Anna thought she might throw up. She had never heard of this before. Christine exclaimed, “Aunt Susanna, did you really go over the top of the swing set?”

  “Like a bucket on a rope.”

  “How often did you do it?”

  “At least once every school day that fall, until Jeffrey ran into the bathroom door in the dark and knocked out one of his front teeth. He didn’t want to do it after that, and it wasn’t as much fun alone. I bet I did it fifty times.”

  “My God! I can’t believe it!”

  Anna could, though. She could imagine it so vividly that she knew it had happened, precisely as Susanna related it, once or twice between three and five in the afternoons, while she, three blocks away, housed, preserved from knowledge, baked a pie for dinner, nagged Claire to set the table, thought continually of money, worried about Ike driving home from work and stopping at a bar. She wanted to jump up now and slap Susanna senseless, but also to crush her in an embrace. It was impossible that she was still here, still safe and intact. She shuddered and said, “Susanna, you must be immortal.”

  “It wasn’t hard if your timing was right.”

  “What wasn’t?” Helen stood in the doorway, sensing she had missed something.

  “Aunt Susanna used to swing over the top bar of the swing set.”

  “Really?” But Helen had already lost interest. “That’s a pretty quilt, I think.” She pointed to a page in Christine’s magazine. “Not so old-fashioned as most. I think this kind of fabric sculpture is rather interesting, actually.”

  “Mother! Aunt Susanna went all the way around, over the top! Don’t you think that’s amazing?”

  “Oh, she did that kind of thing all the time, didn’t you, Susanna?”

  Susanna shrugged. Still caught up in the pleasure of the memory, she did not care, for once, whether Helen was impressed or not.

  Claire pushed past Helen, saying, “Mother, I’m just bushed! Is there anything I can do for you before we go? Do you think Daddy’s all right? I cannot sleep past five-thirty these days. No matter what time I go to bed, bingo, five-thirty rolls around and my eyes pop right open.”

  “That’s secondary insomnia.”

  “Thank you, Helen. Insomnia, huh?”

  “No, really, it’s called that. I read it in the Sunday paper. Primary insomnia is not being able to get to sleep in the first place.”

  “I swear, Helen, you’re such a patsy for any pseudo-scientific jargon.”

  “That’s better than not taking any interest at all, I should think.”

  “Mom,” said Christine, “was there ever a time when you and Aunt Claire didn’t argue?”

  Claire jammed her arms energetically into the sleeves of her coat. “Sure! When we were in high school. We always had to do the dishes together, and that’s when we practiced our tap routines. By the sink. We figured if we got up a good team act, someone would discover us and take us away from all that. Your mother wasn’t half bad, actually.”

  Christine snapped the leash onto Nelson’s collar and he stood up. Helen said, “I don’t think we argued much after we were married.”

  “Now I’ll go lock the back door for you, Mother. Claire can give me a ride home, and Helen can go with Christine.”

  “Maybe our arguments are just another sign of our eternal youth,” laughed Claire.

  As if on cue, Helen said, “Now drive carefully, Claire.”

  “Yes, Daddy!”

  “Well, it’s foggy!”

  “I’ve got perfectly good eyes in my head.”

  “People who don’t care don’t worry. Good night, Mother. Call me if, you know.”

  Anna nodded. Claire kissed her on the cheek, smiling and rolling her eyes at Helen. Soon their argument had floated away into the fog.

  “Goodnight, Grandma. I’m glad to be home. Come on, Nelson.”

  “Now Mother, the back window was unlocked, and I almost didn’t notice it. It’s not that safe around here anymore. I locked the door and latched the storm door. I’ve got to be at the office early tomorrow, but I can come by before lunch if you need anything. Thank you for dinner. Please don’t forget to think about the nurse. I hate to think of you and Daddy alone here, I really do. Goodnight, Mother.” Susanna paused to reach for pins in her hairdo.

  “Susanna?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Would you rather have been pretty and popular like Helen and Claire?”

  “I don’t know, Mother.” She shrugged, unwilling to think of the question.

  “Would you?” Anna thought of the pavement flying up, a target to be averted; of the earth like a laden table and the horizon all around.

  “Mom, I really don’t know. I really don’t.”

  Anna kissed her goodnight. Her cheek was powdery and soft, like Anna’s own cheek.

  PART

  Two

  The bathroom had once been pink and white, the boundary between the two colors a strip of shoulder-high carved molding. Over the green tile, twenty years ago, Anna had thrown a thick pink rug, and from the old-fashioned porcelain towel racks she had hung her first matched set of towels, pink, complete, a Christmas gift from Susanna and Hanson. Washcloths, hand towels, guest towels, bath towels, bath mat, each monogrammed with her initials: aRg. The rug and remaining towels were now thin and clingy with use, and this winter she had supplemented them with new thick towels of bright red and cool white. Ruffled, bleached muslin curtains of the same vintage as the towels had given way to a crisp strawberry print, and for her birthday she’d received red heart-shaped bars of translucent soap that smelled pleasantly of fruit. Her bathroom, long a place of utter indifference to her, was now something of a nest, and she had taken to indulging in long baths, the sort of baths where she would add hot water as the tub cooled, and leaf through more than one of the novels and magazines piled near the big tub.

