Anna offered them some coffee. “Oh, I’d love some, Mother! Shall I make it? Let me make it!” Susanna fled into the kitchen.

  There was absolutely nothing to say. Anna was certainly not going to accuse her of being a nurse, or enlighten her about the situation. Mrs. Cox said, “Incredibly heavy fog last night. I never expect it in Des Moines, for some reason.”

  “Are you from around here?”

  “Not originally. I was raised in southern Ohio, near the West Virginia border.”

  Anna had never been there, or known anyone who had.

  “My little boy was born here, though. I suppose this is our home, now.”

  “You have a little boy?”

  “A girl, too. She’s twelve, not so little anymore. He’s nearly six.”

  For some reason, this information lowered Anna even deeper into her fatigue, and yes, depression. What kind of life could it be, going out to take care of sick people in strange homes, leaving the six-year-old in the care of the twelve-year-old all night, night after night? She wished she could ask without mentioning nursing, without risking a discussion of why Mrs. Cox was here after all. She lifted her gaze from Mrs. Cox’s shoes to her face. She was smiling sympathetically. It was an enormous shock.

  “I like Des Moines, though. It’s terribly bland compared to southern Ohio, but quite prosperous. In a strange way, that’s rather a daily relief. When I worked at the hospital, there were magazines in the waiting rooms, good, bright paint on the walls. It’s funny what a difference that makes, especially to the nurses. When I was in West Virginia, it got so that every patient looked like he was going to die, even if he was just in for a checkup.”

  So she had broached the topic. Anna clamped her lips shut. Mrs. Cox extricated her arms from the sleeves of her coat, which fell over the back of her chair. She seemed to be taking root. Susanna would have made real coffee, not instant, just to allow herself more time. For the first time since the nurse’s arrival, Anna began to get angry. She said, “It must be extremely difficult to work and have children.”

  “Oh, they’re used to it. I worked even while I was married. They respect what I do. I think it’s good for children to know that you exist in order to do something, not in order to serve them.”

  “Aren’t you horribly busy, though?”

  “Less so now that Janet is old enough to help. And anyway, I guess I’ve just learned to be efficient. I don’t often feel pressured like I used to.”

  No, you could tell that. The forthright smile, the firm handshake, the self-imposed—yes, she could see that now—the self-imposed neutrality. Susanna came in at last with coffee and slices of coffee cake, pats of butter, the jam jar, knives, and napkins. She always thought good food nicely arranged ensured peaceful negotiations. But Anna wasn’t going to negotiate. She was, however, going to elicit more from Mrs. Cox, who looked pleasingly like she would feel as cool as a bar of metal if you put your hand on her. Susanna’s worried expression eased when she saw that they were speaking, and with apparent civility.

  “Do they miss their father?”

  “I don’t think so. They see him every weekend. He’s a physician, you see. That’s about as often as they saw him when we were all living together. I think the custody hearing was what finally convinced him not to work so hard.” She continued to smile.

  “I don’t mean to pry.”

  “Please don’t apologize. I don’t consider my situation a family secret.”

  “Mother, Mrs. Cox worked for Bill Thirtyacres’ sister when her mother-in-law had that stroke.”

  Anna didn’t remember. She poured out the coffee and offered the woman a piece of cake. When she was safely eating and sipping, Anna smiled at Susanna, and said, “What did she do for Bill Thirtyacres’ sister?”

  Susanna smiled back at her. “The usual things, I suppose. Mrs. Cox can tell you her usual way of working.”

  Anna continued to smile. “Working at what?”

  Susanna said, “Oh,” and looked inquiringly at Mrs. Cox, who declined to be drawn into the discussion. Susanna arranged herself once again on the couch and took a bite of coffee cake. Finally, she cleared her throat and said, “Mrs. Cox is a nurse, Mother. She stays nights or days, whatever you would prefer.”

  “I don’t have any preference.”

  Susanna’s mouth curled fleetingly upward, but she did not look at Anna. “I’m sure you’ll find Mrs. Cox just perfect, Mother.”

  “Maybe.”

