“Christine . . .” began Helen.

  “Why can’t I just be like Aunt Susanna?” Christine wailed. “I have a perfectly good job, I can find another apartment easily enough! It would be so wonderful to be alone! I feel like everything I do is hemmed in by Todd’s desires or his disapproval or his expectations. I realized a few months ago that I was getting nervous and even wringing my hands as evening approached, and it was because I was about to see him, and I was afraid something would be wrong and he would be in a bad mood again. The things that go wrong for him at work just flood our lives every evening. I can’t describe it!”

  “He’s not violent—” Helen hesitated.

  “No, he’s not a bad person, but he’s always there.”

  “Being alone isn’t—” began Claire.

  “But it could be fine. You could make it fine. You wouldn’t even have to eat dinner if you didn’t want to, or you could have pizza right before bed. You wouldn’t believe this routine we’ve got. He has to have eight-and-a-quarter hours of sleep between eleven and eight, otherwise he thinks his sleep cycle will get off and he’ll go back to being insomniac! Then there’s breakfast, not after eight-thirty, even on weekends, and then lunch not more than four-and-a-half or less than four hours later, then dinner six to six-and-a-half hours after that. He lives in terror of something happening too soon or too late and ruining everything. And he’s right. If the routine goes off, everything is ruined because he can’t stop talking about it. If we get up at eight-fifteen, he talks about it all day, and plans how he’s going to avoid the same mistake the next day and tells me all about the importance of routine until I could die from listening to it. All day!”

  “Darling, men all have these petrified idiosyncrasies when they first get married,” replied Helen. “They wear off.”

  “And then we discuss his lunch, every morning. Maybe I should fix him a sandwich and put in a pear, or maybe he should go out for cottage cheese and he could pick up a pear there, or would an apple be better. He loves the taste of beer, but beer for lunch makes him sleepy all afternoon, so perhaps a coke. I don’t care! Do I have to care?”

  Anna said, “How did he get like this? Was he like this before you were married?”

  “A little, but it just made him seem unusually solid, you know. I mean, everybody else was sleeping till noon and cutting weeks of classes, and Todd, who was just as much fun and wore the same kind of clothes, was getting As. He seemed sort of brilliant. Anyway, marriage changed him. Now he loves suits and comparison shopping, blah blah blah!”

  “Chrissy, when I first married your father, he had fourteen white shirts. Every two weeks, on Sunday night, I set up the ironing board and pressed those fourteen white shirts. Along about number ten, he would go to bed, and then, every ten minutes or so, he would call from the bedroom, ‘Done yet, Elly? How much longer?’ ”

  “What did you do?”

  “I found a laundry that did hand pressing with light starch, and I paid seven dollars a month to have them done. That was the year we couldn’t even afford to put a license on the car and always had to drive on the back streets, but it was worth every penny. I’ll never forget, ‘Are you coming to bed? I can hardly stay awake!’ and me pressing and pressing—tabs, collars, cuffs. Ugh.”

  “Your mother’s right,” said Anna. “He’ll come around eventually.”

  “Any man,” said Helen, “is better than none.”

  “And you like his family,” put in Susanna. “And they always get to be more and more like their families.”

  “I do like his family.”

  Anna shifted in her chair, waiting for the qualifications.

  “I do like his family.” Christine looked around at each of her relatives. “But they aren’t like us.”

  “Who is?” said Claire.

  “Thank God,” added Susanna.

  “No, really!” exclaimed Christine. “Nothing ever seems to have happened to them. They’ve always lived in Aurora; Mr. Walker’s always grown steadily more prosperous; the cupboards are stocked with years of food; and when you walk in the door, you feel like the world could end but the Walkers would go on, concerned but not affected. They don’t talk about anything. They don’t seem to have any history. At family reunions they get out the old games and play them around the dining room table.”

  “It sounds very wholesome to me,” said Claire.

