"You have to go! NOW!" says the waiter so rudely that I stop being embarra.s.sed. He is not at all concerned for her health even though it is clear Nellie is under some great physical strain. She is not built for this kind of hike. Also, we're in the lake. They can't own the lake or even this part of it. Even I know that.

"You know how far it is to the reeds?" asks Nellie, swinging around to look at him as she realizes he could be useful.

"Madame, I can a.s.sure you we are a reed-free facility," says the uppity young man, and now I think I may knock him into the water if Nellie doesn't. But fortunately we have been moving at a good pace during this whole confrontation while the waiter mincingly runs at our heels and in another minute we are around the next bend and into a wild part of the lake again and the waiter, as if there is an invisible fence keeping him back, stays rooted to his side of the bend, calling triumphantly after us, "And don't come back."

I would like to go back and get a little mud on his jacket but if there is a portal, it probably isn't open to people who behave in this way. I'm not sure it's open to people who even think in this way.

Nellie mumbles something but I can't tell what. We stump along again in silence around bend after bend, Nellie muttering periodically to herself, and I think I hear s.n.a.t.c.hes of hymns and prayers and wonder if she is exhorting the universe to show itself or just trying to keep her spirits up. Anyhow we have been going a good hour and a half when we find ourselves suddenly looking at an old blue car and we're so tired it takes us a second to realize we're right back in front of the parking lot where we began.

"We missed it," says Nellie, so disheartened that she plops right down where she is, which unfortunately is in six inches of water. "The portal poodle must have closed."

"It might have closed because I had bad thoughts about the waiter," I say. I want Nellie to tell me my energies are really just fine but "I'm afraid you could be right," she says musingly.

We get wetly back into her front seat and she's so bedraggled and confused she doesn't even bother to spread newspapers on the seats to keep them clean. We get lake muck all over them. Her nylons are ripped. Her dress is ripped. There's a twig in her hair. I am soaked up to my armpits and my feet are a mess of tiny bleeding cuts.

"But we didn't even find the reeds. Where were the reeds?" I ask.

"Probably disappeared with the portal poodle when you had those bad thoughts," says Nellie.

We drive silently back to the trailer to tell our sad tale to Madame Crenshaw. I am so tired I am not paying much attention to the road when suddenly Nellie stops the car. She says nothing and at first I don't see why she has halted and then I do. Ahead of us are the tracks where Madame Crenshaw's trailer once stood.

We sit and stare at them for a while. Then we drive back to town. Nellie says nothing. Her mouth never stops working.

Finally she says, "Do you suppose the portal came and got her?"

"No," I say after a long pause.

"You suppose the cops came along and made her move?"

"Maybe," I say, but our sheriff is a pretty sensible sort and I can't really see it if she wasn't hurting anyone. "Anyhow, it doesn't much matter." Then I remember. "She had your purse."

Nellie's mouth keeps working.

"And your shoes."

We both think about this.

"She said I was destined for a great purpose. You heard her, didn't you?"

"Yes," I say slowly. Then for the first time I realize Madame Crenshaw never told me anything about the Gourd baby. And she said I was moving someplace empty with nothing much to see when we have no plans to move at all.

"Maybe she's back in town or coming back tomorrow," says Nellie after a bit.

I think Nellie is a better person than me because she wants to give Madame Crenshaw the benefit of the doubt and I do not. I want to say, She took your purse and your shoes! But I know that Nellie will just see this as more evidence that I have a closed, unforgiving heart, and maybe she is right.

There is a long silence in the car. In fact, it lasts until we get back to the parking lot by my beach and Nellie stops. She does not say anything and she doesn't look left or right while she parks so it's a good thing there don't happen to be any small children or animals in the way. As I get out I notice that the cigarette man is there again and I start to mention it to Nellie, leaning in the window of the door I have just closed. But she takes off so fast I have to leap back and I watch her car zooming down Main Street until it disappears altogether in a cloud of dust.

When I get halfway down the beach I feel someone's eyes on my back and turn, wondering if Nellie has returned, but there is no one there except the cigarette man and he is not staring at me. He is staring out to sea.

Mr. Fordyce.

My Seventh Adventure.

Mrs. Gourd explained to Ginny and me that once she starts work we have to be at her trailer at eight a.m. so she can start her first day on the job at the Bluebird Cafe at nine. It doesn't take an hour for her to walk over there, but she wants some of that time for readying herself in front of the mirror without little D children scurrying around her clean white uniform. She is touchingly proud of that waitress uniform and the little half hat she wears on her head with its print of bluebirds on top. When we arrive, before we can head for the beach, she wants to model it for us. I think maybe she has never belonged to anything before. Once she puts it on, you can see her lifting her head a little higher. She isn't a n.o.body anymore, she is a waitress.

