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specialissue03, tsukizubon saruko

We Are More, part 1
by Tsukizubon Saruko (月図凡然る子)



May, 1996

The attic was going to be hell.

Katie stood in the middle of it, turning a slow circle with her hands on her hips. Old steamer trunks with garment bags stacked up on top of them, cobwebs sealing them to the floor like tape across the door at a crime scene. Defunct cabinets and haphazardly added shelves full of useless junk whose price value probably varied from '50 cents, maybe' to 'worth more than your life, Katherine Willard,' too tacky or too expensive for regular house display. It was an alien landscape up here, mountains made of history. The bruised-looking husk of a Commodore 64 computer perched on top of one of them, shockingly old, probably never used once since Katie's dad had moved on to better things and donated it.

She blew with her lip pushed out, and sweaty blonde strands flew up off her forehead and fell right back where they'd been. She could hear Eric's voice faintly from the floor below, calling something to Grandmamma, but not the answer; Grandmamma must be downstairs.

Since Katie had gotten her license, just she and Eric had been coming to Decatur on the weekends. Their mom had stopped coming altogether, and though she complained a little about the hour of farmland each way, Katie was actually glad. Things had been icy between Mom and Grandmamma since Grandmamma had put the house on the market; like the two of them unrolled a little strip of frozen tundra between them every time they got within range, each holding an end, like kids with a cup-and-string telephone. Walking through the middle of that no-man's-land gave you chills. Katie guessed Mom didn't want Grandmamma to sell the house she'd grown up in, but she was also getting old enough to think that maybe that was just the tip of it. Maybe the cold went further, back to when Grandpa Carlisle had died. Maybe they'd lost something in him: the slightly bemused, but affable glue that had held their two unlikely parts together, whether they liked it or not.

It didn't matter now, anyway. Grandpa Carlisle had been gone since Katie was fourteen, taking all of his card games and puzzled good humor with him, and the house was sold, to a sweet couple from outside Chicago. They moved in in June, and Katie and her brother had been going to help Grandmamma pack up and get ready for the movers every weekend since the offer. Eric was thirteen and a little jerkwad, of course, but they didn't get along too bad. And he got right to it whenever Grandmamma asked him for something, but who didn't? Dad always said that even tornadoes backed off when Grandmamma made up her mind.

But there was so much to do, even with the three of them. Forty years' accumulation, crowded into a two-level house. All the ordinary necessities of life plus everything Grandpa Carlisle had ever brought home from abroad -- it was crazy, it was like trying to fit a museum into suitcases.

Katie picked a huddle of cabinets at random, plopped onto the dusty floor with her legs crossed after a quick check for spiders. She pushed all the doors open, and pulled out Russian inlaid jewel-boxes, stationery sets, a small cardboard box of glittery junk jewelry. She tried to stack them in some sort of helpful order, for cataloguing, and mostly ended up feeling like she had a giant pile of salt she was moving three feet to the left. She rooted through the drawers, found mostly old stamp collections. Then squeezed past the cabinets (well -- mostly over) to get at the trunks under the window.

These were even older -- probably not even stirred within Katie's lifetime. It wasn't exactly surprising, if so, but it was still a thought with a funny sort of chill; that the entire time she'd been alive, from the day of her birth through the next sixteen years, this trunk had been sitting closed, right where it was now, dust settling mote by mote on its lid. It was more curiosity now than inventory that made her open them, sifting through without any of the ordinary mechanical speed of packing. In a box delicate with age, nested in tissue, was an age-stained ivory dress that Katie thought might have been Grandmamma's wedding dress, when she got married to Grandpa Carlisle; even deeper in the same trunk was a white one, and she sat with both of them out on her lap, looking at them a long time. There was jewelry in here, as well, most of it tarnished, and old pairs of crushed, ballet-slipper-like shoes, and...

Down at the bottom, a scattering of papers, velvety and yellow with time. They had been stacked neatly before, she thought, but her diggings had upset them, and now they were a tumble of envelopes with postmarks that started 195- and loose leaves sprawling with a feminine cursive that wasn't Grandmamma's. There was a photograph mixed into this mess now, too, and Katie picked it up, frowning.

In blacks and whites and greys, two women stood side-by-side on a broad green lawn, rows of low houses in the distance behind them, arms around each other's waists. One was very young, the other one a little older. The latter, the older brunette with the wide-sweeping shirt-dress and the short finger-waved hair, she thought she recognized from old pictures as Grandmamma, although this was younger than Katie had ever seen her apart from in the crumbling pictures of her wedding to Grandpa Day. The younger woman, with her paler hair curled up and twisted behind her head, in a pencil-skirt and jacket and hat, Katie didn't recognize at all. They were both smiling the same way: like they knew they should be more serious, but they couldn't help it all the same. Grandmamma, in particular, had a wise, canny look in her eyes that made Katie both grin and feel uncomfortable.

She flipped the photo over. Written on the back in yet another handwriting, this spidery and slanting, was:

Clora and Deirdre.
Picnic in Joliet.
May 17, 1949.

Katie's frown came back, deeper. Clora was Grandmamma's name. She'd never heard of anyone named Deirdre.

She picked up the letters, shuffling them in her hands, gathering them back into order by date. The ones that had envelopes were all addressed to Grandmamma, first by her maiden name at an address in Chicago, then by 'Mrs. John Carlisle' at the house in Decatur. They were return-addressed to a Mrs. R. Vanderbilt, in California.

Katie carefully freed the first one from its envelope, postmarked October of 1952, and glanced over her shoulder for no reason before she started to read.

In the end she found herself reading the whole stack, all that afternoon, and got absolutely nothing packed. The story they told said nothing, really; not in so many words. But there was something inside it, all the same: a depth of power packed in between the lines of squashed dark cursive that made Katie's skin crawl under the attic dust, that made her feel a little stupidly like crying. She only stopped -- jolting, and then scrambling to push everything back down in the trunk, and then giving up when she realized she hadn't done anything wrong -- when Grandmamma's voice called up from the bottom of the attic stairs. "Katie?"

"Yeah, Grandmamma!" She at least eased the old clothes back into the trunk, and stood up, dusting off her legs. Grandmamma made her way up the stairs, her footsteps heavy and resolute; she had just turned eighty-two this winter, and had a walker that she scorned, a cane she saved for rainy days. Grandmamma hated to hold still, and she limped into the attic in a crisp breath of pale green crepe suit and ivory from Zimbabwe, even though they were just packing today.

