"Go," I told him.

"I should be there with you. I should help you through it"

"I don't want you there. I'd rather be alone that weekend."

He reached across the table and took my hand. "You're doing the right thing," he said.

"Yeah? Tell her that."

"Who?"

I kept him waiting. "Nobody," I finally said.

In my dream that night, Dante helped me deliver her in the backseat of a car. He cut the cord with rusty scissors as strangers looked in, their faces pushed flat against the car windows. Vita Marie was a talking little blond girl. I loved her immediately, but even in my dream, love only got me so far. Before my eyes, she shrank and crusted over until she was a maple-sugar candy. "Eat her," Dante urged. I did.

But when I woke and snapped on the night light, he looked handsome and gentle in his sleep. He'd asked about birth control that very first night-made his position clear from the start, no matter what kind of villain I was trying to turn him into. It was my lies that got me into this mess, not Dante. But I wouldn't even be here without lies. If I wasnt a disillusioned watercolor artist with a Farrah Fawcett hairstyle, then I was myself, Dolores, the person everyone left.

I got out of bed and paced. Back in my apartment, I made two lists: What I Love About Dante . his hands . his voice . sex . his dedication to his work . he loves me back . he made me someone new What I would love about Vita Marie ????????.

Seeing it in black pen on a legal pad made it clear. 1 couldn't leave him, not even for her. As long as he loved me, I was my new self: Cinderella, Farrah-living with the guy a whole gymful of girls wanted to dance with. I had a job, monthly bills, a normal sex life. I was weak at the knees with love. I was weak.

Our Bodies, Ourselves said some women found it helpful to bring a friend along for support. "Hello, Tandy?" I said. "This is Dolores. From work."

"Oh, hi." I heard her exhale her cigarette smoke. "You're not busy, are you?"

"If this is about switching shifts, I can't."

"It's not. I was wondering if I could talk to you."

"About what?"

"Oh, nothing special. Maybe we could go shopping or something."

"Where?"

"I don't care. Burlington? It's just, well... it's always so hectic down at the store, you know? I just thought it would be fun to get together and talk. I bet you and I have a lot in common."

"I'm eatin' lunch," she said. "Oh. I'll let you go then. See you at work."

"Yup."

The morning after Christmas, Dante loaded up the Volkswagen and tied his skis to the roof. The day before had been quiet, endless. My presents from him were a pair of cloison-n6 earrings, a three-inch porcelain whale, and a new love poem he had written.

I had meant to get him a thousand wonderful gifts, but in the midst of all the confusion and resentment, I'd managed only one: a down-filled ski parka, red as blood. It seemed to inflate as he took it out of the box and unfolded it. "I'm sorry," I said.

"What are you sorry for? It's great. Are you kidding me? Look, I can still cancel out, stay here."

I shook my head. "Don't call me, either. I don't want to have to think about when the phone is going to ring."

"All right," he said. 'Til be home Monday then-early evening, probably. Depending on traffic and weather."

"If you change your mind or have any doubts about it or anything, then you should call me," I said. "Don't not call if you think you might want the baby after all."

"Look," he said. "You're not thinking too clearly right now. You have to trust me. We're doing the right thing. It's nobody's fault it happened, but it would be immoral to give life to a random mistake just because-"

"Okay, okay," I said. "You don't need to say all this again."

He pulled me over to him. "Hey, you know what I've been thinking? That we should get married somewhere on the coast. Maine, maybe. How does this summer sound? June, maybe-or early July." I watched his chin move up and down with the words.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know anything right now."

Chadley had flown to Florida to spend Christmas with his daughter's family. All day long, I lay in bed listening to Mrs. Wing's footsteps above my head. I knew if I thought about it long enough, I wouldn't do it.

Her near baldness scared me; I'd never seen her without her black wig. "I was just about to have a cup of Earl Grey, dear. Come in and join me."

We drank the tea out on her sun porch. In the late afternoon light, her scalp shone through the white frizzy hair, pink as the inside of a seashell. "Mrs. Wing?" I said.

She waited for my tears to stop, covering my hands with her hands.

Mrs. Wing squeezed my hand in the waiting room, too. We were the only ones there.

