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element to her temperament that would be misinterpreted by those who did not live with her as sexual passion. To her husband, it was the element of uncertainty. Would she take the joke or would they quarrel? In public, would she swallow her melancholy or, turning away from the shop window with its rending display of skins and furs, would she go ahead and cry? Perhaps, she hoped, to her husband the uncertainty was also understood as sexual passion. Perhaps when she cried on the street corner and he said, “What is this with you? What is this thing?” he was really thinking quite clearly of the friction of their parts, the cachinnation of their immoderately creaky bed, the humors of their various desires.
    Prior to her and her husband's life together, when she did not think of what she was doing as deliberately living a life, she had been confused by the parameters of possible behavior. For example, when she saw something she wanted, say a pair of blue silk panties, or a ring, or a bole of sourdough bread still steaming from its cross, when could she reach out her hand and take it and when must she occupy herself some other way, her hands in her pockets, in her mouth, folding the hem of her shirt? For example, when she found someone to whom she was attracted—by their laugh, or their walk, or their hand on her forearm, rattling her forearm as if it were a bone in a cage—could she turn to look back at them over her shoulder? Could she sweep all the pint glasses from the table, erect and trembling with anger? With want? Couldshe take their finger into her mouth? Up to the knuckle? Further? More than one finger? Could she try for the hand?
    She had often been described as a difficult woman. People said this to her face with the same tone they might use to explain the difference in pricing between, say, the regular eggs and the organic, brown ones; the picked lobster meat purchased by the pound and the whole, fresh lobster still flexing its blue tail in the tank. She took this in the spirit with which it was intended. People also frequently described her husband as her savior. This she was not supposed to hear, but did, and with such frequency that sometimes when she stepped out onto their terra-cotta tiled porch of an evening to listen to the rain fiddling around in the azaleas, she would hear the description of her husband as her savior as a sort of ambient hum in the neighborhood air. It was a blue hum, like the dusk itself. When it got under the sodium street lights it flared briefly green.
    Regardless of their histories, both shared and otherwise, she understood her sons as a new beginning for her and her husband. Children are often figured this way—a point along a time-line at which, in sudden confusion or teleological upheaval, everything changes. Her sons felt to her like a reflex. Her response to them was like their response to her when she was inattentive, or blindly feeling about the darkened house at three in the morning, and held them insecurely against her breast. Her reaction to them was to yip a piercing warning cry; her reaction was to nip. In this way, warning and nipping, a large amount of time passed very quickly.
    One day, one of the sons called to announce he was getting married. She was sitting right by the phone when it rang, perched at the very edge of a high stool at the kitchen counter, her hands gripping the edge of the kitchen counter as if at any moment she would leap from the stool and race across the room, though she had been sitting that way for twenty minutes at least. As thephone rang she thought to herself, “There is the phone, ringing again,” and counted the rings and considered who it might be, always coming back to the sons because there were so many of them and they had various, often pressing, needs.
    In the time that had passed, she had kept her figure, had in fact improved her figure through worry and want and the constant silent expression of male desire which, she considered,