"What on earth are you doing up here?" Grandmamma said in her best tornado-taming voice, surveying the attic and dismissing it with one critical sweep. "This is all packed, the moving men can manage it. Come downstairs and help Eric pack the stemware."

"Okay, Grandmamma." Katie put the stack of letters back in the trunk as discreetly and graciously as possible, and tried not to knock anything down on her way back. She took her grandmother's arm when she was close enough, and Grandmamma was gracious enough to permit the help. "...Can I ask you something?"

"What's that, dear?" Even picking her way across the floor to the bannister, Grandmamma carried herself in a regal way; just the sound of her voice could still bring whole rooms to attention. She'd been to the beauty salon two days earlier, and her silver hair was an elegant helmet.

"Who was, um... Deirdre?" She watched Grandmamma's face as she said it, but there was no visible change of expression; she seemed entirely concentrated on making it to the stairway, as though across an ocean. But she walked better than that most days. "Deirdre Vanderbilt? I saw this old picture."

"Why, that's Leslie's wife," Grandmamma said, without a second's hesitation. "Your Great-Uncle Leslie who died in the second World War. Deirdre Markham before she was married again. Didn't you know that?"

"No, I didn't." Katie glanced over her shoulder, at the half-open trunk. All its secrets still trapped inside it, and probably not all that secret at all.

"Come on downstairs," Grandmamma said, with all the firmness of the queen of England. "We'll finish up with the stemware, and then I guess we'll all have supper."

Three weeks later, whether it had anything to do with it or not, Katie finally screwed up the guts to ask Lisa Wu at school to go to a movie with her. She still wasn't sure Lisa actually thought it was a date until the last fifteen minutes or so, when Lisa leaned across their seats in the back of the dark theater and pressed her mouth to Katie's, a tiny, tight, dry flower that was just beginning to bud.

---

October 21, 1952

My dearest Clora,

How fast this train is! I can almost hear you laugh at me but it is so. It is strange to travel in such safety and comfort, and yet be terrified every time one thinks of the speed. I suppose it is much more dangerous, what Leslie did, to fly little planes so high up over the ocean and the earth, but I cannot help but feel it much more so to ride to it over the ground. The sky is not so crowded. On land there are so many obstacles, so many chances to crash. I think more and more these days that human beings must be so fragile, and the world moves us all along so quickly, heedless of our safety. It is a wonder any of us lasts a day.

Richard says that we will change trains in Kansas City, and then again in Santa Fe. I have never been to a desert before. I do not think I shall like it very much, but Richard tells me it is very beautiful, and that anyway once we arrive in California there will be beaches and plenty of green. He is most amused by all of my worries, but he is very kind.

Clora, I know you will have nowhere to write to me until we arrive, and that it hasn't been so very long. But I am bursting for news of you. Are you well? How is your mother? I hope someday I can repay her for all the kindness she has shown me, and you for all of yours.

So many farms go past our windows, their fields brown and green and all interlocking like checkerboards or quilts. I sit up late at night, when I can't sleep for being so frightened, and watch them go by. I think of the people who live there, if they are happy, if their husbands and children are happy. How strange it must be to fall asleep in all that space, able to hear your own breath. It must be like living in the middle of the ocean.

I know you will tell me I'm silly to be afraid, but I am, I am. This train goes so quickly, and all that space is around me too, stretching out between myself and all I have ever known.

---

February, 1945

The first time Clora had met the future Mrs. Leslie Markham, her first thought had been, "Well, I guess she'll do for Irish."

She felt ashamed later, but mostly only because it had become clear that Deirdre was so much more than just Irish, more than just a whim of spineless, senseless Leslie's on a night out being boys. Deirdre was a high school girl back then, seventeen in a long skirt and short hair, the youngest of six. Leslie was fulfilling his promise to Mother and finishing out his college years before joining the young AAF, a rich young buck with not enough to do with himself, with strange friends and curious absences. He found her at a dance a fraternity brother had insisted on in order to see his own girl, and seven months later they fled Mother's critical eye in the bumbling little plane Daddy had given him at eighteen, up and over to Minneapolis.

("Who, in God's name, elopes to Minnesota?" Clora had asked him some time later, when it was just the two of them alone. Leslie had laughed like a loon, laughed until tears squirted from his eyes.)

But Clora had only been his eldest sister, Clora had wielded no power over him; and so Clora had been introduced to Deirdre over a yachting club lunch long before the plan swung into action. Deirdre had kept her hands in her lap and her eyes modestly downturned, sparkling with jewelry Leslie must have given her. Clora hadn't been impressed with her then, but although grudgingly, she had been when the two of them returned from Minnesota. She called at the small house on the lake Leslie had somehow cadged enough to buy, and a new Deirdre waited for her there, almost unrecognizable from the child she had been. A small diamond ring graced one hand and her hair had grown longer, and she had left her long mended school skirts for a delicate coral-colored housedress, serving tea and shaking Clora's hand all with a practiced even gaze trained on her eyes. Occupying her new home with her presence, almost her authority. I guess she knows what she's caught, Clora had thought this time, but even that cynicism she had come to regret. Even at the earliest she couldn't have convinced herself that Deirdre was only panning for gold; unless it was the gold buried at the bottom of little Leslie Markham, who had only sisters and silly ideas.

The fact of it was that Deirdre grew up like lightning, and like a miracle she sprouted into the roots Leslie had so long needed, to keep him connected to the ground. She had been a Catholic to start (Catholic! Clora could fairly hear Mother echoing in a hoarse cry, into a handkerchief she would keep by to fan herself with), but when they married she converted as neatly as you please, never absent a Sunday thereafter from First Methodist Episcopal Church. She kept the little house clean, cared for guests like a born hostess, left not a word for Mother or anyone else to say against her until at last Mother was forced to say quite a few for her. The most obvious of it, Clora thought, was the change she wrought in Leslie: not only the suspicions she erased but the calm conviction that began to lift him, firing him like a bullet in slow motion, out of university and into a world at war, an America with its Hawaiian flank torn open and ready to turn and bite.

But he came down again, in time; as those things that rise always must.

