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By Root 1548 0

chest and cry about things I couldn’t understand. Look at me now, with this body. I’m embarrassed by the irony of it—the dry pool, the useless body. It’s too obvious even to talk about it. I sound like T. S. Eliot, with his bank-clerk self-pity, don’t I?” She is staring at the ocean. “When I thought everything was in order—I even had a new beau—I was trying to hang a picture one morning: a painting of a field of little trees, with a doe walking through. I had it positioned where I thought it should go, and I held it to the wall and backed up, but I couldn’t quite tell, because I couldn’t back up enough. I didn’t have any husband to hold it to the wall. I dropped it and broke the glass and cried.” She pushes her hair back, twines the rubber band she has worn on her wrist around her hair again. Through her bikini I can see the outline of the shells. Her hands hang at her sides. “We’ve come too far,” she says. “Aren’t you exhausted?”

We are almost up to the Davises’ house. That means that we’ve walked about three miles, and through my heaviness I feel a sort of light-headedness. I’m thinking, I’m tired but it doesn’t matter. Being married doesn’t matter. Knowing how to talk about things matters. I sink down in the sand, like a novice with a revelation. Barbara looks concerned; then, a little drunkenly, I watch her face change. She’s decided that I’m just responding, taking a rest. A seagull dives, gets what it wants. We sit next to each other facing the water, her flat tan stomach facing the ocean like a mirror.

It is night, and we are still outdoors, beside the pool. Sven’s face has a flickery, shadowed look, like a jack-o’-lantern’s. A citronella candle burns on the white metal table beside his chair.

“He decided not to call the police,” Sven says. “I agree. Since those two young ladies obviously did not want your crappy silver, they’re saddled with sort of pirates’ treasure, and, as we all know, pirate ships sink.”

“You’re going to wait?” Barbara says to Craig. “How will you get all our silver back?”

Craig is tossing a tennis ball up and down. It disappears into the darkness, then slaps into his hands again. “You know what?” he says. “One night I’ll run into them at Odeon. That’s the thing—nothing is ever the end.”

“Well, this is my birthday, and I hope we don’t have to talk about things ending.” Barbara is wearing her pink T-shirt, which seems to have shrunk in the wash. Her small breasts are visible beneath it. She has on white pedal pushers and has kicked off her black patent-leather sandals.

“Happy birthday,” Sven says, and takes her hand.

I reach out and take Oliver’s hand. The first time I met his family I cried. I slept on their foldout sofa and drank champagne and watched The Lady Vanishes on TV, and during the night he crept downstairs to hold me, and I was crying. I had short hair then. I can remember his hand closing around it, crushing it. Now it hangs long and thin, and he moves it gently, pushing it aside. I can’t remember the last time I cried. When I first met her, Barbara surprised me because she was so sharp-tongued. Now I have learned that it is their dull lives that make people begin to say cutting things.

I look over my shoulder at the beach at night—sand bleached white by the light of the moon, foamy waves silently washing ashore, a hollow sound from the wind all over, like the echo of a conch shell held against the ear. The roar in my head is all from pain. All day, the baby has been kicking and kicking, and now I know that the heaviness I felt earlier, the disquiet, must be labor. It’s almost a full month early—labor coupled with danger. I keep my hands away from my stomach, as if it might quiet itself. Sven opens a bottle of club soda and it gushes into the tall glass pitcher that sits on the table between his chair and Barbara’s. He begins to unscrew the cork in a bottle of white wine. Inside me, once, making my stomach pulse, the baby turns over. I concentrate, desperately, on the first thing I see. I focus on Sven’s fingers and count them, as though my baby were born and now I have to