  “I wish I were back in college,” continued Christine. “I wish I could be a sophomore for the rest of my life. I think so much about the single room I had that year that I can almost smell it. I had these awful red-and-black curtains that someone gave me, and there wasn’t a bedspread, and I only had an overhead light, but I loved it. I sat up and I went to bed and I listened to music and read and took baths in the middle of the night. Some days there was such a mess you couldn’t even see the floor.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Helen.

  “And others I would scrub and wash and have this incredible sense of imminent perfection. There were a lot of other things about college that were exciting and even inspiring, and the campus was very pretty, but lately I just think about that room. The walnut furniture we’ve collected and the Dansk pots we got for our wedding seem sordid in comparison.”

  Helen said, “You’ll be glad to have nice things. I think it’s awful to look around and not see anything beautiful that you own yourself.”

  “I had beautiful thoughts.”

  “Oh, come on!” Helen’s contempt sang.

  “Possessions are sordid! I can’t stand listening to Todd talking about the things he wants to buy. He thinks he deserves only the best.”

  “What’s wrong with that? He has an eye for quality.”

  “Maybe, but what has he ever done to deserve it? I mean, deserve it! My God!” Nelson began to whine. She stroked his nose and scratched in his curls. “Nelson knows I’m talking about Todd.”

  In the silence that followed, Anna’s peripheral vision glittered and the room floated away from her, bright and hot. She closed her eyes and was terribly tired. They, whoever they were and in whatever gathering, seemed to have been wrangling all day. She touched her fingertips to her temples, and her body unfurled beneath her, a banner of aches: insteps, heels, calves, one wrist, lower back, shoulder, neck, even the muscles of her jaw where she’d been clenching them for the last few minutes.

  “Oh, God!” said Christine, and her tone was such a mixture of anger, disgust, laughter, and hopelessness that Anna kept her eyes closed until the tears, tears of fatigue more than anything else she was sure, dissipated. All her life Christine’s voice had carried this odd note of merriment, so that even now, knowing her as well as she did, Anna couldn’t be sure of the girl’s real mood. It was disconcerting.

  Susanna settled into the couch. With a large sigh and a great creaking of couch springs, she shifted position and uncrossed her legs. Anna opened her eyes, and in the coruscating heat of the room, she realized that Susanna was fat. Her cheeks were red, her breasts were full and heavy, and her blouse had caught in a fold of flesh at her waist. As she shifted position, she automatically pulled it out and smoothed it down. For years Susanna had been talking about food, for years she had declared that she simply had to lose some number of pounds. She was fat. Yes, she was fat. Anna wondered why she felt so surprised. At twelve, coming in for lunch after three sets of tennis, before running off to find a softball game or go swimming, Susanna had solemnly sworn off desserts, bread, mayonnaise, Coca-Cola. “You’re just getting your figure,” Anna had said. “Don’t be ridiculous.” And she’d repeated something similar all these years: “You’re filling out”; “you’re big-boned”; “muscle weighs more than fat.” And now Susanna, who once pedaled her bicycle twelve times around the neighborhood park, no hands, was fat. She began, “If you ask me—”

  “A basic desire to provide well for his family is nothing to sneer at, Christine,” said Helen. “If you buy something good the first time, then you don’t have to buy it again.”

  Susanna sat forward and looked idly into a coffee cup left on the end table. “I think—”

  “Furthermore, it’s more economical to establish some sort of taste at the beginning, so that things go together as you acquire them. I—”

  Susanna raised her voice. “Helen!” Helen glanced at her. “May I say—”

  “Christine,” said Claire, “it seems to me that you’ve made your choice. It was your idea to get married, and you were full of arguments when your mother showed a little opposition. And it’s not as if any other man is going to suit you better than Todd does. I frankly don’t think there is better or worse, only different. If you make up your mind to the idea that this is what you’ve got, then you can make the best of it.”

  “I didn’t know!”

  “Who does? If anybody did, do you think they’d choose anything?”

  “May I say something?” Surprised at the loudness of her own voice and the silence it produced, Susanna flushed and then giggled. “I’d like to get a word in. Okay, Helen? Okay, Claire?” She cleared her throat.