Clora, for her part, had been married to William Day for six years when her younger brother married, nine when William died. Their family's wealth was something of a riddle: smaller than a Rockefeller, greater than a businessman, casts no shadow but sheds no light. Her father's father had not been a railroad baron but perhaps something of a baronet, and he and his son had both made good use of their stocks; Daddy had ended up with a sizable portion of Chicago's steel in his pocket, which had only blossomed there in the Great War. In any case they had been a part of what Chicago had for society, and William had been the son of an old Yale chum of Daddy's, a Yale man himself, invited to dinner one night on the expectation that he and Clora would fall quietly and sensibly in love. Clora never fell in love with anyone, but she saw no reason to disappoint anyone either. They were married in First Methodist in theory and on the society page in fact, and she kept his house as he enrolled in officer's school. War, she supposed, was like music to men's ears somehow. All a woman could hear was a clattering screech, but that meant nothing; they were not tuned to the same frequency, that was all.

Those things that rise must always fall. A storm blew up in Daddy's brain two years after her wedding, and blew him away with it. Clora's widowed mother set aside his staggering assets, sold their sprawling fairy tale of a house to the bank, which even then could still afford to buy, and bought a tidy brick townhouse at the city's edge in the hopes that she would rattle less, alone inside it. In 1944 the war swallowed William, drawing him down into the soil of Normandy, never to be recovered. Only when Clora received a folded flag in his place did she arrive at the certainty, after almost ten years of marriage, that it was not enough: that there could be no fair exchange. She had borne him no children, but then he had been home seldom, much of the time. They had made little love, in bed or anywhere else. But he had been kind.

So Clora, the oldest, the coldest, moved back in with her mother, into the small brick house with gloomy hallways and slow taps. She was no riveter, even then, but she could recall a bit of shorthand and typing from her school days, and took a job at the News Sun. She worked alongside other, poorer girls, their plain hair tied back with no fuss or nonsense and their trousers daring beyond reckoning, and when she spied by accident Rose's hand falling in just the wrong way on Laura's hip after coffee one morning, her rusty, tired mind remembered more about school than just shorthand.

Things rise, then fall. They were deep in the city, and there were more than enough blind alleys for a young lady to wander into, should they open to her. She let them lead her to a club called The Mayflower for reasons no one cared to explain, on nights when Mother didn't expect her too soon after her work. She took in the sights that no doubt corrupted innocent eyes, and would hers if she had had them. Beautiful men-women in their suits, their pink lips pressed pale by hard sneers, the painted tottering dolls they kept and traded, and who kept and traded them. She was seldom approached, seldom even spoken to: no one would risk a "kiki girl" like her, she learned in time, too rich for their blood, neither fish nor fowl. They might even have thought her a policewoman, a thought she found deliciously lunatic. But she went home with one or two, as the war dragged on, mostly the butches with their broad-shouldered conviction and their empty trousers, their shabby apartments in places where no one much minded. She stumbled drunk through the starry city rain to their beds, and one woman made love to her as William had on those seldom occasions, tenderly, all slow hands and breath in a dim moldy flat; one shoved her against a wall and bruised her wrist, and she thought, I am run wild, mourning my husband, she thought, I am lost without my father, she thought, I am making my own mess for once, maybe and she thought I am an explorer in another world, hacking through a jungle with my machete, finding strange new fauna in the shadows of inverted trees. She thought, Things rise. Things fall. She wore bracelets the next day to hide the mark.

And then a year later Leslie had fallen with his comrades' bombs on Malaya, shot down or merely careless in his clever little plane, mute forever on what she never could have asked him. His head brought out of the clouds for once and for all.

And that was when Deirdre came to live with them, and stood the first afternoon with her two little suitcases pitiful around her feet, in the cloudy grey light of the front hall.

---

April, 1998

The acceptance letter from NYU came at the start of the month. It was her first choice, and she bellowed over it in the kitchen with a hand over her mouth and did a really stupid impromptu dance. When she came waving it in her hand at her favorite teacher, Ms. Frankford, honors chem, the next day, she got a huge inappropriate hug, and it was awesome. It was awesome for at least three full days, until finally she actually thought in bed one night, I'm moving to New York, and nearly threw up.

No, though. No. She was ready for this. She didn't really believe it, but Katie kept telling herself, swearing it to herself, hoping it would finally stick. She was ready for all of it.

And first things first. She was going to be away all summer, she repeated every time she gave herself the talk, while washing the dishes or combing out her hair after a shower, and then there wouldn't be another chance. And she was ready. She'd been telling herself she was ready since last November, when Eric had come into her room one day after school, sat on her dresser, and said, "Joey said you're a lesbian."

She'd looked at him, not quite gobsmacked or even quite surprised. She'd been folding shirts from the laundry to put away and she stopped with one halfway there in her hands.

"Joey's a dick," she said, finally, and made herself finish the fold. Eric shrugged.

"Kinda." But that obviously wasn't the end of it, and she waited. The shirts were good for keeping her eyes on. "Are you?"

"A dick?"

She thought that would make Eric laugh or at least roll his eyes, and it did both, at least a little. "A lesbian, retard. I think that's kinda the opposite." She told herself she wouldn't dignify that by laughing, but she did anyway.

"How would Joey even know?" she said, too, but Eric didn't say anything to that. She put down the polo shirt in her hands and finally looked at him, and found him looking back at her, with a solemn big-eyed expression that made her want to grab him in a headlock and Dutch rub him out of all possible vulnerability. Eric was a little turd but he was also so sweet, and the world was going to shit on him forever for it. He looked sort of like a dandelion like that, with his long skinny neck and thin fuzz of the same dark blond hair as her own. She sighed instead. "Yeah. You didn't tell Mom, did you?"

Eric recoiled. "What, what Joey said? She'd kill me and then him."

That made Katie laugh, startled or even shocked her into it, and that made Eric laugh, and that was kind of a crazy relief. She hadn't really thought Eric would be weirded out, but... well, but.

"He said you went out with Brandon's sister for a while," Eric continued a minute later, still giving her that fixed, naked, curious look. She watched his face while he said it, but finally she decided it was just something he needed to know about.

"A little," Katie admitted, and shoved Eric's leg to the side until he moved it and let her put the shirts away. "I guess. I don't even know if you'd call it going out. Mostly we just hung out."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

And that, finally, sounded less curious and vulnerable. It sounded like Eric had finally busted a gasket. She didn't look at him, but she didn't think she had to.

"I didn't tell anybody," she'd said.

"Yeah, but why didn't you tell me?" Eric had asked. And she'd found herself with no answers to give him at all.

