When we were all sitting down Lally said to me: "Now, I want to hear all about you. How are things in that big bad city?"

"Sally lost her job," Ma said. "She quit, and she can't get it back."

"I'm freelancing," I said.

"Just another word for unemployed."

"Freelancing seems to be the thing these days," Lally said. "God, this salad dressing's divine, Bonnie, you'll have to give me the recipe." She started going on and on about some neighbor of ours who had a son who was a poet in New York and doing legal proofreading nights to pay the rent. She asked my sister, "And how did you say you made your living, dear?"

Marty yawned.

"She's a clown," I said. "She dresses up in a polka-dot suit and juggles at the South Street Seaport."

"You have to start somewhere." My mother smoothed her apron and smiled at Lally. "Now, how about dessert?"

After Lally left and Marty and I had loaded the dishwasher my sister retreated upstairs and I went into the living room and watched a couple of sitcoms. When I came into the kitchen for something to drink my mother was sitting at the table correcting papers. Flick, flick, flick. Marty and I used to imitate her on our already corrected school compositions and then hold them up shrieking: "I got a hundred!" It was one of the few things we did that could make Daddy look up from his newspapers.

I was leaning into the refrigerator and jumped at the sound of my mother's voice.

"I call Valeric and she says you're doing fine."

"She said fine?"

"She said progress."

"That's a little different, Ma."

"Maybe you don't need her anymore."

My mother's stare was level, telling me nothing.

"I think it's too soon to quit," I said, trying to keep my tone neutral.

"When do you think you're going to get better?"

This was what she used to say when I was a little girl, home from school with the mumps or the measles. In the first hours of an illness, my mother was tender and magnanimous, running out to indulge every whim: a special brand of orange soda, a stuffed animal, another box of crayons. But then I'd wake up one morning to her standing over me: "You've been sick for two days. When do you think you can go back to school?"

I could think of several answers to Ma's question: Therapy is a process, not an instant cure; someone who's just been discharged from a psychiatric hospital needs to be followed up; or even the desperate, I'll pay for it myself if I have to. They all sounded weak, unconvincing.

"It will probably take a little while. I'll let you know."

This was the wrong answera"I could tell from the look on her face.

"I don't say anything when you're in the hospital. I do all what Valeric says I should do, I even go to family therapy. But there's no result!"

"What do you mean, no result? What did you expect?"

"You still don't have decent job, you still see doctor all the time."

"Ma, it's only been a month!"

"I know all you do in Florida, your Aunty Mabel tells me. What kind of boy! Boy from the hospital!"

"Just leave Mel out of it."

"You're not so sick, you can fool around with this boy. You just feel sorry for yourself, I can tell. You think *Poor, poor Sally' and you imagine everything that's happen to you, what I do to spoil your childhood, terrible things about your daddy."

"You didn't spoil my childhood."

"You're so selfish, I'm embarrassed to speak about you to my friends. They all the time talk about their children, this one gets married, this one goes to law school, and what am I suppose to say? I have a crazy daughter? I spend so much money and she is crazier than before?"

I'd never understood the expression "to see red," but now a faint crimson bar appeared in the middle of my line of vision, so that I could only see the periphery of the scene, and not the focus, which was my mother sitting in the midst of her papers.

"You are a horrible person," I said. "You are not even a human being."

I turned and walked out of the kitchen. Behind me I heard her shouting, "We do everything for you, we send you to the best boarding school in America," and it was as if Daddy were speaking. I found that I could tune it out easilya"there seemed to be a switch in my brain designed specifically for this purpose.

I went up to my room and into my day pack I stuffed the following items: the carved wooden horse, my summer correspondence with Fran, the snapshot of Marty and me on the swing set on Coram Drive. Also a postcard from Lillith I found on my bureaua"a photograph of a giant hot fudge sundae with a message I couldn't quite make out, something about feast or famine. From Ma's bedroom I called a taxi to take me to the train station and then I went down to the living room to wait.

My mother came to stand in the doorway. "What are you doing?"

"I'm going back to New York."

"Too late to take the train."

I didn't answer.

"I can drive you to the station, if you want."

I picked up a copy of Newsweek from the coffee table and opened it.

The next time I looked up she had disappeared.

I studied the room, as if seeing it for the first time: the wooden laughing Buddha seated cross-legged on his cushion on the stereo cabinet, the tapestry of the Great Wall over the sofa, the set of three porcelain stools with their elaborate raised red and green curlicue designs like script on a birthday cake; there had once been four, but Marty had broken one pretending to be a circus elephant. If I could have taken anything with me, it would have been the painting in the foyer. It was of a boy on the back of a water buffalo. The boy was so insoucianta"he was playing a flute and looking off into the distance. I remembered the painting was a gift from Mr. Lin, and now it occurred to me that it was probably his work.

Across from where I was sitting was a low table displaying my mother's collection of framed photographs. My and Carey's wedding portrait, once in the position of honor, had been removed. There were my parents and Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard all dressed up in a nightclub somewhere in Florida. A sepia picture of Nai-nai from her singing days, a perfect fullblown orchid in her sleek hair, her mouth a dark bow. Marty leaning against the front door of our house in Montereya"the photo was black and white, but I remembered the dress, a pale yellow, with navy stripes across the bodice. Marty as the Virgin Mary in the eighth-grade play, draped in blue and gold. Marty's head shot when her hair was longer, in a bob. In none of these pictures was my sister smiling, but there was something seductively relaxed about her look, the confidence of someone who was thinking at the moment her image was being recorded: yes, yes, I am beautiful, and I deserve to be adored, I deserve everything the world is able to give me, and more.