"I thought / was pregnant once," she said. I stared down into my chrome chair arm, watching my warped reflection as she spoke. "But it turned out to be a false alarm. Mr.

wing always wore a propnyiacuc. tie was meticulous aoout it. Of course, back then you didn't dare tell people you didn't want children. Everyone just assumed you'd tried and failed."

The counselor assigned to me wore her hair in a bouncing ponytail. "It might be better if you wait out here," she told Mrs. Wing. "But I'll take good care of her for you."

The doctor was the woman whose taped voice I'd listened to, the one who'd said not using birth control was a decision to have a baby. I looked at her big chapped hands as she spoke, not at her face. She told me it was best to have her explain the procedure as it was happening, that it took away fear of the unknown. "Any questions before we start?"

"No," I said. "I hate myself for doing this."

"Do you feel you're not ready to continue?"

"I'm ready to continue. I just wanted you; to know I love her very much. Even though I'm doing this to her."

She just looked at me.

"Go ahead," I said. "I'm ready. I am."

"I'm going to insert the speculum now. Would you like to see what it looks like first?"

I shook my head.

"Questions?"

"Will it hurt?"

"You shouldn't feel any pain but there'll be some pressure," the counselor told me. Her eyes looked sympathetic, but when she wrapped her hands around my fists, they felt as cold as the equipment.

"I'm going to anesthetize your cervix with Novocain now," the doctor said. I pictured myself screaming and wailing, halting the procedure. But I just laiy, my emotions mislaid, and let it happen. I saw Dante !high up on his mountain, his shiny red parka against white: snow, blue sky. Once, in bed after we'd made love, he told me what he got out of skiing. "Pure, distilled silence," he'-d said. "Except for the hushing sound of your skis." Then bae'd touched my arm and made the sound. "Husshh. Husshlh."

I was up on that slope, watching him fall and unfall through the snow, enjoying the hush.

"Carol has started the aspiration now. This should take about five minutes." It hummed louder than I wanted it to. It drowned out Dante's skiing. My body itself felt nothing- not even the pressure they'd promised.

Whales made good mothers, I had read. Their babies came out tail first and the mothers nudged them up to the surface for air. They carried stillborns around on their backs until they dissolved back into the ocean. I couldn't tell if I was dreaming or resting. I saw my whale's big dead eye, close up, on the day I'd swum down to it. What did the clinic do with the tissue that went up the tube? Where did Vita Marie end up?

"How you doing?" the counselor asked. "You feeling strong enough to sit up and rejoin the world?"

The doctor wrote me two prescriptions, one for birth-control pills, the other for tetracycline to prevent infection. I sat out in Mrs. Wing's lavender Cadillac while she had them filled, pressing down on the gray leather upholstery to get through each cramp. "This is as hard as life gets," I told myself. "And you're living through it." A man walked by wheeling a baby in a stroller. I slumped down in the seat, hid my face from him, and took the next spasm.

When she got back in the car, Mrs. Wing handed me the bag. Inside were the pills and a present, too: a bag of licorice whips. I put one of the ropes in my mouth and chewed, amazed at how good something could taste in the midst of life's being this bad. I chewed and chewed, swallowing back my own sweet licoricy saliva, unable to turn off" the undeserved taste.

He got in on schedule at seven o'clock on Monday night, so windburned and healthy-looking that eye contact was impossible. He dropped his soft luggage in the middle of the floor, sat down on the bed, and hugged me tight for over a minute. I hated him.

"How did you make out?" he said, finally.

"All right."

"Did you have it?"

"Have what? Say it"

"Did you?"

"Say it."

"The abortion?"

"Yes."

He took my chin in his hand and turned my head so that I'd look at him. "I'm in mourning, too, you know," he told me. But later he forgot himself, whistling as he unpacked.

We spent New Year's Day napping and playing Scrabble. Dante made us a vegetable broth and sourdough bread and got the dirty clothes ready for the laundromat. "What's this?" he said. He was holding up the cold duck.

We drank it from the bottle while we sat out in the car, watching our clothes tumble inside. Over the sound of the heater and defrost, the radio counted down the year's top songs. "Hey, Home EC?" Dante said. "Happy 1977."

"Yeah," I said. "You, too."

He took another swig of wine. "You know what I was just thinking?"

