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of an Arctic front. Lake Superior, surely our most inhospitable body of water, was roaring under a glittery sky only a few blocks from the house. I hadn’t minded the delay, because beneath my breastbone I knew that this would be the first time I had spent more than a night away from my mother. It all seemed a mistake because it was barely three months and the baby hadn’t made its presence felt. I wanted to be either home or back in Duluth, in the hotel where we could see all of the harbor during the few hours the blizzard let up. We had had a wonderful room-service dinner sitting by the window; then Mother began to cry and I comforted her with more strength than I owned. I liked the snow-laden forest and hills, so unlike Nebraska, on the road between Duluth and Marquette.
    Mother’s cousin, Warren, was in his early forties and a game biologist for the Department of the Interior, and hiswife, Maureen, a plump vigorous woman, taught drama at the local college. Warren was slender, quiet, contemplative, obsessed with birds and mammals, while Maureen was loud, hearty, profane, the first woman I ever met who swore a lot. In fact, the first thing she said at the door was “Jesus H. Christ, what a beauty!” For some reason I laughed, and she embraced me. But I cried for an hour or so when Mother left the next morning, so Maureen insisted I go to a play rehearsal with her. I was abashed sitting in a small auditorium watching the students speak their parts in Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding. It had never occurred to me that people could speak that passionately out loud. Grandfather had read Shakespeare to me but this was raw and direct. Several of the men sat down next to me during a break but I was too shy to say much. One of the men, a graduate student from Chicago, was unbelievably handsome and this made me nervous. He was dressed in the fashion of the bohemians I had seen in a photo essay in Life magazine. Maureen waved the men away, whispering to me, “No wonder you’re pregnant.”
    The time passed quickly because I was given so much schoolwork to do and on a level beyond my capacity. Warren tossed my schoolbooks aside and put me on a science program of his own devising. Maureen did the same in the humanities, screeching “Puppy shit” as she threw my textbook on English and American literature into the fireplace. She taught me what she called “living literature” rather than the writers she loathed in the text—Pope, Dryden, Tennyson, William Cullen Bryant, Howells Markham. Her favorites were Keats and Yeats, Dickens, Twain, Melville, Whitman, and William Faulkner, who was difficult at first, though I identified closely with Light in August. Maureen also started me on a rigorous study of Spanish which I hated at the time but have been grateful for ever since. They both strongly disapproved of the country-Western music station I listened to all day but decided I must need the music in order to endure it. The music made me homesick but had the familiarity of old and favorite clothes. Duane’s favorite singer was Hank Williams, who Maureen admitted had a certain quality she called duende, a Spanish gypsy term for “ghost” or “soul.”
    Once Maureen came home from work early. I was in theshower and didn’t hear her and she found me standing nude in front of my bedroom mirror looking for signs of rumored baby. I was a little embarrassed after I dressed and sat down to review my schoolwork. She had a large tumbler of imported sherry and poured me a small glass. The Jerez sherry was an indulgence she had learned during the two years she had lived in Barcelona and Ibiza. She pushed the schoolwork aside and started to talk, more a slangish monologue than a lecture: “I certainly don’t believe that story about you screwing a pheasant-hunter but that’s your business, and right now it should matter to no one except you. You’re going to have a