24.

On Memorial Day weekend I finally saw Fran for the first time in over a year. We had both been invited to a cocktail party given by a friend of ours from boarding school. She came over early to pick me up, and when I opened the door my first impression was that despite being dressed up she looked haggard, a little hollow-eyed. But Fran was one of those people whom exhaustion becomes, it made her seem more alive, somehow. After we'd hugged, she plopped herself into the baby rocking chair. "Listen, kiddo," she said, "I just want to get this out of the way before we start catching up. You have no idea what you put me through this spring. It was a crime, what you did."

"Franny, you don't understand, I was like a vegetable."

"You know what suicide is? Murder in the first fucking degree."

"You have no right to judge me. You have no idea what it was like."

She was silent, rocking, and then she said: "I'm sorry I didn't come to visit you in that place. You know how it is with me." When we were teenagers, Fran's mother had gone through several breakdowns and she'd had to leave school to check her into Payne-Whitney. Fran would never talk about these trips, although once she told me that when she was nine, right before her parents got divorced, she'd found her mother passed out on the pantry floor. "Tranquilizers, of course," Fran told me. "Mom was never very original." As neither I had been.

"How's your summer job?" I asked, handing her an opened beer.

"Fucking corporate politics. All the other interns are up there, you know, working this long weekend. They got browbeaten into it. They all live in terror, essentially." Fran, who had been at the top of our class and graduated Harvard summa cum laude, had never known this kind of terror.

"You're not up there," I said.

"Nope. I'm taking my chances." She took a swig of her beer. "So how's it feel to be back outside?"

I'd tried to explain it to Valeric. Sometimes I still simply didn't belong on this earth. The triggers were everywhere. That morning when I was struggling back to my apartment with grocery bags, the glance of a strange man burned me to the ground and I'd thought: What right have I to be here?

And there was Ma, phoning practically every night. Sometimes I picked up, sometimes I didn't. Yesterday she'd asked what I was doing this weekend. "Go to a barbecue maybe?" She was being her most charming and I recognized the tonea"it was the voice she used with Marty. I told her I wasn't doing anything special. "You know I don't get a bill from Valeric this month," my mother said.

"You won't be anymore. She's sending them to me now."

"I can pay, Sal-lee. I didn't mean say I wouldn't pay."

"It's all right, Ma. I'll take care of it."

There was a space full of her breathing and then she said, "Well, I just call to say Happy Memorial Day."

I thought of greeting cards.

"Thanks, Ma. You too."

Fran asked if I had cigarettes.

I found a pack and handed it to her. "Take it. I'm trying to quit."

She lit up and exhaled. Then she said: "I'm having an affair with one of my professors."

"Affair? You mean he's married?"

"She's married."

"Come again?" But I'd heard what I'd heard.

"Surprised?"

"Does this mean you're bi, or something?"

"Maybe. I don't think so though. I think this might be who I am."

I wanted to ask: What about that guy with the boat in Wellfleet you lost your virginity to? Or the French tutor you almost eloped with sophomore year? But I didn't have to ask. I already knew. Suddenly it made all the sense in the world.

"How long have you known?" I asked.

"Well, it was like there was this door in front of me and I kept thinking, What'll happen if I step through, and when I did I realized there hadn't been any door in the first place. Do you understand what I mean?"

"Kind of."

"She's very smart. Very verbal."

"Sounds great."

Fran dropped her cigarette into the beer bottle and began picking at the label. "I'll tell you, Sally, it's different with a woman. You don't have to condescend. Or worse, be condescended to."

"You seem very okay with this."

"The whole idea of coming out, well, it's so unpleasant, isn't it? Why do you have to announce anything? Why can't you just be yourself, live your life?"

"What does your mother think?"

"I haven't told anyone except you. The thing is, my mother probably wouldn't give a shit. My father would be amused."

"It's actually kind of hip."

"Hip to the outside world. To me, it's my fucking life. And don't worry, Sally," she added, addressing my secret thoughts, "I'm not attracted to you. You're not my type."

"That's a relief."

"I like more meat on the bone."

"Okay, okay." I thought about telling her about Lillith, what there was to tell, but I didn't. I felt lonely in a way I hadn't before.

"I can see you're ready to rock at Alicia's." Alicia, whose party we were invited to, was actually more Fran's friend than minea"they'd attended elementary school together.

I had on the hibiscus dress. "Yeah. What do you think?"

"Foxy. And that's just as well. I heard Carey might be there." Fran had always liked my husband.

"Oh, great."

"He has a new girlfriend."

"I know."

"I think he's still carrying a torch for you though."

"I doubt it," I said. "I got Alicia a bottle of Merlot. Do you think we should bring flowers too?"

"Relax, Sal. Wine will be fine."

"I'm sorry I'm such a nervous wreck. This is my first social event since I've been back."

I had never been to Alicia's apartment, which was on Beekman Place. In the old-fashioned wood-paneled lobby, a liveried doorman phoned up to announce us. He said, "Miss Fischel and Miss Wang." Fran tapped her toe on the slick marble floor. She looked like she belonged; I didn't. I'd had no idea how rich Alicia was until once when I was at the dentist I'd picked up a copy of Town & Country and found her name on the list of the most eligible heiresses in the United States.