"What?"

"That we shouldn't wait. That we should get married as soon as possible. What do you think?"

"Why do you call me that, Dante?" I said. "Call you what?"

"Home EC?"

He shrugged. "I don't know, just to tease you. Why?"

"Is that what you and me are all about?"

"Meaning?"

"Me scrubbing your toilet for you. Me keeping you in clean sheets." He sighed and took another swig. And another. I went inside to fold the clothes.

When I got back out, the radio was playing Rod Stewart, number one for the past year. Spread your wings and let me come inside... Dante had finished the bottle.

"Love is what you and I are all about," Dante said.

That was the answer I'd wanted from him, been fishing for. All the way home, I sat and tried to figure out why it wasn't enough.

We set the date for George Washington's Birthday and booked a justice of the peace and the back room at the Lobster Pot restaurant downtown. Paula from the high-school dance said sure, she and Boomer would be thrilled to stand up for us; she'd even throw in Heather as flower girl. I decided to wear my blue-and-silver dress and ordered a corsage of yellow roses to cover up that punch stain.

I spent January preparing for the wedding and trying to convince myself I had done the right thing. Sometimes on the worst days, the call-in-sick ones, I let myself pretend that Vita Marie was invincible -that she'd somehow tricked all of us and existed, still, inside of me. An overwhelming pregnant-woman's fatigue took me over, resided in me. Sometimes on my fifteen-minute break at work, I'd fall asleep on the plastic sofa with a lit Merit between my fingers. (I'd gone back to smoking, but only at work.) Walking the hill back home required an effort so total that I'd flop down on the daybed, not waking up until I heard Dante in the kitchen, rattling the pots and pans in a huff, making the supper I'd promised to make.

"You're smoking again," he said one night in bed. "Aren't you?"

"I had one cigarette at work today."

"Well, your hair stinks of it. It's a turnoff." Which was just as well; I'd managed to avoid sex since the abortion, except for once. That time, his penis had felt like a vacuum cleaner up inside me, looking to suck out life. "I'm not ready for this," I'd told him. He said he understood and was willing to be patient, that he would pour all his passion into his poetry and wait for a signal from me. But a few days later he got his first literary magazine rejection slip for "Love/Us" and started slamming things around the apartment and shaking his head at me. "Here we lie," he said that tight in bed. "Monsignor Frustration and Sister Mary Chastity, America's most abnormal fiances."

But Dante indulged me in his own way, buying me flowers and herb teas and books I could never quite get myself to read. At the end of January, he sat in the dark with me for eight straight nights, watching "Roots."

I ached to tell him how I felt, but how I felt was all tangled up in other babies: my brother Anthony Jr. and Rita Speight's baby and my own fetal self in the pool at Gracewood... Secrets were the way to go with Dante, I was absolutely sure. The one secret I had let him in on-"Dante, I'm pregnant"-had lost me Vita Marie.

Somewhere during that time, he wrote a new poem, about a woman who shrank her husband and put him in a bird cage. "What's this supposed to mean?" I asked him.

"It's allegorical. I guess I'm trying to say I feel diminished."

Not as diminished as Vita Marie, I thought. But to his face, all I said was that he'd promised to be patient with me.

"I have been patient," he said. "But I'm getting goddamned sick of this pity party every night."

I put my hands over my wet face. "I can't help it, Dante. She was growing inside me. I even named her."

"Named it," he said. "Not her. It. Why are you doing this to us?"

"I'm sorry. I know I've been awful. I'm going to try to be better."

He rubbed my back to stop the shaking. When he pulled up my sweatshirt and licked at my nipples, I managed not to scream. Later, between his orgasm and his falling asleep, he murmured, "You see? You see how good getting on with our life makes you feel?"

"Uh-huh," I said. "Get some sleep."

I had managed not to tell him her name. After that night, I kept my grief a secret, too, focusing as best I could on my new role: bride-to-be.

His parents arrived in their Winnebago two mornings before the wedding. Dante and his father hefted our present, a La-Z-Boy recliner, out of the camper and into the middle of our apartment where it sat, parked like a Buick. I avoided sitting in it; it reminded me of the recliner in Dr. Shaw's office where I'd had to sit and tell the truth.