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By Root 454 0

shoes flatter her ankles, her hips, her waist, everything up to the back of her head, because everything is connected, of course. She is thin. She weighs 107 or 108. Once I had a good grasp on her, I could have carried her anywhere. She was wearing a white flannel nightgown scattered with tiny red hearts. She was warm and damp, her hair was askew, she would have said that she didn’t look her best. A silk shirt, those heels, a linen or cotton or wool skirt, a good haircut, lipstick—that is looking her best, she would have said; a fine-grained surface, a sort of enameling. Women who are more relaxed find her a little cold, or archaic, or formal, but it seems to me that she has poured herself into a sort of dental mold, too. Dentists make a lot of money. Dental conventions are full of dandies. Two dentists in conference in the lobby of the Dallas Hyatt are more likely to be talking about tailors than about inlays. Her body is not yielding. It has a lot of tensile strength that is inherited, I think. Her brother Joe can bench-press 250 pounds, though he doesn’t lift weights as a hobby. In any pickup softball game, her sister Frances has amazing power at the plate. To lift Dana in one’s arms is to feel not weight but elastic resistance.

To take Dana into one’s arms, and to be taken into hers, is to feel, not yielding, but strength. When she holds your hand, she grips it hard. When you hug her, she hugs back. When you kiss her, her lips, which are firm, press against yours. Picking her up reminded me of those things, reminded me that retreat isn’t always her mode, is rarely her mode, has never been her mode, is, in fact, a function of point of view, of where you are in the field of her activities. I pushed the covers back with my foot and laid her down. She groaned. I pulled her nightgown over her feet, pulled the sheet up to her chin, then the blanket.

Stephanie had been asleep since about eleven. I opened the curtains of her room partway, and shook down the thermometer by the streetlight outside. I opened her drawer and took out a fresh nightgown. The house was quiet, and I was fully awake somehow, though I hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in six days, or slept the sleep of the innocent in weeks. The darkness, when I closed the curtains, seemed a presence in the house, sensible, like heat. I let it envelop me where I sat on Stephanie’s bed. I might have said that it pressed against my skin, got under my clothes, filtered into my hair, coal dust, blackness itself, sadness. I reached out my hand and put it on Stephanie’s small hip under the covers. It submerged her, too, pressed her down against the dark pillow so that I could barely see her face. Even her blond hair, coiled against her neck, moist with sweat, gave off no light. Now the darkness felt as though it were getting into me—by osmosis through the skin, mingled with my inhalations, streaming into my eyes and up the optic nerves to seep among the coils of the brain, replacing meditation. It pooled in my ears. My pulmonary arteries carried blood into my lungs, where it was enriched with darkness, not oxygen, and then it spread through the circulatory system, to toes and fingertips and scalp. The marrow of my bones turned black, began spawning black blood cells. And so thought was driven out at last. Meditation, the weighing of one thing against another, the dim light of reflection, the labor of separating thread from thread, all gone.

I ran my hand gently up Stephanie’s back and jostled her shoulder. “Time, sweetie,” I said. “I need to take your temperature.” I jostled her again. No response. Now I put the thermometer on the night table and lifted her in my arms. Her head flopped back against my shoulder, and I put the thermometer into her partly open mouth, then held her jaws closed. I was glad she seemed to be getting sounder sleep—she had been restless for two nights now. I counted slowly to 250, then took out the thermometer and laid it gently on the night table. Then I unbuttoned her nightgown and slid her out of it. Her skin was so damp that it was hard to get the