She keeps us in the trailer for a while, asking our opinion about the angle of her hat and whether to leave her top b.u.t.ton open or close it. Ginny and I admit to each other that as we watch her, purse slung over her shoulder, jaunty lift to her usually plodding stride, making her way to town to her respectable job, we feel a measure of pride. Her excitement is contagious. It is because of us she can do this thing.

I feel good until I remember that because of me Willie Mae may be permanently damaged.

Mr. Gourd is sacked out on the couch and when Mrs. Gourd leaves, he gets up and takes a beer out of the fridge. He stares at us as we grab the children's sand pails. "GET OUT OF HERE!" he bellows, falling against the kitchen table. Ginny and I scoot out, leaving behind the rest of the toys we meant to gather up. My heart pounds. We take the children, with Darvon sobbing, as far away from the trailer as we can before we even breathe again.

At the beach we settle into sandy boredom. It is going to be a long day.

"I didn't know it would be so hard to watch children," says Ginny. She has just checked her watch. We have been on the beach fifteen minutes.

"No," I say. I don't think Max and Hershel and Maya are this hard to watch but I have never done it all day.

"I'm never having any myself," says Ginny.

"Oh, Ginny, don't babysit with me if it's going to make you feel that way," I say.

"What's so terrible?" asks Ginny. "More people should want not to have children. World over-population is the biggest problem on the planet. I was on the fence about it before, but now I know for sure. I don't want any. They're disgusting."

"Your children won't be. They won't be like the Gourds, for heaven's sake," I say. I look at the little Gourd baby in his carrier. We take the liberty of removing the blanket Mrs. Gourd always keeps draped over it. He blinks in the unaccustomed light. He probably just needs some stimulation.

"They may not be like the Gourds, they may be delightful, but it is clear to me that they wear you down. And I don't want to be worn down. I want to design fabulous clothes for horrible women dripping in wealth who can afford them and who will invite me to their silly, pretentious parties."

Ginny's ambitions never make a lot of sense to me but they somehow keep a fire burning in her that propels her forward every day. Mrs. Gourd always looked fireless but now with this new job she begins to look different, as if she is being propelled forward too. A fire is starting to burn in her as well. I think this fire changes everything about a person. Now she won't look tired all the time. Now maybe we are going to be the ones who look tired all the time. Me, because my one hundred adventures must be put on hold. I cannot have such adventures with so many people in tow. I long to venture forth alone. I am suffocating, my fires of purpose dwindling to embers. I tell Ginny all this while we sit on the beach, and she stares at me the whole time, her mouth slightly open, her eyes round and fathomless, but she says nothing.

The morning drifts on; we make sand angels and talk and help the children with their castles and occasionally pa.s.s out snacks. We have taken a jar of peanut b.u.t.ter and some bread from the Gourd cabinet to avoid having to go back and face Mr. Gourd in his undershirted glory.

It really isn't so bad, only another four hours of this, I think, when a car pulls up to the public lot. Cigarette Guy is already there sitting on a cement divider and watching the waves crash. He hasn't started smoking yet. He eyes the car with curiosity and then Ginny sees it and says, "What's my mom doing here?"

But she doesn't go up to greet her. Instead Mrs. Cavenaugh walks down to the beach looking primly annoyed. She takes a starfish out of one of the Gourds' mouth. A little something we have missed but when you're watching five children at once you do tend to miss things from time to time.

"These children are filthy," she says.

"Well, we aren't paid to give them baths," says Ginny. "In fact, we aren't paid at all."

"Anyhow, tell your little friend goodbye," says Mrs. Cavenaugh. Mrs. Cavenaugh always refers to me as Ginny's little friend, I think because she secretly hopes I will shrink to nothingness and disappear altogether. It is extremely wishful and imaginative thinking on Mrs. Cavenaugh's part. "Come on, we have to go. I have enrolled you in soccer camp."

Mrs. Cavenaugh grabs Ginny by the upper arm and hauls her to her feet. This surprises me. Ginny seems surprised by it too.

"Ouch," she says, yanking her arm free. We've been taught at school how to deal with potential kidnappers. Always make a fuss and resist. I wait patiently for Ginny to start screaming "NO, NO, NO," which is step one, but she doesn't.

"But I thought soccer camp was full," says Ginny.

"There was a cancellation. I had you on a waiting list."

"And you told me I didn't have to go to any more camps this summer. That I could stay home and design dresses."

"Are you designing dresses right now? Besides, I don't recall saying anything of the sort," says Mrs. Cavenaugh.

"But you did," says Ginny.

"Well, if I did then it was so you could design dresses, and you have broken your end of the bargain. Now, don't make a fuss. Think of the example you are setting for the little Gourds."

