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By Root 499 0

in her insteps from pointing her toes in her sleep. Some say this is a vitamin deficiency. I don’t know. Anyway, I slithered under the covers and grabbed her feet. What you do is bend the toes and ankles back, and then massage the instep until the knot goes away. Massage by itself doesn’t work at all; you have to hold on to the toes so that they don’t point by mistake, for about five minutes. I did. She let me. While I was holding on to her feet I felt such a welling up of desire and pain and grief that I began to heave with dry sobs. “Dave,” she said. “Dave.” Her hollow voice was regretful and full of sorrow. In the hot dark under the covers, I ran my thumbs over her insteps and pushed back her toes with my fingers. Your wife’s feet are not something, as a rule, that you are tactilely familiar with, and I hadn’t had much to do with her feet for eight or nine years, so maybe I was subject to some sort of sensual memory, but it seemed to me that I was twenty-five years old and ragingly greedy for this darling person whom I had had the luck to fool into marrying me. Except that I wasn’t, and I knew I wasn’t, and that ten minutes encompassed ten years, and I was about to be lost. When the cramps were out of her feet, I knelt up and threw off the covers, and said, “Oh, God! Dana, I’m sorry I’m me!” That’s what I said. It just came out. She grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me down on top of her and hugged me tightly, and said in a much evener voice, “I’m not sorry you’re you.”

And so, how could she tell me then? She couldn’t, and didn’t. I think she was sorry I was me, sorry that I wasn’t him in bed with her. But when husbands express grief and fear, wives automatically comfort them, and they are automatically comforted. Years ago, such an exchange of sorrow would have sent us into a frenzy of lovemaking. It did not this time. She held me and kissed my forehead, and I was comforted but not reassured. We went back to sleep and got up at seven to greet the daily round that is family life. Zap, she used to say, there goes another one.

I was worried about her and she was worried about me, and that was an impasse that served my purposes for most of that week. God knows what the bastard was doing to her, but she was very reserved, careful, good, and sad. She went to the grocery store a lot. Maybe she was calling him from there, standing in the phone booth with two children in the basket and a line of old ladies behind her waiting to call the car service.

Each of my children favors one sense over the other. Lizzie has been all eyes since birth. We have pictures of her at nine days old, her eyes focused and glittering, snapping up every visual stimulation. She is terrific at finding things and has been since she could talk. It took us a while to believe her, but now we believe her every time. She doesn’t stare, either. She glances. She stands back and takes in wholes. It seems to me that her eyes are the source of her persnickety taste and her fears. She simply cannot bear certain color combinations, for example. They offend her physically. Likewise, what she sees is far away from her, out of her control, and so makes her afraid. She rushes in, gets closer, so that she can look more carefully. But it is hard for her to reach out and touch or rearrange. Fear intervenes. She only looks, she feels no power.

Stephanie is the wild beast who is soothed by music. She has always heard things first, looked for them second. She often looks away from what she is paying attention to, making her seem evasive, but really she is listening. She is the only child I’ve ever known who doesn’t interrupt. I don’t even know if she listens to words as much as to tones, to the rhythms of sentences and the pitch of voices. Will she be a musician? She likes music. But she likes the sound of traffic, too, and the sound of cats in the backyard, and the cries of birds and the rustle of leaves. She simply likes the way the world sounds, and she listens to it. She comes closer than Lizzie does, but she doesn’t seem to respond to what goes in at all, except