"Nothing," I said. They were for my mother-for what her banged-up face had looked like the night she'd called my father a whore and he'd given her that swollen purple lip, that Chinese eye. I'd been lying there reliving that night during Dante's grunt and thrust.

"Hey, babe," he whispered. "You and me."

He's nothing like Daddy, I told myself. No couple is happy all the time. He's nothing like him at all.

All that next week, Dante drove me to work so he could have the Volkswagen. One afternoon, I walked back up the hill, happily unaware. The thick orange extension cord was what I noticed first, not the harsh sound of the drill someone was running out back. I followed the cord from our kitchen window out to where the noise was painful. What I saw was painful, too. The cord ended at Dante, who was wearing plastic goggles and standing on our stool, armed with a power tool. He was drilling a hole into a shiny green van that still had its price sheet stuck to the window.

"Well," he said. "What do you think?"

I said I hoped he had permission to cut into whoever's van it was.

He laughed. "It's ours, babe. I'm putting in a teardrop window."

"What do you mean it's ours? Where's our bug?"

"Traded her in. Don't worry. I got this below-sale price- super deal. Bought it three days ago but there was some paperwork. Surprise!"

"You bought this thing without even telling me?"

"They install these windows for you at the dealership, but it's a rip-off. I'm saving us a good hundred and a half. You like it?"

I couldn't think of anything to say.

"You and I are going on a belated cross-country honeymoon trip. First three weeks in August."

"Dante, I... I can't just pick up and go on a three-week vacation. I only get a one-week vacation."

"All taken care of. I called what's-his-face, your boss. He finally agreed to give you your week with pay, plus two weeks off without pay."

"You planned my vacation without even asking me?"

"I'm putting shag carpet down on the floor. Boomer's got a remnant left over from their place. All the comforts of home, huh?"

His using the word "home" was what woke me. I ran into the house.

He'd found which drawer the bankbook was in, all right. The balance said $671.

He came inside. Wearing those safety goggles, he looked like a giant insect. "I wanted to leave some in there for the trip. The payments are only one fifty-five a month... I figure we can camp out right on the van floor in sleeping bags, save some money. Maybe splurge once or twice and get a motel room."

He walked over and put his hand on my rear end- cautiously, like he was testing the flatiron. "Well," he said. "Say something."

"I thought you were going to write poems all summer. You said that's what you needed to do."

"Travel will feed my writing. I figured you can take the wheel when I want to write."

"'You never even asked me!"

His fist whacked down against the mattress; dust specks zoomed around us. "I thought you'd be excited about it. You think it was easy putting all this together?"

"But a lot of that was money my grandmother gave us."

"Oh, I get it. Hands off the wedding stash because she's my grandmother, not yours? I never realized you were such a rucking materialist before. Little Miss Equity."

"That's not the point. Making decisions without me is the point."

"How about Mim whatever the ruck her name is? Doesn't she get her usual vote in this, too? Look, I wanted to surprise you with the honeymoon we never got to have. Not that our marriage needs a jump start or anything. Not that we have room for any more wedded bliss."

Dear Grandma, Exciting news! Dante and I decided to use your wedding money to buy a van. We're taking a crosscountry trip in August. (I'll buy you a pair of Mickey Mouse ears when we get to Disneyland!) We don't know our exact route yetf but we're either planning to drive down and see you the first part of the trip or the last part. I had to give up my head-cashier position because the trip will take three weeks, but I'll still have a job there when I get back. People are always coming and going at that place, so who knows?! might be head cashier again before too long.

Sorry to hear about Mrs. Mumphy breaking her hip. I sent her a card at the hospital. Maybe you should go on that bus trip anyway. I'm sure there'll be other people you know. Take a risk! That's what Ma always used to say.

I really WASN'T crying the other morning when you called. I had a cold. (It's better now.) I'm very happy.