  Susanna was visibly relaxing into victory, but Mrs. Cox, Anna could see, knew that the job was not yet hers. Anna wanted to say that if there had been a job, she really would have been perfect. She smiled warmly at Mrs. Cox, but shook her head, just a millimeter to the right, just a millimeter to the left. Mrs. Cox paid attention, as Susanna did not, then folded her napkin into a little square and placed it on her saucer.

  “Maybe it’s a good time for Mrs. Cox to meet Daddy, mother. Is he awake?”

  “No.”

  “Do you mind waiting? Would you like more coffee?”

  “I don’t think you should waste the woman’s time, Susanna. We aren’t in the market for a nurse.” Anna stood up. “It’s been very nice meeting you, Mrs. Cox.”

  The others stood up. Crumbs fell off Susanna’s skirt, and they seemed to Anna to land in the rug like sparks. It was then that she realized how angry she was. She wanted to shoo these women out of her house like little girls, or chickens, or flies. If they put their coats on as a ruse, and then ran toward the staircase, got out of her range and up the steps to Ike, she would stop them, yes sir! They were very slow, especially Susanna, who had to smooth her blouse, and then her sweater, and then straighten her skirt, front and back. Anna wanted to snap, “Clothes never fit fat people!” but ultimately she dared not. Susanna held the sleeves of her sweater and eased her arms into her coatsleeves one by one, until finally Anna went up to her and jerked her collar up over her shoulders. Susanna staggered. Mrs. Cox continued to smile, though tentatively. Anna wanted to scream at her how cool and refreshing she had been, and how certainly competent Mrs. Cox seemed in every way. Her children were to be envied, perhaps. Susanna stepped carefully toward the door at last, and Anna scuttled to the bottom of the staircase, where she held onto the newel post and guarded the upper floor. Christine came to the landing, looked down, disappeared again. When the women were safely on the porch with the door closed after them, Anna locked it with what she hoped was an audible click and went to the front window. Susanna looked up at her, but Anna did not smile or wave. She got into her car rather sheepishly, and Anna’s last view of them was of Mrs. Cox, perfectly upright, gliding away.

  The fog had lifted into featureless, bleached overcast. Anna continued to stand by the window, but amazingly she was no longer thinking of Mrs. Cox or Susanna. With their departure they had ceased to annoy her, and she had therefore ceased to be angry at them, almost as if by magic. She was instead listening to the faint click of Nelson’s toenails on the upstairs hall linoleum and imagining Christine’s mind working, not whirs and taps, light bulbs and gleaming pincers, but a vine. In her exhaustion she thought of a miniature and perfect grapevine exfoliating and curling inside a skull as inside a terrarium, impossibly green and moist, thickening daily. It was almost disgusting, and yet she was attracted to what Christine had said, knew instantly, perhaps by experience, perhaps by intuition, that pleasure of the mind working.

  Margaret Lacina came out of her house, gloved, turned to check her door, dropped her keys into her purse. Anna could practically hear the bite of its old-fashioned jaws. She waved to Anna, and Anna lifted her hand. Margaret eased into her twenty-year-old Pontiac, rear end first, knees together, toes pointed as she drew her feet into the car. She had, of course, taken lessons in the ladylike entry of an automobile. Mama would have liked that. In a moment, Margaret pulled out and drove away, a widow for fourteen years, who had sold her house and left her friends and family to come north, no one knew what for, since her new life was mostly an energetic reproduction of the old. With her cakes that Frank would have liked and her minute care of Frank’s last car, Margaret often seemed extremely happy. Happier, Anna sometimes thought, with the artifice of this preservation in an alien place than she would have been with remnants at home. What would she do herself when Ike died, when she was no longer in the midst of their lifelong debate? She was too tired to push the notion out of her mind. Susanna and Mrs. Cox seemed somehow to have done her in. She was even too tired to be afraid. She would, of course, die herself. Between now and then, the few years of her widowhood would cuddle against the huge bulk of her marriage like a puppy against its mother. But that was not so, either. Every moment of her widowhood would be as huge, as much everything, as each moment of her marriage was. Life with Ike would come to seem like a long rat’s tail leading to the giant present, whatever that might be. The images made her dizzy. She closed her eyes, then opened them on the Paullys’ house, across the street. The shrubs needed a terrible pruning. Brutal pruning. Devastating pruning. Their grass was turning green already. Each spring it took about two minutes for grass to turn green. Had she ever loved the workings of her own mind as Christine did? Was Christine a genius? Did her mind deserve to work, deserve to escape the distractions of marriage and children because she was a genius, or simply because Christine took pleasure in it, perhaps only the amateur pleasure of a neighborhood baseball player?

