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By Root 470 0

the three could stop laughing, the two older girls from the sight of it, and from the feeling of their own power, and Leah, perhaps, from the pleasure of their attention, or perhaps from the rattling perspective shifts she experienced as they manipulated her head. I said, “Careful of her neck.” But they were, without my saying anything. I pretended not to be watching them, but really I was transfixed by the passing of that baby head from hand to hand, by the way Lizzie’s and Stephanie’s fingers spread and flexed, by how strong their hands were with all their childish pudginess, and by how unconscious they were and yet how sensitive. I went into the kitchen. When I came back a few minutes later, the big girls were at their pictures and Leah was coloring her fingernails with a blue marker. I opened my mouth to remind her not to write on her skin, but before the first word was out, she had drawn a line from her ankle to her diaper. She looked up at me. I said, “That’s naughty. Don’t write on yourself.” She knew I would say it, and I did. She refrained from writing on herself then as a formality until I left the room.

These are the trivia of family life, what the children do and say, how the fragrance of dinner wafts through the house, a view of the yard through the glass of the front door, the border collie across the street barking at the UPS man, a neighbor who has been hardly noticed these last weeks bringing the packets of seed you ordered together, looking at you quizzically and with concern, then turning away, making a joke upon herself. One by one they come upon the senses, charge along the neurons, leap the synapses, electrify the brain, and there is a moment, a moment of a specific duration which I don’t remember, before the synapses jam, when the ear hears, the nose smells, the eyes see, the fingers sense the cool smooth foil of the seed packets.

We ate dinner.

We watched “Family Ties,” then “Cheers.” We put the children to bed and watched “Hill Street Blues.”

Dana was sitting beside me on the couch. She yawned and turned toward me. I saw my face in the pupils of her eyes, then I saw that she was smiling. She said, “I can’t believe I’m so tired. Are you going to sit up?”

I was, and I did, alone in the silent living room, with the lights off and a beer warming in my hand. It seemed to me that the unexpected peace of the day had left me dizzy with pleasure, such pleasure that its prospective loss made my stomach queasy. Feelings are in the body as well as in the mind, is what he said. I lay back on the carpet, on the floor of the organ that was my house, and felt my family floating above me, suspended only by two-by-fours as narrow as capillaries and membranes of flooring. My pulse beat in my ears and the walls of the house seemed to throb with it. I closed my eyes and took some deep breaths. From China, from California, state by state, patient by patient, the flu had arrived.

I wonder if it is possible to prepare yourself for anything. Of course I lay there, saying, This is the flu, it isn’t supposed to last more than two or three days, I should find the Tylenol. In the moment I didn’t feel bad, really, a little queasy, a degree feverish. The disease wasn’t a mystery to me. I know what a virus looks like, how it works. I could imagine the invasion and the resistance. In fact, imagining the invasion and the resistance took my attention off the queasiness and the feverishness. But when I opened my eyes and my gaze fell upon the bookcases looming above me in the half-light, I shuddered reflexively, because the books seemed to swell outward from the wall and threaten to drop on me, and my thoughts about the next few days had exactly that quality as well. I did not see how we would endure, how I would endure.

There are many moments in every marriage that are so alike that they seem to be the same moment, appearing and vanishing, giving the illusion of time passing, and of no time passing, giving the illusion that a marriage is a thing everlasting. One of these recurring moments, for Dana and me, has always had to