Love, Dolores Dante got the carpeting in smoothly enough, but he'd cut too wide a hole for the teardrop window. On and off all one afternoon, I was required to train the garden hose at the error while Dante sat inside the van and studied the leak.

Somewhere near dark, he hopped out the back, let loose a string of curses, and kicked a dent into the passenger's-side door.

"You happy now?" he shouted, forcing my hand against the dent. "You like the feel of that? Well, you can thank all your bitching and moaning for the last several days."

I pried my hand away. I thought he might hit me.

"That's your tactic, isn't it? Chip away at me little by little? I should jump into this thing and leave you rotting in the driveway-good fucking riddance."

"Don't say things like that, okay? I know the trip will be good for us. It's just that I thought if we bought a house, then..."

"You're not going to be satisfied until we're in one of those prefab coffin things over there at Granite Acres. Until we have some tiny little life we can predict right up to the funeral."

The abortion had been a choice between Dante and Vita. If he left me, I had neither of them. I had my old self back. "You're right," I told him. "I felt a little disappointed at first, but it was just temporary. Don't say that about leaving, okay? I love you, Dante."

That night he did anal sex on me out in the van. I pressed my face against the new carpet, inhaling the chemical smell and reciting things I'd memorized in school. "Seven times eight is fifty-six, seven times nine is sixty-three... This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks..." I winced and waited for it to be over. It was nothing like what Jack did, I told myself. This is my husband, our van. We're two consenting adults.

"Being open to new experiences is what will keep us alive," he murmured to me afterwards, on the verge of his sleep. "I could tell you liked that just now, felt the exact second you relaxed and went with it. You telegraphed your enjoyment right to me-put me on fire!"

His whispering voice was moist against my ear.

The next day I drove the van for the first time. The ride was smoother than our Volkswagen and the seats were up so high, I felt like I was levitating. The body-shop man said the dent would cost $375 to fix; I told him we needed it done before we left. I walked to the bank and withdrew two hundred more dollars. For Dante, I bought two pairs of shorts, two T-shirts, all seven volumes of the Mobil Travel Guide, and a leather-bound journal for his poems. I got myself a new pair of clogs and, at the drugstore, renewed my birth-control prescription.

"Anything else?" the register clerk said.

I slid the tube of first-aid cream across the counter at her. I'd had rectal bleeding that morning.

If you looked quickly at our three-inch stack of crosscountry pictures (ten rolls' worth, developed free of charge at the photo lab back in Rhode Island), you'd swear Dante and I had had a wonderful time-that his plan to ignite our marriage like a camp stove had worked.

Most of the shots are of Dante, posed in the lower right half of the picture with Mt. Rushmore or the Wall Drug sign or the Magic Kingdom just over his shoulder. Even when he was in one of his moods, he transformed himself for pictures, breaking into a self-assured, Robert Wagner kind of half smile, so that what got developed was the illusion that he was content. Out of the hundreds of shots, there was one truthful picture: one of me by myself, standing in the hot-springs steam at Yellowstone Park, leaning my arm against a wooden sign that says "Dangerous Thermal Area" and looking weary and scared. All the other photos Dante took of me were ambushes: one of me getting surprised inside the camp shower, another where I'm sleeping on the van floor with my tongue out, vulnerable as a dead woman. "Bam! I got you!" Dante would say whenever he took a shot. If I was going to take his picture, he'd borrow my hairbrush first.

The photographs don't say how lonely I was, sitting up front, driving the van through whole states while Dante sat cross-legged, snickering at some book, some private joke between him and an author. Or writing out his private thoughts, his black Flair pen squeaking along on the oversized pages of the leather-bound journal. It was thinking about distances that made me so lonely-how Nebraska went on forever one day, how far away I was from Grandma and from Grandma's idea of what my life was like. Looking from a distance at those purple Bighorn Mountains made me wonder about God again: if he was real, if he was too far away to matter. For whole days on that trip, Dante, sitting beside me, was as distant as those mountains.