  While the tub was filling, Anna opened the window and leaned into the fog. Anna was a lover of weather. When something odd happened, like a large snowfall or a heavy fog, her spirits lifted at the simple novelty. In addition she had never fully believed in the dangers of snowy roads or diminished visibility. These were the dangers of the automobile age. Her heart believed in staying at home with a full larder, shoveling a path only as far as the barn, where hay would be piled up for the horse, leaving the mail at the post office for days on end. Perilous weather, to Anna, was an endless series of clear and breezy days, when people tended to grow too independent and self-assured. The fog gusted and puffed. Margaret Lacina’s house, next door, could just be discerned, and her own sideyard, below, was shrouded in the smoky warmth. Soon, in six weeks, the apple trees would blossom, and the apricot after that. With Ike sick, the spraying and pruning would of course be too much work. She lifted her arms to the wet breeze. Mama had believed that night air could cure anything, clean it out of you, and Anna still thought it uniquely present, tangible and almost visible, ready to enfold one, or buoy one up. The fog seemed very personal, almost cozy. She leaned farther out the window, stretching her neck and opening her mouth. The fog parted, and she saw that Margaret Lacina was still up and downstairs, for a single light shown in the bay window. Margaret’s bathroom was directly across from hers, and Anna thought how convivial it would be if Margaret flung open her window, leaned on the sill, and told her all the neighborhood gossip she had missed in the last day or so. She had had a friend like that once, a neighbor who wrote messages in lipstick on her own bedroom window for Anna to read across the way: tomatoes up or bread delish. It would never happen with Margaret, though. She was from North Carolina, and her house was hermetically sealed, year around.

  Her bath ready, Anna closed the window, drew the shade, and began carefully to take off her clothes. Old age sometimes felt like a course she had to thread between various attacks of pain, and her evasions and retreats were now habitual. Certain movements she avoided, or made deliberately, testing. When she saw others on the street doing the same thing, she knew that she was old, as they were. She exhaled, pulled in her stomach, and unhooked her foundation, grimacing at the flow of her flesh as it took its natural shape or, she thought, smiling, shapelessness. Her breasts had gotten so large that it hurt to go without support, so she lifted them as she stepped across the new cherry-colored rug to her bath.

  She had never looked like any of her daughters. In her youth she’d been white and slender, with little pubic hair, and no hair at all on the rest of her body. After a while, when she was no longer so slim or pale or smooth, she had occasionally recalled herself as “petite” or “delicate” with “good legs” and “nice skin,” but at the time she’d assumed her looks depended on “a pleasant expression” and “good grooming.” Ike had never mentioned what he saw in her. She remembered thinking at seventeen that if she didn’t wear a pretty dress, no one would see her at all. Mama had thought so, too. Anna had any number of pretty dresses. Mama could make a pretty dress out of a bedsheet and a yard of drapery trim.

  Stepping into and out of the bathtub had become disagreeably suspenseful, in spite of the white rubber daisies stuck to the bathtub for traction. Nothing worked right. Her legs were heavy as she raised them one by one, her knees ached slightly, as if bones abraded each other. One-legged, she always felt precarious and stuck. Fear of falling combined with fear of being unable to move. But then she was in, both calves baptized in warmth, both hands securely gripping the edges of the tub. She lowered herself to kneeling, then to sitting. Her book, she discovered too late, was across the room. For a moment she considered it: torchlit, velveted Italy, sixteenth century, boar hounds in the dining hall. But the characters were too young, and their concerns actually rather contrived. Not worth another in, another out. She slipped down, the warmth rolled over her shoulders, dividing around her neck as around a boulder in a stream. The water was so deep that if she pressed her arms and back to the bottom of the tub, only her head and the crook of her knees jutted through the surface. She was reminded of something Helen liked to do years ago, to hold so still that the water would cease absolutely to move. “Mother,” she would utter in a pressed-out voice, “do I look like I’m trapped in a block of ice?”

  She could easily envision herself as she had been at first, though not as one always saw oneself, chest, belly, knees, from above. Instead she saw herself from across the room, as Ike might have seen her, or as she would appear in a photograph or a mirror, except that she never looked in the mirror if she was naked, and of course there were no photos of her without all her clothes, and a hat and gloves for good measure. Still, she believed that what she imagined was somehow herself, and no wonder Ike had been frightened of it, so thin and pale and hairless, so unlike his own ruddy flesh. Perhaps she had frightened him more than he had frightened her, after all. As for their life in bed, they had done their best for a long time without ever saying a word about it. She suspected they’d done better than her own parents; in the winter, Mama wore as many clothes to bed as she did to the store. Even so, maybe they hadn’t done well enough. You never knew how such things exfoliated into the lives of your children.