The little Gourds care so much that they don't even notice Ginny leaving, but I watch her dispirited trudge behind her mother through the sand back to their car with mounting terror. Now I have four hours alone with the five of them and no one at all to talk to. I will go stark staring mad. I begin to understand Mrs. Gourd better and better. Also the thrill of working at the Bluebird Cafe.

Ginny doesn't even turn around to say goodbye. I wonder if she feels guilty because she is secretly relieved to be hauled off like this. To be forced into something that either of us would consider paradise next to Gourd-sitting.

I am sorry to say that by noon, after countless trips to the public washroom with all five Gourds, because I don't dare leave any of them on the beach, these little excursions being the height of excitement after long minutes of watching sand blow across the horizon and watching the Gourds, who are getting restless, slap each other with whatever is handy, I begin to understand even Mr. Gourd's method of dealing with tedium. It is then that I decide I will take the Gourds on a long trek. It will be like the Long March. History always seems to be full of downtrodden people being forced to march great distances for other people's convenience and if it works for those dictators it should work for me. At worst it will tire out the little Gourds and I can't help feeling that if we lose a few on the wayside the senior Gourds will be extremely forgiving. So we start to trek.

"Where are we going?" asks Dean, who, being one of the brighter Gourds, has noticed that we are changing our location.

"Well, now, if I told you it wouldn't be a surprise, would it?" I say.

We go down Main Street and when they see we are not stopping at the drugstore for penny candy or the Dairy Queen or even (I consider their up-bringing) one of the taverns, they begin to squawk. They cannot imagine good things beyond these borders.

"Think of the cathedral at Pisa," I say. "Covent Garden. Cafe life in Paris." I am not familiar with any of these things exactly but at least I have heard of them. I hope to spark something within.

"I don't want to walk no more," says Darvon.

"Any. Anymore," I say. I decide that the best way to deal with their protests is never to address them directly but to use them as an opportunity for grammar lessons.

"I don't want to go no more," says Dee Dee, sitting down determinedly on the sidewalk.

"Anymore, anymore, Dee Dee," I say. "Look, there is an especially pretty sight at the end of this hike. Like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."

"What pot of gold?"

"What's a pot of gold?"

"I don't want to go no more."

"I'm hungry."

"Darvon ate a rock."

"You should put a blanket on Willie Mae's head."

"I don't like Willie Mae. He cries."

This seems the most extraordinary statement, because Willie Mae has not cried once all day. I put it down to the stimulation of life without the blanket. Willie Mae is seeing the world for once. Willie Mae may have prayed for a hundred adventures himself, for all I know, and I am facilitating them for him. I wonder if he cried a lot more prior to being beaned with a Bible and then am so full of guilt that I let the children rest five minutes before I make them start walking again.

They are better about it than I thought they would be. They trudge on without any questions about where we are going. My feet are sore, my own brain is nearly dead. I didn't want any of the Gourds' grimy peanut b.u.t.ter or bread so I am starving and I still have two and a half hours to kill. We stop now and then on our trek across town, sometimes on curbs to watch children who own toys and bikes and things playing sensible games. We stop in at the school playground until I see that it is dangerous. I can't keep the four of them from breaking their necks all at once. Darvon runs up the slide. Dee Dee hangs on the teeter-totter and gets a splinter. I tell her we will show it to her mother later because I have nothing to remove it with. This makes her scream and cry. It is time to get walking again.

And then finally we are on the other side of town, right at the edge, and here the town stops as if someone has drawn it along a line, and beyond is just blank paper. I wonder what it will be like to leave the sidewalk and go into the blankness. As we continue on, I imagine we are going into the twilight zone. Then I think, I am walking endlessly with four children and a baby, I am in the twilight zone. We head toward a small copse of trees and a road winding into meadows.

"Where's the gold?" asks Darvon. I have forgotten all about that.

That's when I spy the trailer on the other side of the copse of trees. It is a different style from the Gourds' or Madame Crenshaw's garish purple one. This one is silver and bullet shaped. There is a card table set up on the gra.s.s next to it with chairs around it. The trailer has flower boxes in the windows so I know it is permanent. I begin to see that on the outskirts of our town there live a whole subset of people, all in trailers. As if these people have chosen to put themselves apart from the community. Not belonging but not wholly adrift either, the way barnacles can attach to sea turtles, not turtle but living nonetheless, organically connected. I suppose Ginny's mother may see my mother that way but we are not trailer people. I don't know what makes us different. It is more as if my mother is a light that the town would attach to if it could. But you cannot attach to light, it is amorphous, you can only be in it.

"Where's the gold?" asks Darvon again.

"There," I say, thoughtlessly because I am ruminating about these things, and I point at the silver trailer and then am immediately sorry because all four Ds run madly for it even though I don't think any of them really cares about a pot of gold. I sigh. I will have to round them up before they trespa.s.s on the owner. However, I now know that all I need to do to get them out from underfoot is to point randomly in some direction and say "There." I consider pa.s.sing on this helpful tip to Mrs. Gourd but decide she's too much of a stinker.

