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the majestic difference between then and now , the way my stomach slopes and bunches in new patterns, my skin the color of sickly milk. The angry scar.
    When I was nineteen, in a hotel room far away, I stood in the shower with a man twice my age whose hair streaked dark beneath the water. We were in Rome, and he was a stranger, more or less. He had spotted me from the audience of a performance of Massenet’s Cendrillon while I pranced around as one of the spirits who send the opera’s lovers into an enchanted sleep. A minor part, but I caught his attention. His hands ran down my slick side, over my ribs, and into the hollow of my waist.
    I can’t remember his name. Perhaps I could if I tried.
    He whispered to me and I closed my eyes so that the water seemed to be rain. Soft and warm, his voice tickled the coiling hollow of my ear, brushing the small hairs deep inside, near the drum. What did he say to me? Only silly lovers’ nonsense. I’m totally disarmed, I’d give you anything. What did he do, when he wasn’t wooing young women in the dark of night? I never knew. He might have been a banker, a preschool teacher, a surgeon. I’m naked of myself , he said. You have everything. I don’t want anything for myself anymore.
    Later that night I climbed out of bed onto my toes. Hair still wet and starting to curl. He slept, the stranger, his face crushed against the pillow, while I pulled on snagged silk stockings and tugged a dress down over my nose. I picked up my purse, made sure my own hotel key was inside, and left him sleeping, empty and new.
    Now I clutch Kara, water rushing around my feet and down the drain, and beneath me my legs quiver with the unaccustomed strain of crouching. Resting the heel of my hand against the rim of the tub, I hoist myself into a standing position and wrap a towel around Kara, tufting it up the back of her head. I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt so keenly the various strengths and pressures of my toes against the ground, the balls of my feet against the tile. I could easily slip.
    For some minutes I stand still, taking shallow breaths, afraid to move lest we both fall down.
    M y daughter’s face reminds me of past lovers. How do you live with that? How do you let yourself feel that complicated rush of adoration and not lose your mind? It happens every day, every time.
    And of course she also calls to mind the better people I have known, the ones who wouldn’t cringe away from the task of singing to a newborn baby. The ones who were glad to sacrifice what they had so their children could live. Kara and I, we go on in spite ofthem. We breathe the air they gasped out with their last exhalations, swallow their dust by the happy accident of being in the world.
    So , I tell myself, think of a lesson. Something Ada taught you about living. I remember being six and frankly annoyed that my babenka had signed me up for the children’s choir at a church in Pulaski Park. Up to that point I’d only sung for her or my mother at home, and I wasn’t entirely sure that music should be so widely shared. Not when it made me feel so open, so undone.
    “It will be healthy for you, darling,” Baba Ada told me, “to sing in front of a crowd. You need to learn presentation.”
    She was right. Sight and sound have a natural link, since sound is a primal trigger, an indication of where to look for signs of danger, water, food. We peer into trees to find hiding predators and watch dancers to see how their limbs correspond to the strain of a cello, the beat of a drum. A deaf man, if properly trained, could track the progress of a song by the flicker of a singer’s throat, the clench of muscles around lymph nodes and collarbones.
    But I was young and single-minded and didn’t want to learn. Walking from the train on the way to my first rehearsal, I dragged my feet, scraping the toes of my once-polished Mary Janes. It was March, and gray snow still gathered in the corners of the streets where it had been