"You're trapped by your own lies is what it is," I told myself in the rearview mirror one twilight "Gracewood, Kippy, how you got pregnant with Vita Marie-that whole rat's nest of secrets." We were parked in a supermarket lot someplace in California and Dante was on his way inside for groceries. I watched the automatic doors close behind him. "You've got all that distance because you've never been honest with him-not once, not since before you even met him."

He usually slid his journal under the seat when he wasn't writing in it, but this time he'd forgotten to put it away. There it sat, within easy reaching distance. Between the leather covers might be his real thoughts: why he got so angry, why he'd married me, what he felt. I could see him in the store, wheeling his cart. It would be easy.

I shook with the choice I gave myself: I could be the same girl sitting in that empty classroom back at St Anthony's School, undoing the clasp on Miss Lilly's pocketbook-the fat, wrecked girl locked in the toilet stall at Hooten Hall, prying the flap off Dante's stolen letters. Or somebody else. Somebody better. The person Dr. Shaw and I had started but never finished.

I looked in at Dante, fourth or fifth back in a line of customers, two thicknesses of plate glass away. I scraped an emery board across my fingernails. Listened to my breathing. Left the journal unread.

THERE WERE MIRACLES ON THE ROAD. At a snack bar at the top of Pike's Peak, I asked for real milk, not powdered, for my coffee. The waitress said they couldn't keep real milk on the top of the mountain, that it went bad-something about the altitude.

"Isn't that odd?" a woman said to me. She was at the table next to us, she and her husband. "About the milk? I ordered the exact same thing a minute ago. I couldn't help overhearing."

Anyone but me up there on that mountain would have just looked over and seen an ordinary, friendly tourist couple. But it wasn't anyone else. It was me, looking right directly at my coffin-picture people, Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Fickett from Tepid, Missouri. I even recognized Mrs. Fickett's polka-dot halter top; she'd worn it in one of their series I'd developed. It was a powerful moment for me, one of the most powerful moments of my life if I'd chosen to use it. "Why, Mr. and Mrs. Fickett," I could have said. "Have you been taking any more of your casket pictures lately?" They would have probably run screaming right off the mountain. Of course, I didn't. I didn't say a word, not even to Dante. How could I?

Vita Marie would have passed her first birthday while we were on the road. One early morning, in a campground shower stall, I closed my eyes and saw her, heard her-so vividly, it felt like a visit. She was plain and real and had my eyes: a chubby, brown-haired little thing in red corduroy overalls. I felt the ribbing of the material, smelled her smell. She took a step, then ka-boomed backward to the floor, sitting in her own surprise. I closed my eyes against the spray and leaned to the wall, laughing out loud. Who'd sent me this gift? Ma? God? Vita Marie herself?

On the return route through New Mexico and Arkansas and Tennessee, I only half noticed what was around me; I was more interested in what was ahead. I'd start up our house fund again, I decided, as soon as we paid off the trip bills. Dante and I might have our own home by 1981 or '82, and maybe a baby by the following year. Now that this trip was out of his system. Now that school was starting up again.

Dear Grandma, I can't believe I've gotten to see so much of the country. Remember back in high school when I was scared to even leave my bedroom? There's more to tell you about our trip than I can fit on a postcard. We're planning a visit this fall. I'll bring all our pictures! Dante and I are fine and happy. Love, D.

Driving past the "New England and East" sign, Dante sighed and said he'd be glad to get home over with.

"That's a strange way of putting it," I said. His jaw locked and his hands tightened around the wheel.

We got back to Montpelier in late afternoon. The downtown streets were steamy and slick from a shower we'd just missed. Even shut up for three weeks, the apartment smelled good to me. I grabbed Dante as he walked in with our suitcases. "I love you, honey," I said, squeezing him tight "Thank you for our trip."

"Too bad we're not still on it," he said.

Afterward, I sat sifting through old mail and newspapers and back-to-school circulars. "Well," I said. "Eight more days for you and two more for me and we're back to the grind."