The door to the trailer opens and all four Ds are struck dumb, which is a startling event in itself. Then I see why. Santa Claus has emerged. But it is not Santa, it is a short, fat man with lots of fluffy white hair and a long white beard, wearing a red T-shirt. He opens his mouth but there are no ho ho ho's. You'd think someone who looked like that would feel oddly compelled. Instead he says, "That's an awful lot of kids to babysit."

I don't know how he knows I am babysitting and am not a Gourd myself and then in horror realize that maybe he thinks I am the Gourds' older sibling babysitter, and I am about to set the record straight when Willie Mae begins to cry for the first time all day. I reach into the diaper bag for the bottle. The children scramble around the card table, which has a bowl of raspberries on it. They don't even ask but just dig in. The man turns and goes into the trailer while I put a bottle in Willie Mae's mouth.

"Don't eat those raspberries, they aren't yours," I hiss at the children, who ignore me.

The man comes back out with a big box of toys, which he puts down by the trailer steps. Darvon spies it first and the four of them descend on it with whoops of joy. I don't even bother telling them that it's rude not to ask because the man has clearly brought it out to get them out of his raspberries. He takes the empty raspberry bowl and goes back into the trailer. Then he comes out with a fresh bowl of raspberries, a pitcher of lemonade and two gla.s.ses. He invites me to sit down so I sit and continue giving Willie Mae his bottle. I don't know what to say. I am so grateful for this kindness. I remember all those Bible stories of people being offered water at wells and whereas I used to think, Big deal, water, now I understand the inexplicable warmth you receive from being offered a chair and a cold drink. I have never been footsore and thirsty and lone enough to appreciate it before.

I am shy. The man doesn't seem dis...o...b..bulated at all. He nods toward the toy box and says, "I have grandchildren. They don't live around here but I like to keep it for when they visit."

I still don't know what to say. So we just sit there quietly for a long time and I ask him finally about his children. He has two and they live in Florida but they come up for visits with the grandchildren, of which there are seven. Also, he says he has had several children by different women and that it is a strange thing, not the way he would have expected his life to turn out, but he offers no more information about it so I don't say anything more and neither does he and I think how maybe he never talks to anyone, sitting here hour after hour eating berries, and so such a strange and personal fact comes spilling out because people need to tell people things, and then as if to break an awkward silence he says, "Have you ever read Robert Frost?"

I shake my head.

"He's a poet."

"I know," I say. "My mother is a poet."

"What's her name?" asks the man.

"Felicity Fielding," I say.

"Oh!" he says, startled, and he stares at me hard and then takes two long gulps of lemonade. Finally he gets up and goes back into the trailer. He returns with some books. The one on top is Snow. The book that my mother won the Pulitzer for.

"I like your mother's poetry," he says. "I think she's very good. I like Robert Frost too. Who should we read?"

"Well, I know my mother's poetry. Some of it," I say. I don't tell him that I don't really like to hear my mother's poetry. It is as if she becomes someone else and is not my mother. It is mostly just embarra.s.sing. I don't want to know her private thoughts. I mean her very private thoughts. I like to think she is thinking of our feelings the way she always seems to, not that she is having feelings of her own.

"All right, then, let me get some more raspberries." He goes inside and I leaf through the Robert Frost book and then pick up my mother's. Inside she has written, "To Anton Fordyce. For you, dear Anton. For lovely evenings and with grat.i.tude for finding Mrs. Martin!" He is Anton but who is Mrs. Martin? The name rings a bell and then it comes back. Mrs. Martin used to babysit us. My mother would put me to bed and say "Mrs. Martin is coming for a few hours tonight." This is why I never saw any boyfriends, because my mother didn't bring them home. Instead, Mrs. Martin came. And perhaps there were other babysitters before her that I was too young to notice or remember.

My thoughts are interrupted when Mr. Fordyce brings out a bowl of berries for the Gourd children, which they ignore. They are into the toys now and have very limited attention. He puts another bowl of berries on the table for us.

Then without further ado he picks up the Robert Frost book and turns its dignified, old, thin pages, the crackling sound somehow becoming part of the poetry, and reads. When he gets to the lines that go "I am overtired/Of the great harvest I myself desired," I think, This guy is really good.

It is such a luxury to be read to. Not to have to make a response or remember any of it and keep my attention focused. Sometimes my mind wanders to Mrs. Martin. Is this when my mother would meet the clothes hanger man? I am sad to give up my myths, the things I have secretly believed since I was little, that I was conceived in the depths of a moonlit sea by tides and eddies and swirls of sea life and the longing of a poet to be a mother.