So now her acceptance letter was stuck up on the fridge with a white-on-black "got milk?" magnet, she had never been to New York before in her life and was scared so bad she could barely think about August without starting to breathe too hard and sweat, and she'd made herself this stupid, stupid promise that before she left to be a counselor at Lake Michigan Summer Adventure Camp this year, it would be Mom's turn. Both to hear the truth and to ask all the questions she wouldn't have answers for.

Yeah, no pressure for Katie this year. Maybe if she got bored she could go defuse a bomb.

Mom was working on dinner in the kitchen when Katie finally steeled herself up on the way in from soccer practice, stirring peas and pearl onions around in a saucepan on the stove. She smiled at Katie when she came in, but it faded. She wouldn't forget that, whatever else about it she forgot, as time went by. How her mother's smile faded.

But she didn't get angry. There was no fight. They were by and large lackadaisical midwestern Methodists, saw the inside of a church maybe six times a year, on Easter and Christmas and Mother's Day and the occasional birthday or guilt-trip. She got no hellfire or brimstone out of her mother, only that thinning of her mouth, and an especially fixed look into the vegetables she was cooking. And who even knew what that meant? She didn't think Mom was angry, but she couldn't tell what Mom was: if it might even just be Eric's question clanging around in her head too. Yes no one, but why not me?

"I guess I'm not all that surprised," Mom said at last to the peas, and her face was pretty much blank, in a way that Katie only now suddenly cross-associated with Grandmamma. Also not exactly surprising, in its way. Mom knew a thing or two herself about staring down tornados. "I guess I don't have much to say. Except I want you to know your dad and I love you no matter what."

And that was the end of it. An anticlimax after all, and New York still looming overhead.

No matter what. Yes. She thought about that a lot, over the next few years, when she thought about coming out to her parents. About those three little words, and how they went with those other, more famous three little words. That magic power they seemed to have to make the whole sentiment into jail time.

We will always love you, Katie. You will never be free of our love; the faster you run, the faster it'll rattle along behind, like a tin can tied to a dog's tail. In spite of however hard you may try to slap it aside, to break its dark red heart, whatever crimes you might commit against it. Our love will still be there with you, and it will never give up. It'll rub you raw as a noose.

No big deal, anyway, all things considered. No horror story. No scars to show. She counseled at summer camp like always, and at the end of August rode in the minivan with her dad and all of what little she had in the world across half the country lengthwise. She tried to keep smiling. When they had unpacked into a dorm right smack in the middle of towering, crazed Manhattan, her out-of-breath dad gave her a squishy, sweaty hug and said he was proud of her, Katie, he hoped she knew that because he was so proud. And she couldn't help waiting for No matter what to come following behind -- the grim pallbearer in the dark tailcoat -- but it didn't. It never did. And when it didn't, she found that even in this new clamor of smog and honking horns, she could suddenly breathe a little easier.

---

December 13, 1952

My dearest Clora,

Merry Christmas! I say that very hopefully, since where I stand it is hard to imagine Christmas could possibly come in less than two weeks' time. California is another world. You may not believe it but it is as warm here by the sea as a Chicago July. I go out in short sleeves and open shoes each day, more like a beachcomber than a wife to the grocery. It is pleasant for now, but I wonder how I may tire of it in ten more years.

I was most sorry to hear that your mother is feeling poorly. Please send her my love, and take the best care of her. She is a woman with much more to give the world, like you yourself.

I've sent you and Mother Markham a postcard each. Do you see the way the horizon seems to almost curve, between all that blue and blue? I could walk outside, walk half a mile, and throw a stone into that water. It's true! Sometimes I even think I could strike the horizon-line with it, and it would ripple and crack, the illusion broken. Sometimes I believe that so much I don't dare try it. People have paid dearly for trying less foolish things. But you always said I had such an imagination.

---

May, 1945

Deirdre was infatuated with Clora almost at once. It waited no longer than the passage of the initial fog of grief for Leslie, for the life she had anticipated but never entirely believed would come to pass, and even this, she sensed, had only been a decorous sleight-of-hand on her own mind's part. Because, she supposed, she had always been infatuated with Clora, because Leslie had also been infatuated with Clora, in his way; his enthusiasm had been contagious. He'd called her "Sister Clora," as though she were a nun, or it were only one step shy of "Dame Clora" or "Duchess Clora," and told legends of her bitter tongue. "When we were kids Daddy had the strap," he said, in bed one night with his hands woven into hers, fingers fitted tight as light and shadow; "but if you tried anything funny it was Clora who'd give you the lashing." Leslie always talked himself hoarse after they made love, like too much had just happened and he needed to get his thoughts in order. She had nodded then, even laughed, but down inside her head she had been unable to imagine the terror of being snapped at by Leslie's older sister: who over their first lunch at the yachting club had pushed her nerves -- fine silverware, fine linen, two-bit little Deirdre Kelly in her ten-dollar dress, trying to touch nothing down to the chair she sat in -- over into mute panic. She had been beautiful like a frost on the crops, her dark hair twisted up behind her head, her long swan's neck arched, her dark eyes swift, assessing, dismissing. She had known every fork to use and when, and Deirdre had felt strongly that she'd barely escaped with her life.

Sharing a house with Clora, though, she found that a withering tongue was only the tip of Clora, not really even the truth of her at all. The truth of her was that she was more like Leslie than Deirdre would ever have dared imagine, or than Leslie would have, she expected. The quick temper and quicker wit, the energy that pushed and pushed and frustrated them if they were stopped by common, human inability, the mirror-polished steel down at their cores that an especially kind observer could call bravery. Certainly Clora had needed to be brave. She had lost not only her own husband, as Deirdre had, but Deirdre's too.

So she was taken with Clora, who belonged in glittering ballrooms with pride arching her swan's neck, but instead took shorthand in a gritty newspaper office and swept up a dim-lit brick townhouse at night, who seemed to Deirdre like a diamond knocked out of its setting and rolled under the rug. Although she knew well enough that that wasn't the truth of Clora, either; only her own girlish Cinderella dreams. In reality they were just three widows, doing what they could. There was still money, but Clora and Leslie's mother had put it aside to let it continue its own monstrous growth, like mushrooms in a damp cellar. Deirdre suspected sometimes that Mother Markham was a little afraid of that money, that she would manage to offend it somehow with her unworthy touch. If so, Deirdre could more than understand. She took a job of her own, a secretary in the office of a steel mill the Markhams might quite possibly still own, at least on paper. She wore suits and hats, and walked down the street alone. It was what Clora would have done. What Clora was doing.