"Yup," he said.

Then he snatched the keys to the van and disappeared until midnight That was the first hint that Dante was keeping secrets, too. Well, one secret-one big one that was already a whole summer old.

"I guess I better tell you," he said. I had just come back from shopping for his back-to-school clothes. He was standing next to me, not taking the bag with his two new shirts in it "Tell me what?"

"I lost my job."

"Lost it?" I sat down, the wind knocked out "What do you mean?"

"They fired me. In June."

"In June?... Why didn't you... What's going on?"

He sat down and put his hands to his face. "Ev Downs and his vigilante committee. They got me."

"Dante, I still don't-"

"I said it all along, remember? That he'd get me if he ever got a chance." With his arm, he smeared the tears across his face. "I wanted to just drive us away, to protect you from all the gossip-from that fishbowl where you work. But I'm exhausted from keeping it in. It rucked up the whole trip."

I took his hand and squeezed it to stop my own shaking. "Okay," I said. "Okay." I was taking deep breaths. "Gossip about what?"

"There's this kid, Sheila, all right? A student in my American lit class two years ago. She was a senior this past year. Used to come around to talk about her problems, that kind of thing. So the last day of school, I'm sitting at my desk correcting exams and she comes into my room. It must have been three-thirty, quarter of four. I thought I was the only one in the building. She said sne wanted 10 uu*. iu me. Boyfriend problems-she was confused. So we went for a ride out to Barre, to the quarry."

"Just the two of you?"

"I was tired of correcting," he said. "I needed to get out of that building. It was just to talk."

"Then what happened?"

He looked up at me. "What happened?" he repeated. "Well, whose version do you want-mine or the PTA cunt who decided to 'come forward' a week after the fact about what she saw?" He laughed bitterly. "Did I say fact just then? I meant fiction."

I wanted us to be in the van, a thousand miles away from what I was hearing. "What did she tell them, Dante?"

"Let's just say I'm accused of breaching the sacred trust."

"Dante, skip the fancy vocabulary and-"

"Kissing her. Feeling her tits. According to this bitch, we had quite a time out there."

He started to cry. "I swear to God, Dolores, we were just out there. I never so much as touched the tip of her sleeve."

I thought I could hear the truth in his quivering voice. We were both in tears.

"Hastings and my good buddy Ev called me into school the first week of vacation. Introduced me to the Board of Ed's attorney-this mutant asshole who looked like he just stepped off the set of Deliverance. They gave me two choices: a statutory rape charge or clean out my desk."

"But why didn't you just tell me, Dante? Maybe I could have-"

"Could have what?" he said. "Overcharged one of my accusers down at the fucking Grand Union? Thrown their canned goods in the bag on top of the tomatoes? You realize what a public hearing would be like? How much fun it would be to see me skewered on the front page of the fucking Times-Argus? I didn't tell you because I wanted to protect you from it. And because... because I thought you'd believe-" Now his crying came out as weird, strangled gulping. I sat down and hugged him, rocked myself against him. "We'll fight it," I said.

"They had me by the balls. I'm gone. I'm out of there.**

"But Dante, they can't just accept someone else's word without letting you defend yourself. What about the girl? Don't they believe her?"

"Who, Sheila? Sheila can't tell the difference between wishful thinking and reality. Sheila is officially 'confused' about what went on."

"I'll help you fight it, Dante. Well get a good lawyer and-"

"You want to help?" he said. "Just stay out of it Just let it alone-that's how you can help: Take the fucking shirts back and get your goddamned refund. I've already talked to a lawyer, he says I might as well hang it up."

"Why?"

"Just... just drop it."

"But what are you going to do?"

"Take a rest for a while-get my shit together. Then, I don't know-I guess I'll look for another job."

"Yeah, but that's exactly why you need to clear this up, honey. No school is going to hire you if they think-"

"They won't know about it. That was part of the deal they cut me."