  “Aunt Susanna, I think you live the most perfect life. You love your job, and you’re the best salesman in the office. You know all the houses around, and you’re terrific with ideas about fixing them up. The men in your office give you lots of respect, and you’ve gotten to develop lots of different kinds of talents. Your free time is your own, you have your own house and car, you travel. You know, I hate traveling with Todd. He wants to stop and check the map at every corner, and I can’t wait to get lost and find something unexpected.”

  “Shut up!” exclaimed Susanna.

  “I’m sorry! Really, I—”

  “Why do you consider me the great example of single success? I mean, yes, my job is fine, houses are fine. Money is fine! If I were married to Gilbert Hanson, we’d have four kids, constant fights, and utter chaos. He’d be some high-powered, silver-haired staff physician, and I’d be an alcoholic with a Mercedes for going to the grocery store. Looking back, it seems like my choices were that and this. This is better than that.”

  “But it’s not just the money and the house!” cried Christine. “Don’t you all see? When I’m alone I feel like anything can happen! No, hush Nelson. Go lie down.” Nelson lay down, flopping over onto his side with a thud that made Anna wince.

  Susanna ignored Christine’s enthusiasm. “I always think that maybe there could have been something else to choose, like another man.”

  Helen rolled her eyes.

  “Just one.”

  Helen waved her hand. “Don’t be melodramatic.”

  “Helen, men were never a problem for you.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “You know what I think?” Claire uncrossed her legs and spoke imperiously. “I’ll tell you.” She looked around. “I think you can only really choose what presents itself to you at the moment. You can’t say you’re going to divorce one man and find someone better. You can only say that you can have the man you’ve got now, or no man at all. If you’re willing to have no man at all, then maybe that’s the right choice for you, but the real question is married or not married. Maybe someone will come along and then you can say again, married or not married, but you can’t say, this one or that one.”

  “Claire, some people make sure they’ve got the next one on the line before they let the first one off the hook, you know.”

  “There’s many a slip twixt the line and the lip, Helen.”

  Helen had been married twice. Anna had found the men, both of whom drank with the casual abandon that seemed characteristic of Helen’s generation, remarkably charming. Both were now dead. This year Helen would turn fifty-two.

  “I didn’t divorce Hanson Gilbert because I had another man on the line, Claire, but because he had another woman on the line. So there. I made just the choice you say we have to make.”

  “You couldn’t—”

  “Besides, you’re always setting up these rules to live by. You never actually look at a situation, you know. Helen’s right. Everything is simple to you.”

  “I was going to say that you couldn’t make any other decision at the time because at the time, you had some self-respect.”

  “A half an hour ago, you said something about, ‘He’s her husband, it’s that simple.’”

  Claire’s face was red and her toe tapped with measured severity against the leg of the coffee table. “A dalliance is one thing. A loveless marriage is another.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Hanson didn’t love you.”

  Susanna coughed. In a moment she said, “I know that.” Anna was surprised by the ensuing silence. It had an air of shock about it, as if the events, and the knowledge they forced upon everyone of betrayal and jealousy and sadness, were not nineteen years in the past. Susanna coughed again, then she said in a trembly voice, “No one ever did.”

  Claire said, “Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself,” but Anna thought, Why should she stop? Why? Why? Susanna spoke again, her voice even more teary, “I wanted a baby.” Helen got up and went into the kitchen. In a moment Claire followed. Fifty years of prickly rivalry had never prevented them from despising Susanna’s difficulties and using her admittedly frequent self-pity as an excuse not to sympathize.

  Anna could say that she herself had sympathized continually, and say so with honesty, but looking back it seemed that the words had been routine, the willing ear only half-attentive, the embraces, when Susanna was young enough to welcome embraces, perfunctory. Hanson’s departure had been so perfect in its way. Even Susanna had recognized it at the time as a development uniquely to be expected, its timing a relief, as there was little property to be divided and no child to worry about.