She had loved Leslie, and so she had made herself become what he needed, whatever the cost. She had sat in the cockpit of his noisy little plane and watched the world move underneath her, transforming bit by bit until it had fully become Minnesota, until he landed on a bumpy strip outside the city and grinned at her like the sun, and she had not been frightened then, or so much as allowed herself to think of fear. In her love and trust she had forgotten gravity. And now she loved Clora; and for her would do the same.

On a Tuesday morning she woke up, as she would on any other, washed her face and brushed her teeth in her slip, put on a dressing gown. The light was so dim in the townhouse it left her puffy-eyed and thick in the head for hours; the windows were narrow, and time had left them resistant to even the firmest of washings. She found Clora at the small square kitchen table, half-dressed with her hair already up, reading the newspaper. A cigarette was burning in her hand, but when she glanced up and saw Deirdre she snubbed it out.

"You don't have to do that," she said, her smile only faint; she was concentrating on her earrings, which she was still trying to put in, her head cocked on one side like a listening dog. "You're up early."

"I couldn't get back to sleep," Clora said. She took a sip of her coffee and then got up to fetch Deirdre a cup. Her voice was low, rich, cultured: a Vassar alto. Although she hadn't finished at Vassar, of course; she'd been married before that. She touched the paper on the table with the tips of her fingers. "So I came down and read the news. The war is over, in Germany at least. I think we must even have won, or else we'd know about it."

Deirdre stared at her, then at her hand. Of course the headline said VICTORY in it, in bold type no less; Clora was only being herself. But that wasn't why she couldn't stop looking.

She had wondered sometimes, guiltily -- especially moving in with his mother and sister -- if she hadn't mourned Leslie too little. If she hadn't been too ready to be done with her grief, too quick to move back out into the world and be a woman alone again, her husband gone, her fortunes unanchored. But the truth that she suspected was that she had mourned him as much or as little as any war widow; that she had started early, taken a running start, the first second that he had left home. Turning away from her in his bomber jacket, his hand raised and smile as large as ever, a photograph already fading.

It was August before the war was fully over, before it came to such an apocalyptic and appalling end in the theatre where Leslie had been a player. By then it was hard for her to believe there had been any sort of victory at all.

Where they stood, after all, not much changed.

---

September, 1998

Katie spent her whole first month in Manhattan not admitting to herself that she wanted to go home.

It wasn't that she didn't like it there, it was more that there were just so many details she couldn't make a picture of there at all, a good one or a bad one. It was too big, too much, all the time and there was nowhere to get away from it. She couldn't sleep at night; the light through the blinds and the amount of traffic noise might as well have made it day, even on the tenth floor of her dormitory. She got lost on the subway on the weekends. Gruelingly, stupidly lost. Like Brooklyn lost. She forged her brave way to classes and her even more brave way to LGBT meetings, but didn't really make friends. Her high school in Champaign had had a graduating class of 70, at least 55 of whom she knew down to their parents and preferred music. She was swamped.

But it was a new world, too, and every now and then, even now, inexplicable joy would come bubbling out from under all her terror and overload. She saw amazing things every freaking day, most of them astonishing little human dramas. She passed a tiny elderly woman, her white hair perfectly coiffed, with something enormous from Starbucks in one gracefully gnarled hand and a puffy little dog tucked under the other arm, a little dog that had somehow been induced to be exactly the same delicate shell-pink shade as her silk suit. (She couldn't stop staring into space the entire way back on the subway, totally arrested. Did she dye it every day? Did she dye her dog every day? Or were all of her clothes just the exact same color pink? She couldn't decide which idea was more appallingly fantastic.) The leaves turned colors with absolute conviction in Washington Square Park, cutting the sky into slices of blue between their reds and golds. A homeless man told her she was beautiful. On the hundredth same exact walk back from class she noticed a statue on a building that she'd never seen before, high above street level, and for a second could only gape at the amount of the city that took place above her head, far above the street, how beautiful they had made parts of buildings so high up that people could hardly even see. That was New York too, Katie was starting to discover; little treasures that sometimes came toppling out of the whole schizophrenic parade. You just had to have the confidence to stop for a second and look around.

She was working on that.

Her roommate -- straight, but also a frequent LGBT visitor; she seemed to be friends with every last gay boy in the freshman class, or at least to think she was -- invited her out to a party one Friday night, at another dorm a few blocks away. Drinking had been pretty much the only thing to do in Illinois, and she handled the vodka like an expert, and ended up in an epic futon conversation with a girl named Ennis, which she freely admitted was pretty weird. Ennis was so tiny she made Katie feel like the elephant girl, trunk and tail flopping out everywhere. She had wrists the size of rulers and a fringe of dark brown hair in a pixie-cut across her forehead, big black-framed Buddy Holly glasses. She had a big nose, though, which made her look birdlike and friendly. She was in the theater school, but where else would she be?

"I used to read people's palms in high school," she said, and laughed. She had a big laugh Katie liked, where she tipped back her long skinny neck and let it go. "Like that was my dorky thing. There was a thing about it in the yearbook and everything. Palm-reader! Mostly I just made shit up, I didn't fucking know how to read anybody's palm."

"You wanna make some shit up about me?" Katie had said, offering her palm and grinning. There was something about Ennis that just made her want to grin. Ennis took Katie's hand in both of her own; she needed them both. Katie's hand looked like a big slab of meat in her little pencil fingers, a big T-bone with the lines crisscrossing the palm. She was pretty drunk and the thought made her snort laughter, and Ennis laughed too, her slight weight falling into Katie's sturdier shoulder.

"What?"

"My hand looks like a steak," Katie said without thinking, explaining and apologizing in one go. It didn't make any sense, but Ennis cracked up, laughed so hard she had tears in her eyes.

She didn't remember later any of what Ennis made up about her, but she remembered making out with her in a stranger's suite bathroom, pressed up between the tiny sink and the wall that was too close to it, Ennis's glasses folded up on the sink-rim behind the rank of unknown toothbrushes. Ennis's tiny hand pushed up her shirt and under the cup of her bra, flickering across her nipple, making her feet lose traction and slide out across the tile floor as she whimpered. She'd taken off her shoes at some point, maybe had to before coming in to the party. She unbuttoned Ennis's tiny doll jeans and worked her big hand down in there, crushed between tight panties and her skin, inchworming down past her pubic hair between her thighs. She had a big clitoris, though, which seemed like the last crowning absurdity, and she pressed her face into the crook of Ennis's shoulder to keep from laughing. It almost took two fingers, and she held Ennis up, against her bigger body on the creaking sink. Somebody pounded on the door at some point, but eventually went away again.

