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By Root 807 0

that I was more wretched than nearly anyone who had ever lived. As Nellie prattled on, it occurred to me that Howard was no doubt heaving and sweating in a far field, working, and at the same time keeping his own pain at bay, by putting it into a historical perspective. And so I tried, for a minute, to make myself feel smaller and happier than others before me who had been accused. I raced through all of the history I could think of, past the ancient Romans who had certainly sullied their hands with their relations’ blood, past the Rosenbergs, the Nixons, John Hinckley, Jr.’s parents, past the nameless multitudes serving time for momentary lapses and crimes of desperation. It was no comfort knowing that others had gone before me. It was despicable, I knew, that where there should have been ordinary grief in my heart, there was, in its place, shame and dread. My remorse, my inability to make amends, was undiluted, stronger, I was sure, than those of any of the guilty characters I could conjure or name.

“I tried to go back and think of all the things I did during the nine months that might have caused the trouble.” Nellie was still talking, laying out the bacon on a paper towel. “Even though there wasn’t the awareness there is today, I had been careful, and I certainly didn’t smoke or drink.”

It was eight o’clock in the morning and Emma and Claire were in the living room in front of the television, within its electromagnetic field, watching cartoon characters beat each other over the head with bananas. I’m going to march in there, I thought, and smash the set. Why had we ever allowed the children to watch cartoons? I had always said that letting them sit before the tube was as bad as feeding them a diet of Hostess Ding Dongs, and yet I also was often too tired to think of alternatives. All the harsh words, the spanking, the swearing, being weak when I should have been firm—the panorama, the complete history of what I had done wrong appeared before me in living color, and the garbled profanities thundered in my ears. I pushed my chair back while Nellie was still talking, went straight to the television, and punched at the large black buttons. The image sputtered and then vanished.

“Turn that back on!” Emma shouted. Claire chanted, “On. On.”

When I shook my head, snapping it back and forth, Emma said, “I hate you, Mom. I HATE YOU.”

“Emma, lamb,” Nellie said, coming into the living room with a dish towel in one hand and a plate in the other, “don’t talk to your mother like that.”

“But I want the TV on,” Claire whined.

Emma crossed her arms and turned her head, giving her grandmother the view of her exquisite dirty neck, and the Goodwin Cro-Magnon jaw. It was perhaps hard for a five-year-old to respect an older woman who was fixated on her granddaughters’ bowel patterns, who referred to the effort as “doing your duty.” Emma’s gaze fell on the Barbie with the long black tresses and she grabbed it, waving it in Claire’s face, tormenting her by the evident fact of possession. “That’s mine!” Claire cried on cue. “Emmie has mine!”

I turned right around and went back into the kitchen. Nellie had told me I should eat something. I sat at my place, in front of a bowl of Grape-Nuts, small pieces of gravel that would aid my digestion. Nellie had somehow turned the clock back one hundred years; she was the farmwife, the unsung heroine, up at the first glimmer, making a cake for noon dinner. She lived by the creed that there was no wound or woe an angel-food cake couldn’t heal or conquer. The twenty-five-pound sack of flour was bursting from the cupboard, and all the new, clean, glinting Jell-O molds were stacked against each other on the drain board with the symmetry of a chorus line. There was a leg of lamb thawing on the counter, and the green onions, miraculously salvaged from the dead garden, drying on a napkin. There was food everywhere I looked. There seemed to be enough time to pickle and preserve and nourish. I was dimly aware of Nellie, luring the girls to literature in the living room. Their voices were far off, as if they