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disproportionately large, as if there was a hat under her scarf? This head, on this skinny body, gave Phyllis the appearance of an alien; and she hardly grew bigger as she got closer. But neither did she look as though she’d been on an airplane for two days—or rather three airplanes for two days, first toiling over to London before catching the eastbound jumbo, then the hop from Mauritius, the Big Island, as the locals called it. No, it was Jean who looked disheveled, with her wind-ruined hair and rumpled linen, then the bandage on her eye that seesawed her sunglasses.
    “This place is a riot. Fabulous,” Phyllis said, taking in at a glance the tiny airport, making Jean feel instantly defensive. “Your eye! Your skin! ” Phyllis was peering closely at Jean, still gripping her arms from their hug. “I’ll give you my hat when I leave,” she announced with resolute generosity, unwrapping herself to show she indeed had one under the scarf, a narrowrimmed raffia, part boater, part cloche, neatly placed on her immaculate chin-length hair, which was still tucked girlishly behind her ears.
    Well, that didn’t take long, Jean thought, wondering if Mark would call this headgear a bloche or a cloater, and deciding that she absolutely, categorically, hated the word “fabulous.” Jean was irrationally enraged by the large quantity of Phyllis’s luggage—and they were waiting for a third bag.
    “Darn,” said Phyllis. “It’s my shoe bag. I bet someone’s stolen it.” She squinted at the uniformed and armed security guard, then at the barefoot kids hanging around the entrance scanning the new arrivals, sizing up tips.
    “Mom, I really don’t think anybody’s stolen your shoe bag,” Jean said. The relationship to shoes, as everyone knew, was a kind of litmus test for female equilibrium. Hadn’t Phyllis been a neat little packer in the old days, ever scornful of wheelies and garment bags, chic with just her carry-on? That was what Jean remembered from her mother’s visits to Oxford, watching through the rain-streaked window of the Randolph Hotel tearoomas Phyllis stepped out of a black London taxi, a complex fugue in brown, layers fashioned from the hides and hairs of at least four kinds of mountain dweller—alpaca, vicuña, llama, fox. No shoe bag in those days. “What happened to your packer’s principle, Mom: ‘Halve the clothes and double the money’?”
    “Well, how do you know I’ve abandoned it?” Phyllis replied, gamely enough. Jean, already worried about driving home in the dark, began casting about for someone to complain to. She had to wonder if more and bigger luggage signaled bloat elsewhere with her mother—amplified anxiety, panicky indecision, forgetfulness—and she felt a heavy presentiment of near and future trials. Never mind, she told herself. It was imperative that she manage the visit well: she was forty-five years old, nearly forty-six for Christ’s sake, even if for nearly half that time, for nearly half her life, she’d had Mark to share the load. In fact, she suddenly realized, over the years Phyllis had become his department.
    The shoe bag was finally found outside on the tarmac, where it had been off-loaded and forgotten; Jean added it to the already precarious cart and pushed it out to the parking lot and the lone car.
    “So, is Mark working terribly hard?”
    Wrestling the bags into the back, Jean understood just what she was getting at—Why the hell didn’t he come to meet me at the airport? She agreed that wedging bags into a small trunk was very much the sort of challenge Mark liked, though she wasn’t about to say so. “Yes, actually, he is. He’s working on a big account for kitchen appliances.”
    Phyllis, who’d left her hometown of Salt Lake City far behind, was an event planner at the New York Public Library, responsible for luncheons and fund-raisers and lavish dinners in the Great Hall. She didn’t choose the readings or entertainments but saw to the