  Susanna delivered herself of two or three shuddering sobs, Christine looked on sympathetically, and Anna sighed. How could she say, after all these years of reassurance, that yes, all those things Susanna had feared at fourteen, twelve, even as young as six, when she worried that the other first-graders did not like her, had come to pass? How could she admit now that the pain was real and that nothing had, or would, compensate her for it? Her daughters were so unhappy! Was it her fault, after all?

  “You know what?” remarked Christine in her half-humorous way. “I was just thinking about the best time Todd and I ever had together. It was about a month before we got married. We’d gone out for dinner and shared this big shrimp salad, then walked back to Todd’s apartment. Well, I have never had such a stomach ache as I had by the time we got there. I could hardly stand up straight. Todd, too. We turned out the lights and lay down on the couch, and then Todd began to do impressions. He sniffed my ear and mouth like a dog, he pretended to be a hard-of-hearing old man, he imitated a whole group of foreigners from different countries meeting at Disneyland and trying to have a conversation, he even pretended he was the chef who made our salad. I laughed and laughed. God! It hurt so much and I laughed so much! I didn’t know it was going to be the best time we would ever have until the next morning, when he told me that the whole night he thought we had dangerous fish poisoning from the shrimp. He seemed so funny and heroic to me. I never thought I’d mind about the pear and the beer and the sandwich ever again.”

  Anna looked toward the clock on the mantelpiece; the delicate miniature of the room reflected in its bright glass dome triggered the old hot glitter in her vision. It was nine-thirty, time for everyone to go home, time for relief from the cacophony of her daughters’ superabundant opinions. “Oh, me!” she said, elaborating her sigh. At last the headache came on. Anna inhaled sharply, but the air in the room was tepid, unrefreshing. These headaches made her forehead seem like a bank of bony knobs played on by the pain like organ stops. Her hearing sharpened. In the kitchen Claire and Helen were opening and closing the refrigerator. Every one of them approached her refrigerator with a ten-year-old’s belief in treasure boxes; none of theirs gleamed and flashed with ice cream, Cokes, caramel upside-down rolls, brandied fruits, butterscotch sauce, and stored icebox cookie dough the way hers did. The sucking creak of the heavy door sounded again, followed presently by its muffled slap. Anna bit her lip. She had not stopped feeding these women for half a century. She was furious. She had to go to bed. Why did they treat her house, her larder, her furniture, her effects as if they owned them? And her life, too! A nurse! Contemptible! The pain narrowed to two awl points above her nose.

  Christine picked up the magazine Helen had put down. Susanna said, “I remember the best time I ever had. I was nine, and we were down at the playground, swinging.” As she spoke, Anna’s headache seemed to open into a memory: the elm-ringed pavement with its rooted jungle gym and chinning bars and swings. The brown painted benches in the horseshoe about the sandbox. “Jeffrey Neal and I used to meet there every afternoon, and the other kids would come from school to watch us. We’d draw straws for the best swing, because one was about an inch and a half lower than the others; then we’d get on and start pumping. We were the best pumpers in the grade school. I was better than Jeffrey, for that matter. I always pumped so hard I lost my shoes. You’d go back and forth and back again, and after a while, on the back swing, you’d be looking at your hands, and it would seem like the crossbar was below you, and you’d know that if you made a certain kind of kick at just the right time you’d be up and over on the front swing.” Christine’s mouth had dropped open, and Susanna, smiling, was gazing at her knees. “Sometimes I dared myself not to kick at the right time, or I made myself think about what we were going to have for dinner, but it was like my body couldn’t be distracted. My legs would kick, and the swing would seem to shoot straight up, and then the board seat would sort of smack against my behind, and just when everything was upside-down, I’d sort of settle into it, and it would carry me down and around. Hmm!” She paused. “I remember the way that pavement looked to this very day. It looked like a target. Anyway, then the chains would be wrapped around the crossbar, so the cat would die, and we’d get off. All the other kids would take turns throwing the swings back to starting position. I remember we always wanted to go over right together, but I don’t think we ever did.”