Ennis shivered against her like a rabbit, grappled at belt-loops on her jeans, came making a high and nearly theatrical whine against her neck. She kissed Katie and worked her own hand into Katie's pants, ground her fingers around. She tried to put a finger in but Katie stopped her; she wasn't always great with that, and the angle was all wrong. It seemed like it took her forever to come, and when she did it was like a train wreck: all jangle and crash, nothing left but twisted metal.

Everyone still there was pretty much dead drunk by the time they came out, but Katie felt almost sober again. They sprayed the whole bathroom with a stranger host's perfume until it stank of homicidal flowers, and staggered out laughing like loons. Ennis shambled off to bed, waving with her tiny fingers, but not before she wrote her number down on the back of a Thai delivery menu; but somehow Katie lost it in her jacket pocket, no matter how she rustled through later or turned the whole thing upside down. She never saw her again -- but then, there was no way to be sure that wouldn't have happened anyway.

Learning the city, learning not to be scared. It's okay to look into other people's faces, to walk a little slower. Take a few deep breaths. Look up more.

---

June 17, 1953

My dearest Clora,

Thank you so much for the news of Mother Markham, and for keeping me in both your thoughts in this difficult time. I am most pleased to hear she is still in good spirits, at the least. I wonder if there is anything nobler any of us can do, than to keep our spirits high, to lift our heads and whistle our way into stormy seas. Am I a terrible bore, Clora, an overgrown schoolgirl filled with patronizing sayings? But we can think of so little to say at times like these, I think the sayings serve us best. At least they have been tried before and have at least held a little water. I send you both my love and wish I could be with you.

For my part I do not think I have much news, at least not in the face of what you've been through. There is a tense, strange atmosphere around Richard lately. He is terribly angry, I think, although he speaks of it little. I think I might be angry too if I were more in a position to understand, but Richard makes deals all day with army men who have all sorts of things to say, about Senator McCarthy and the Jew and his wife with the pleasant faces who have been sentenced to die in New York, and he knows much more to be angry about than I suspect I ever will. He has told me what he believes, but I will not repeat it. Other women's husbands have been arrested for less than their putting in a letter what their husbands say in private. I know a few.

I don't know much else, but I think after the war was done, America became too quiet. Don't you think that might be true? All of a sudden it was quiet, and we all could clearly hear one another's breathing, like on an elevator stopped between floors. We looked around and saw all at once who was on board with us.

Which reminds me that I have thought about what you said, about perhaps trying to write a novel. A novel! But it is not so absurd. Busier people than I have written them, and I feel as though I think enough strange things to make a novel from every day. The only question is of who in their right mind would want to read such a thing.

I think about you always. Perhaps if I wrote a novel, it should be about you. Then at least I would know that I would want to read it, if only to refresh my memory.

---

November, 1945

Clora never fell in love with anyone, but that wasn't entirely true; there had been a girl at Vassar, a girl a year her senior, and they had traded letters and dried flowers and delicate silk ribbons, any trinkets an envelope could hold. Anyone watching would probably have called it innocent, a girlish rehearsal for things to come, but that was the safety of being a girl, wasn't it? Still, they had kissed only once, and there hadn't been much more to it than that, but Clora had loved her for a time, most likely. It grew harder and harder to be sure with age. And she began to love Deirdre only when Deirdre set fire to the medical bill.

Mother had migraines (which the family doctor had diagnosed as hysteria up until perhaps five years ago, and probably still resented being forced to renege), intermittently, and at last at Clora's insistence had seen a specialist over the summer. The heat -- and grief, let us not forget grief, what mother's body can bear to have outlived its own son -- had driven the attacks for the first time in years to the point of the unbearable, and Clora had tired of bringing meals up to her mother's pitch-dark room. Which wasn't exactly very far out of the ordinary, but enough, she had decided, was enough. The specialist had been full of mildly useful notions and a much more useful prescription, and the bill had been paid in full -- at last requiring a dip into Daddy's estate, but what could it matter? But there had been some sort of error, which Clora was certain was the office's and the office insisted was hers, and the bill was sent again and again and again, no matter how far she went to gather proof that the money had been paid.

Clora threw the fourth bill down on the kitchen table, on the verge of fury, digging her teeth into her cigarette. "I'm going down there," she said, rattling her fingers on it like a snare drum. "This instant. I don't care what comes of it. I'm not trusting anyone who can't keep their own damn paperwork straight with a brain, for God's sake."

Deirdre just nodded, as if to agree with a prediction about the weather. The upper half of her hair was back in a simple twist on the crown of her head that day, her lipstick a pale pink. Clora would remember these things only later. "Could I have a match, Clora?"

She rooted back into her purse for the matchbook, not even thinking, her teeth just clamping all the harder. She talked through them, her voice low. Hard. "They know we're on our own here," she said, almost in undertone, handing off the matches. "They know. They'd never get away with it otherwise. That's the whole... what on earth are you doing?"

Deirdre didn't say anything, but what did she need to? She'd already touched the match's flame to the corner of the bill, and dropped it in the ashtray.

They both only stood there a moment at the table, staring down like startled schoolchildren at a captured frog or turtle. The flame catching in dancing miniatures in both their eyes.

Then Clora glanced over at Deirdre, and saw the smile struggling on her lips, the pert sweep of her hair back behind her shoulders as she tossed her head and looked up, looked back. Half-defiant, half-embarrassed, but all as certain as could be. "I don't know much about money," Deirdre began; but before she could get any further, Clora had already started to laugh.

Becoming aware of Deirdre was a slow process, full of fits and starts. She was so gentle, so ready to help, that she faded a bit, but she was already so much older than the nervous girl in new jewelry at lunch at the club had been. Hadn't she thought it herself? Deirdre was very pretty, but that was something in a woman that so seldom seemed to have anything to do with any other, even a woman like Clora, who sometimes found herself in strange blind alleys with a hand around her wrist. Deirdre was shy, she was anxious, but she was not weak. She would sing, softly, in the kitchen, when she thought she was alone: Don't start collecting things; give me my rose and my glove...

Winter sped windy and bitter into the city, and Clora put aside enough to buy Deirdre a necklace for her birthday: a pearl at the heart of a gold rose. She put it on Deirdre as she lifted her hair up out of the way, the pale nape of her neck golden itself in the light of a frugal oil lantern.

