
the picture complete.

Sheryl brushed her lips against her cousin's hair, his determined
squirming like an echo of the child she had carried.  What she thought
of then was not the nights they had shared, or of all that had
insinuated itself between them since the door flew open and her life
began again.  What she thought of instead was summer.  Another summer
evening on our street.  The dinnertime stillness slowly giving way, the
sound of chairs scraping away from tables and, through window screens
and opened doors, of dishes tumbling in sinks full of water.  Children,
numbed briefly with food and already taller than they had been,
stepping out into the new light, walking carefully into the cooled air,
across the lengthening shadows.  Her father's death still new to her;
her throat still strained with the effort of not calling out his
name.

The three females linger at the table.  The plates before them are full
of food, only the crumpled paper napkins and the empty glasses and the
silverware crossed over each plate mark the time that has passed since
they sat down.  Her grandmother says, "Too hot to eat," although there
is only

cold meat and salad.  Her mother wipes her throat with a napkin.
"There was a breeze," looking toward the dining room ceiling, into the
still air, "but it's gone."  Her voice saying of course.  Of course
there is no relief.

Sheryl moves her bare thighs, pulling them from the sticky plastic
seat.  "Can I go?"  she asks, and her mother nods and tells her
somewhat indifferently to be home by nine.  Then something in her face
seems to relent.

"There's a movie on TV tonight," she offers in a way that implies she
is doing her best, but it's hard enough keeping herself alive.  "When
the ice-cream man comes, I'll pick up some ices."

Sheryl shrugs and pulls herself from the chair.  She climbs the stairs
slowly, her hand trailing along the banister.

The lights of her vanity mirror seem dim in the red evening sunshine
that fills her room.  She sits before it, carefully studies her face,
then reaches for the thick blue compact.  With one hand steadying the
wrist of the other, she draws a careful black line across each eyelid.
She lifts a hank of hair, rats it vigorously, wets it with hairspray.
Her lipstick tastes of peppermint although no one has yet to share the
flavor.  She slips a thick plastic bracelet over her wrist, and then
another.  The sound of them, she knows, will reach the boys, make them
turn away from their cars.  She practices a slow, wise smile.

She wants to love someone else.  This emptiness left like an impression
by the way she loved her father must be filled or else it will be as
though he never lived.

Downstairs, her mother and grandmother are watching an unfamiliar
program on TV, thrust a half an hour too early into their evening
because there were so few dishes to be done.  Her grandmother clucks
her tongue when she sees

her tight clothes.  Her mother says only, "Nine o'clock," no kindness
in her voice now, only the sense that she had once thought her children
would save her but there is no relief.

She leaves by the front door, going quickly down the three steps and
across the lawn.  Jake stops on his bicycle to watch her.  My parents
peer over the rhododendron.  Mrs.  Evers, eyeing her carefully, knowing
what she is dressed for, says "Hi" as she brings her garbage to the
curb.

The air is still hot and her shoes echo against the pavement.  There is
the pale swish of lawn sprinklers, children appearing here and there,
in trees, behind fences, across the grass, as numerous as fireflies.

Angie is waiting for her at the corner.  Sheryl greets her with a piece
of gum and the two girls turn, their hips bumping and their shoes
scraping over the sidewalk, and once more head for the schoolyard,
where they know the boys will be.

The miracle, then, was not the door banging open and filling the small
bloody room with hot sunlight, bringing her more life; the miracle was
that, despite all she had lost, despite all she knew was no longer
true--her love alone was not enough, it would always, eventually, come
to nothing-still, there was the blind, insistent longing, stirred now
by the child in her arms, that this emptiness be filled again.

In the front seat, Pam, her mother and her aunt were keeping up a
bright conversation to which the three children added their own bright
and nonsensical things.  Sheryl pulled her small cousin closer to her,
held him more tightly in her arms.  She tossed her hair back over her
shoulder as Pam drove out onto the highway and the car picked up
speed.