  A year after Susanna’s birth, Anna had gotten pregnant again. In the midst of their move from the ranch, in the midst of Ike’s rooting after some career, some job, in the midst of rice and beans for dinner every night and bare cold floors, and nothing to sit on except kitchen chairs, she had cried and cried, not only because they couldn’t support another child but also because she simply didn’t want a fourth baby appropriating her womb, then her breasts and her time and the bits of freedom she would soon have now that Helen and Claire were old enough to watch Susanna a little. She had cried her way into a miscarriage, she sometimes thought. If not, then at least she had been sinfully glad at the cramps and the nausea and the bloody tissue. It seemed like nothing; certainly it was not like a baby, whose confused and disgruntled stranger’s face was already endearing before you recognized it. She had stood the children in a line against the kitchen wall, then, on the pretext of measuring their height, Susanna in the middle, standing proudly, with her sisters at each hand, and she pondered their faces, looking perhaps for another face, as different from these as they were from each other. A boy’s face? She tried to summon up regret for the fourth child, the missing child, but there was no child missing, and she had hardly ever thought of it again. It seemed like her generation had had no choices, only luck, which absolved you from guilt, but Christine could make any choice she wanted, any time. It was never too late to start over, never too early to worry about the choices she had already made. Every plan, every purchase, every lifting of the fork involved a moral decision.

  “Did you reach the doctor?” Christine at the top of the stairs again looked carelessly girlish. Without curls, without makeup, without a brassiere, without a girdle, she looked less mature at twenty-three than Helen had at fifteen. “Who was that with Aunt Susanna?”

  “Some nurse. The doctor’s calling me back.”

  “Oh, Grandmother!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you think maybe she should have looked at Grandfather or something?”

  “What?”

  “Well, did you notice that his hands seem a little swollen? Here’s his cup. She could have at least, you know, set our minds at rest, or something.”

  “My mind is at rest!” After another moment she said, “That hand thing, it’s nothing to worry about. He has medicine for that. You don’t have to worry.” But she imagined Mrs. Cox regally climbing the stairs, placing her cool square hand on Ike’s chest, on his forehead, on his wrist. “None of you understands about this nurse thing, none of you!” But she could not help imagining further, imagining Mrs. Cox settled in Ike’s bedside chair, knowing what to watch for, exactly when to be concerned.

  It was automatic for Christine, although obviously in low spirits, to skip down the staircase, Nelson clattering at her heels. Anna sighed herself into her rocking chair, oddly conscious of the dank street now at her back, the damp houses, the buckling sidewalk, the sodden grass verge, and the great sycamores whose branches tangled into a net at second-story height, and also of her granddaughter, whose arms and legs and back could not help but express elastic youth, who settled unselfconsciously into her grandmother’s gaze, used to the many eyes of adult love. Perhaps a lifetime of adoring grownups had produced this refusal to seem suffering, which sometimes appeared as vitality and sometimes as shallowness? Anna closed her eyes, but both Christine in the living room and the street at her back stayed with her, holding her like a huge mixing bowl. She shook her head. Christine would be flipping through magazines. Sure enough, when Anna opened her eyes and picked up her knitting, Christine was glancing at a Woman’s Day. “You know, Grandmother, Todd is like an open book to me, but he’s not a novel or a volume of philosophy, he’s more like an auto repair manual or something. Detailed but without a lot of levels. Do you know what I mean?”

  Anna could imagine it, although not imagine thinking such a thing, so she nodded.