Deirdre and fire, in the wake of the war.

---

December, 1999

"Why are we even here?" Katie yelled, and then collapsed into laughter at her own volume. Inez laughed too, going sprawling across the arm of Katie's she was clinging on to. Whether it was because someone bumped into her or just because was up to debate.

"Because this is HISTORY and you need to be in Times Square when HISTORY is happening," Inez yelled back practically in her ear, and she winced a little but kept laughing. They were both full of champagne and takeout sandwiches, Chloe just full of the sandwiches since she didn't drink. She was behind them, staying attached by holding on to one of the zippers on Inez's leather jacket, with serene authority.

"History's cold and I think it just stepped on my foot," Katie said, but Inez only kept laughing and whooping. Something must be going on with the ball. Chloe leaned forward, putting her chin in the lopsided V between their shoulders.

"Is it time, is it time?"

"Do you hear anybody counting, bitch?" Inez yelled back at her, jovially, and Chloe flipped her the finger and then mimed turning down an invisible volume knob on Inez's neck. Inez made as if to yell in her ear in response, but Katie gently separated them. "Quit it, quit it, I'm watching."

"Watching what?" Chloe said, but then Inez erupted into bouncing and cheering, throwing her arms up into the air. Countdown hadn't started, but it was approaching.

She'd gone home for Christmas, as over the summer, and each time found Illinois miraculously unchanged: Mom in a book group, Dad with a new computer, Eric doing community theater and demanding a lip piercing without much success, Grandmamma the undisputed queen of any activity she decided on, mostly complicated and exhausting dinners at her new condo. Katie saw a few high school friends, got along okay with everyone, did everything she was asked but mostly sat sidelined, bemused by what passed for busy. Getting on the plane to O'Hare had felt like going home, it was true, but she was almost but not quite surprised when getting on the plane back to LaGuardia felt even more so. And now -- well, she'd even let herself be dragged out to Times Square on New Year's Eve, if you could imagine that. Last year she'd been home for all of the holidays through January, and glad for it; just the idea would have given her the screaming horrors, and this was the biggest New Year's Eve of them all, the biggest one she'd probably see in her whole life. She'd sort of wanted to spend tonight being the pain-in-the-ass friend who keeps pointing out that the new millennium doesn't actually start until 2001, but as hard as she tried not to get excited, she couldn't help herself. Popular consensus insisted that a whole new page was rolling over tonight, a new digit over on the left to prove it. You got swept along.

She kept her eyes trained on the glittering ball, which they had to be at least a half a mile from; they were all the way back down 42nd Street, just squinting to see anything, and they were still pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with what seemed like everyone else in the whole city. Before much longer, the whole city started counting. Inez on her arm, Chloe on her shoulder, Katie raised her voice and counted with them.

---

February 3, 1954

My dearest Clora,

I hope you'll forgive me for being brief. I haven't been well.

But I did receive the wedding announcement. They are so lovely. You have always had the best taste of anyone I have ever known, I've often thought so. But what a surprise - I never even knew you and John were engaged. In fact I cannot remember having seen you mention his name.

All my congratulations, Clora. Please give my love to Mother Markham.

---

January, 1946

One day was much like another, but some nights Deirdre had to work late; and it was on one of these that she came in in the evening and found the lights down as usual to save on the electric, Clora's shoes in a tumble in the hall, Clora herself in a tumble as well on the loveseat in the parlor. Her hair was loose, a dark curtain over her shoulder, and her face seemed to sag with weight. There was a drink on the sideboard, ice and some liquid in one of the crystal tumblers that Mother Markham's move to this tiny house had rendered utterly incongruous. The liquid was unknowable, a pale translucent brown.

"Oh, Deirdre," she said, when Deirdre had been standing in the door for a few seconds. On an intake of breath, as though she had just thought of something she had been meaning to tell. "You should go on upstairs. Sister Clora's quite indisposed, I'm afraid." Her mouth stretched in a tottering line. Deirdre frowned, stepping closer to the sofa. The smell of Clora's drink was faint but evil.

"What's the matter? Are you ill?"

"Only drunk," Clora said, and then laughed in a bright peal. It shocked Deirdre a little, but mainly because as tired as Clora looked, she didn't sound tired. She sounded angry. Furious, even. "Drunk as a skunk, I think. Such talents ladies learn alone in the city." She drew up her head a little, taking a moment to settle it in place. Her eyes, regarding Deirdre, were narrow, almost suspicious, but all she said more was, "Or in certain parts of it."

"Clora -- " Deirdre began, gently, but Clora had sat up all the way now, one of her long legs toppling from the side of the sofa. Her disarray had pulled the seams at the backs of her stockings ragged.

"I suppose you wouldn't know," she said, and then groped out for her drink. Her hair fell in a curtain across her cheek; somehow the sight of it squeezed at Deirdre's heart. "Or would you?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Of course not," Clora pronounced, half-humorously. She drained half of what was left in the glass, and set it down, watching it with an air of bemusement. "What the hell's the point," she said, mostly to herself, the way it sounded. "I'm so tired."

"I should help you up to bed," Deirdre said. It was hard not to let her voice shake. This was nothing she had ever even begun to suspect. Clora laughed for no reason she knew, this time in a caw, and waved off her approach yet again.

"I'd think again, dear... ...Deirdre." It was impossible to tell if 'dear' was actually what she had said, or only a trip and stutter of the name. In the end, Deirdre supposed it didn't matter. She came close anyway, bending her knees in her straight skirt in front of Clora, the slave girl before a reclining Roman empress. Only one long year had made the empress so old. Clora cocked her head, giving Deirdre that narrow look again. "Dee-Dee? Leslie called you that, didn't he."

Deirdre couldn't help herself; she dropped her eyes to the floor. The wooden boards were knotted and whorled, dark and shrunken with age. They creaked with every step. "Yes," she said, barely in a whisper.

"Dee-Dee," Clora said again, musing, and gooseflesh wandered up Deirdre's spine. "And what about Leslie?"

"What?" She glanced up again, tricked into it, and found Clora's eyes too arresting to look away from. "What about -- "

"Leslie," Clora exploded, nearly shouted, shocking again in the dim quiet of the house. She came forward half off the couch, her hair hanging, looking quite mad. "I'm asking about Leslie, you stupid little girl -- was he? Would he know what I mean? Was my brother a fairy, was Leslie a fairy, that's what I'm asking! Did he marry you for an excuse, did he take boys, did he fly off over the ocean hoping to be packed in with a bunch of men!"

