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By Root 1439 0

the time. Then, forgetting that, she asked everyone in the family why Elizabeth had gone to pieces. “Why did you feel so bad about Janis, Elizabeth?” I said. “I don’t know,” she said. “Did her death make you feel like killing yourself ?” I said. “Are you unhappy the way she was?” Rosie now speaks to me only perfunctorily. On her get-well card to me (no visit) she wrote: “So sorry.” They are all sorry. They have been told by the doctor to ignore my gloominess, so they ignore me. I ignore them because even before the accident I was not very fond of them. My brother, in particular, bores me. When we were kids, sharing a bedroom, John would talk to me at night. When I fell asleep he’d come over and shake my mattress. One night my father caught him doing it and hit him. “It’s not my fault,” John hollered. “He’s a goddamn snob.” We got separate bedrooms. I was eight and John was ten.

Danielle comes back, looking sweatier than before. Below, they are playing the first game. My father’s brother Ed pretends to be a majorette and struts with his mallet, twirling it and pointing his knees.

“Nobody sent me this time,” Danielle says. “Are you coming down to dinner? They’re grilling steaks.”

“He’s so cheap he’ll serve Almaden with them,” I say. “You grew up in France. How can you drink that stuff ?”

“I just drink one glass,” she says.

“Refuse to do it,” I say.

She shrugs. “You’re in an awful mood,” she says.

“Give back that piggy,” I say.

She frowns. “I came to have a serious discussion. Why aren’t you coming to dinner?”

“Not hungry.”

“Come down for Lorna.”

“Lorna doesn’t care.”

“Maybe you’re mean to her.”

“I’m the same way I always was with her.”

“Be a little extra nice, then.”

“Give back that piggy,” I say, and she puts her foot up. I unbuckle her sandal with my left hand. There are strap marks on the skin. I lick down her baby toe and kiss it, at the very tip. In turn, I kiss all the others.

It’s evening, and the phone is ringing. I think about answering it. Finally someone else in the house picks it up. I get up and then sit on the bed and look around. My old bedroom looks pretty much the way it looked when I left for college, except that my mother has added a few things that I never owned, which seem out of place. Two silver New Year’s Eve hats rest on the bedposts, and a snapshot of my mother in front of a Mexican fruit stand (I have never been to Mexico) that my father took on their “second honeymoon” is on my bureau. I pull open a drawer and take out a pack of letters. I pull out one of the letters at random and read it. It is from an old girlfriend of mine. Her name was Alison, and she once loved me madly. In the letter she says she is giving up smoking so that when we are old she won’t be repulsive to me. The year I graduated from college, she married an Indian and moved to India. Maybe now she has a little red dot in the middle of her forehead.

I try to remember loving Alison. I remember loving Mary’s sister, Patricia. She is dead. That doesn’t sink in. And she can’t have meant to die, in spite of what Mary said. A woman who meant to die wouldn’t buy a big wooden bowl and a bag of fruit, and then get in the car and drive it off the highway. It is a fact, however, that as the car started to go sideways I looked at Patricia, and she was whipping the wheel to the right. Maybe I imagined that. I remember putting my arm out to brace myself as the car started to turn over. If Patricia were alive, I’d have to be at the croquet game. But if she were alive, she and I could disappear for a few minutes, have a kiss by the barn.

I said to Lorna last night that I would tell her a story. It was going to be a fairy tale, all about Patricia and me but disguised as the prince and the princess, but she said no, she didn’t want to hear it, and walked out. Just as well. If it had ended sadly it would have been an awful trick to pull on Lorna, and if it had ended happily, it would have depressed me even more. “There’s nothing wrong with coming to terms with your depression,” the doctor said to me. He kept urging me to see a shrink.