  “When he talks, my mind wanders, but I can’t ever think my own thoughts, because he’s always wanting my attention. If I settle down to read, he just can’t stand it and talks to me the whole time.”

  “Honey, your grandfather’s the same way.”

  “Doesn’t it drive you crazy?”

  “I don’t remember. Maybe it did once, but after you’ve been married fifty-two years, it’s all a part of you.”

  “But don’t you want to maintain something of yourself? Some pure, independent sort of core, or kernel?”

  “You do that anyway. Every time I look at your grandfather, I know he isn’t me.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I can’t explain.” She could not help cutting Christine off, and her tone was annoyed. She knitted a row with quick, jerky strokes, unable to lose the sense that she was exactly the focus of a dome of surroundings, and she felt anxious again. She wanted to speak calmly, without panting. What did Christine think a marriage should be? Perhaps the outside of her own had formed a lot of the girl’s early notions, and Anna could not know what that outside was like. She said, “Your aunts and your mother talk about your grandfather and me sometimes, and they always sound like children in an enchanted forest. Every habit of ours that they suddenly discover, and even most of the ones they remember, seem either magically bad or magically good to them, and every little fact or circumstance has enormous meaning. Sometimes they tiptoe through the forest and sometimes they try to tear it down, but it’s always the same huge, dark, important forest, and even when they seem to grasp the fact that your grandfather and I are just two people who have come together and learned to take one day and one argument at a time, they always lose the fact, and go back into the forest, looking for the one mystical stone or leaf, that when they turn it over or pick it up will show them how they came to be them, or even, maybe, what they came to be.” What was she talking about? Her marriage? Some definition of marriage? She could only think of Ike, all the years of their married life, telling children and teenagers, and more children who then became teenagers, stories about his boyhood, about his brothers and sisters, about her, and even about themselves—these very children who were listening so raptly—about things they had done and could remember perfectly. He chuckled and rubbed his hands and it all became very interesting in the retelling, things that bored or angered him at the time—fights with Abel, life on the ranch, her idiosyncrasies—got funnier or bigger than they had been. She saw Ike, a well-intentioned man, promoting himself a little bit, but what did the children and grandchildren see? “Honey, anything I tell you about marriage, and about my own marriage—”

  She tried again. “It’s sort of a matter of smell, you know. And sight, too, and hearing. You look at each other for years, and what you expect of each other, and your life together becomes pretty habitual. The ingredients are indistinguishable. The looking and hearing and whatever, though, reminds you constantly that he is he and you are you, and never the twain shall meet.” She thought of the countless times she had caught Ike’s gaze, or not caught it. She would have been more like him if they had never met.

  “Even though I can predict what your grandfather might do in a given situation, he seems more mysterious to me now than ever, but maybe not importantly mysterious. I mean, he’s my husband and your grandfather, and we love him, but he’s also just another person who did a few things and didn’t do a few others. Do you see what I mean?” Did all of this have any practical use for this granddaughter? This lithe, sad, sulky person who hadn’t changed a bit in twenty-three years?

  “When your mother and aunts are tramping around in that enchanted forest, what they don’t realize is that even though I have seen them every day, just about, since day one, and I saw them born, they are as mysterious to me as your grandfather is.” What was she saying? Stay with him? Have the baby? They’re all the same? She didn’t seem to be. Was she urging any course of action at all, or simply crying out for sleep? She said, “Do you understand?” slightly emphasizing the you.

  It was not apparent whether Christine, her head on the back of the couch and her eyes on the ceiling, was still listening, and she did not reply to Anna’s query, so Anna resumed her knitting, too overcome by fatigue to care whether she had been attended to. The morning was well advanced by now, but without the feeling of morning, or of any time of day. The light in the room was still yellow and diffused. The sun, whose wheel of brightness ordinarily created time and gave Anna a sense of purpose, had not broken through the overcast. Her eyes began to sting and water, and so she closed them, but kept knitting stockinette stitch. Her fingers did it of themselves, as Mama’s had, as had the fingers of every self-respecting woman of her mother’s generation. Nothing, mere practice. Surely the doctor should have called by now?