Deirdre stared into her eyes. For a second she thought she would fall back, pull away, run from the room, but she didn't do that. Her lips twitched for denials; her eyes prickled and stung to cry, to armor herself with tears. That had always been Leslie's weakness, when she cried. He would fold her hand in his, and murmur in her hair Don't cry, Dee-Dee, don't cry. The world isn't over yet.

"I don't know," was all she somehow said instead, in a tiny little voice scarcely a whisper. "He... he never said. I knew there were men -- not boys -- there had been men, but..." Clora's face never moved an inch; it might as well have been stone. She rubbed the back of her hand, her unsteady hand, across her own mouth. "It didn't seem to matter, any more than women would," she said, into Clora's eyes. "I loved him."

And maybe it was too simple, but it was true.

The silence seemed long. "I know," Clora said, finally, at the end of it, and her voice had softened again. "I know. I'm sorry. I'm being an awful brute." She made a tiny sound in her throat, possibly a laugh, and sat back on the loveseat again. "I think I should have been a man, and Leslie should have been a girl," she said, after another slow, brooding pause -- one in which Deirdre was entirely unable to move. "The eldest son, all daughters after. That would have been something, at least; and he could have wasted all the time he liked." Clora's eyes flickered to her face, and she half-smiled, reaching out her hand to brush fingertips on Deirdre's cheek. They were soft, but callused. "I might even have been your husband instead. What do you think?"

Deirdre could think nothing, and in the end that was what she was able to say: her eyes wide, her breath caught in her throat. Eventually Clora's fingers fell away, and she stared at her hands in her lap.

"What's the point," she said again, to them. "We get by and we manage and we go on surviving, and there's some in the bank if we ever can't make our way. There's plenty more who don't have the luxury, too. But what's the point? Why even bother? Mother's shut up in her room with the shades pulled, I'm in the bars watching other women have a good time, you're home in the parlor mending skirts like you think I am your husband. What for? We've all got holes in our chests. We're just... passing time."

She reached for her drink again, but this time Deirdre could move. She leaned forward on her knees, took the glass before Clora's hand could reach it, and plucked it away, then as an afterthought stood up to remove it entirely. Clora did not stare up at her exactly but merely looked, eyebrows raised, eyes mild. Amused, even? Possibly. Certainly the anger seemed to have drained out of her.

"That stuff is dear," she said, nodding toward the glass, when Deirdre had no more than tensed her muscles to go to the kitchen. "Don't waste it."

Still meeting her eyes, Deirdre stood a moment longer; and then drained the glass in two swallows. It burned like fire and tasted like poison. She never let her face change. Clora's brows managed to climb even higher, and Deirdre thought there was even a smile buried back behind her mouth -- and then she was on her feet, fast enough to be frightening. Steady as sober, standing a head over Deirdre, hand clutched into her arm. Eyes and mouth so close. It was frightening, but Deirdre's body took a wrong turn somewhere: her nipples tightened and stiffened under her blouse, and between her legs a wet heat struggled to unfold.

"Then you tell me," Clora said, almost in a whisper down into her face, as though Deirdre had spoken instead. The alcohol was thick on her breath, but somehow not as unpleasant as it might be. Her hand was tight but still gentle. "What's the god damned point? What are you even here for?"

Her voice was gentle, when she found it. Old. Wise. Not like her own at all; but it must be, because it told the truth.

"You're the point, Clora," Deirdre said. She reached up and pushed loose dark hair from Clora's brow, hair that was just beginning to take on a frost of silver. "I thought you knew."

She did not quite have to lean up on her toes to kiss Clora's mouth. She did not quite have to reach and pull her down. Clora's lips tasted of whiskey, but so did her own. She had thought it was a sisterly kiss, but it stopped being one fairly quickly, and she wasn't sure what it was after that. But Clora's arm gripped suddenly around the small of her back, and reeled her in; so it seemed like Clora knew, like Clora seemed to know all things, and that was a relief. She could trust Clora to lead, even now, even always. Her love defied fear. Gravity was a rumor, the ground a myth.

The crystal tumbler ended up falling from her slackening fingers, saved by the cushions of the loveseat; and the last dregs of whiskey would leave the upholstery only slightly, but irrevocably, stained.

Deirdre was still wearing one of her suits, and in Clora's bedroom the jacket wound up behind the door, her blouse open, her hair disarrayed. Clora knelt, unfastening her skirt, and kissed the vague shape of Deirdre's hip through the silk of her slip as she slid it down. Her breath was hot, humid, shaky. Her hands were so long and delicate, piano-player hands, tea-server hands. Deirdre bent, touched Clora's face, drew her back up.

Clora's bed was made for one, and Deirdre ended laid out on it on her back, her blouse spread like wings, with Clora on her hips. Her brassiere gave way, and her slip, but the girdle and garter-belts were too much trouble; Clora's fingers just found the cracks between fabric and skin, let elastic and nylon pin them. Precious as the crystal, these days, the nylon, but both of them beyond caring. She twisted her head into the pillow until her hair was an unfathomable muss, and Clora pinched and rolled her nipple, kissed her, kissed her, pressed a hand at the fork of her thighs and worked her way beneath the edge of Deirdre's panties, in to the center. Her long finger sank into the soft wet there, found the little bud at its high center, and set to its work. What were they if not accustomed to operating in limited space?

She thrust her hips up in a circular grind as Clora found a more certain rhythm; her mind drifted across the darkness, thinking of Leslie's sunny grin, the swan's arch of Clora's white neck in happier times, the sweet play of light off Spring Lake as she'd first seen Minneapolis. As her heart raced, as her breath began to be so fast it hurt her throat, she opened her eyes just a crack, and looked up in the dim light into Clora's face, hung with the dark curtain of loose hair, lips parted, as unguarded as Deirdre had ever seen. Her eyes filled with that same sparkling lakelight, and Deirdre was not at all afraid, not even now. She was in hands that would not let her fall.

Her climax was sweet, huge, endless; her mouth gaped wide but let out nothing but breath, and it did not surprise her that she could be so taken into warm darkness and yet still mindful of mothers and neighbors. She caught her breath puddled on Clora's bed, her fingers relaxing out of the pillow, the muscles of her thighs and inside her twitching and fluttering.

Then she drew herself up on the bed beside Clora and fumbled for the clasps of Clora's dress; and proved herself, as always, ready to learn.

PART TWO