  Helen’s life, for instance. Helen had been a lovely child, with Ike’s height and without his big bones, her hair the color of some pale wood like pine or maple, her posture and the set of her limbs easy and straight. A perfect first child in a way, for with her they’d had time to marvel at their own cleverness and to anticipate with enthusiasm the certainty of engendering a race of such beauties. She had not been obedient, but the fact that she did not toe out, that she could see and hear perfectly (and look so effortlessly beautiful doing it) was full compensation. Ike had taken her over early, partly because of Claire’s instantaneous appearance, but partly because of his own enchantment.

  Anna shivered, splintering the solid water, and manipulated the hot tap with her toe. More warmth plunged to the depths of the tub, then eddied to either side of her buttocks and over her belly. Helen had been a great runner-away. Anna always said that she took a step one day, walked across the room the next day, and ran away the day after that. The exaggeration was only slight. Thereafter she’d been found any number of places on the ranch: headed for the horse corral, in the doorway of the barn, toddling down the dirt road, toddling up the slopes west of the house, even as far as the wildflower meadow overlooking the house. She had been found with shoes and without, without a coat, without a sweater, once without a stitch of clothing. No toys or games or adjurations to play with Claire could keep her in the house, and one summer they’d actually harnessed her to a post in the backyard, following a neighbor woman’s advice, but the harness had seemed cruel, and after a week or so had fallen into disuse. Miraculously, she had never gotten hurt, at least on the ranch. If Anna or Ike or Abel put on a coat, Helen would beat her or him to the door, saying, “Go? Go? Bye?” It was funny how you didn’t attribute any human significance to these infant predilections. It wasn’t until years later that Anna even suspected that home repelled Helen as much as distance attracted her.

  When they moved off the ranch, the fascinations, and dangers, of Helen’s journeys multiplied. Anna considered herself fortunate if Helen went to the playground by herself and could be found there when her absence was discovered. At six years of age, since the crossing of only one small street was involved, she was allowed to go on her own. One small street. Nevertheless, it was enough. Helen stepped into the street, was hit by an oncoming car, which threw her into a telephone pole, dislocating her shoulder. She picked herself up, eluded the driver who had stopped to investigate the small bump he’d felt, and ran on to her destination. Only after playing in the sandbox, hanging by her heels from the jungle-gym, teeter-tottering with a neighbor child, and trying to swing, had she come home, her arm dangling at her side, and reported the accident. When asked if it hurt, she’d said, “Yes,” and fainted. Anna could even remember what she was cooking that evening (knockwurst and sauerkraut, pungent and nearly ready) when all of a sudden her green-clad child was slumped on the brown-painted floor. Her first thought had been to turn the pot handles toward the back of the stove, as if boiling cabbage might leap off the burner and scald the prostrate form.

  Anna’s heavy eyelids closed. And Helen was six years old in her green coat, arcing through the air like a baseball, and then the car had stopped and the driver was scurrying around it double-time, looking for Helen, sniffing her out, but Helen had disappeared. Anna shifted position and her shoulder came out of the water into the chilly air. She woke up, turned on the hot water again, slipped down. Behind her lids was a pleasant, warm brightness, given color by her awareness of the red, white, pink, and green she knew was there. She sighed. Her headache had gone. The water was blissfully warm. She closed the tap. It was then that she heard his call, “Mother! Goddamn it!” He had obviously called before.

  By the time she got there, he was florid with impatience. “I’m thirsty!” he snapped. “Can’t you hear me? I must have called ten times! What were you doing?” It was only the weakness of his voice that kept her from barking back at him. After a pause while she suppressed her annoyance, she said, “What would you like to drink, Ike?”

  “Chocolate milk!”

  Anna tied the knot in the belt of her robe and turned to go.

  “I’m freezing!”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m freezing.”

  “Would you like some hot chocolate, Ike?”

  The old man settled back against the wall and put his hands under the blankets. “If it’s not too much trouble,” he said benevolently. In her fatigue this remark struck her oddly, since it implied some choice on her part while at the same time removing all actual choice from her power. Only a churl would respond that indeed it was trouble, great trouble, to go downstairs into the darkness, round up the milk and the cocoa and the sugar and a pan and a cup and a spoon, apply them all to one another in the proper fashion, and then balance the cup through the darkness, back up the stairs, only to be faced with perplexity about where to put it. It was trouble. But was it too much trouble? In what context? In the context of his illness? Of their marriage? Of her delay in responding to his wish (need)? Of her tiredness? There were cases in which no trouble was too much. Perhaps he was so ill already that the greatest pains and inconveniences would be merely sufficient, merely humane. Perhaps they had been married so long (fifty-two years!) that no trouble was too much trouble in light of all the trouble that had been taken already.

  Actually, it wasn’t much trouble. She could find her way easily among her things in the dark, the milk and cocoa and sugar and utensils were immediately to her hand. Cooking anything was second nature to her, and she filled the cup, a large mug, only three-quarters full. There was even a marshmallow, in a bag right there on the kitchen table, and she plopped it in. How much trouble was too much trouble? “Thank you,” said Ike.