I sat listening to her sandals clack down the corridor. One of the fluorescent lights made a funny sputtering noise, which the strange silence of the empty classroom amplified. I tiptoed to the front and sat down on Miss Lilly's chair. I hadn't planned it. I looked out at the rows of empty desks and was flooded with sympathy for Miss Lilly. There was a silver thermos on her desk and several notices and reminders from Sister Margaret Frances, the principal. When I picked up the battered poetry book, it opened automatically to "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The print was underlined and circled and everywhere on the page were little arrows and notations, each ending in an exclamation point.

Her straw purse was behind her desk. I picked it up and reached inside. Watching the classroom door, I pulled out her car keys, a pack of Winstons, and a brown plastic vial of pills. The label read, "Sandra Lilly. Take one at bedtime when needed. NO REFILLS." There was a five-dollar bill in her wallet, three quarters, and some seven-cent stamps. Sandwiched inside the worn, scratchy cellophane windows were her pictures: a blond woman with a bubbletop hairdo, an elderly couple standing in front of a fancy cake, and a black-and-white shot of Miss Lilly and some man at the beach. Miss Lilly's hair was wet and stringy and her bathing suit straps were down. The man wore sunglasses and had a flabby waist.

I banished him from the picture and imagined Big Boy from the superette instead. They were in the sand, Big Boy and Miss Lilly, kissing and kissing. No one else was around. They were rubbing against each other. Then, suddenly, they were both naked.

When I looked up, I saw Rosalie's red vinyl notebook. My plan presented itself to me fully developed, like a gift from God.

I put Miss Lilly's things back in her purse. I walked over to Rosalie's desk and picked up her religion book. Back at my own desk, I made the exchange, then placed my book amongst Rosalie's things.

Miss Lilly smiled at me when I slid into the girls' pew. I smiled back, feeling strangely confident. Inside the confessional, I waited for Father Duptulski to slide open his window.

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three weeks since my last confession. These are my sins."

I told him I had been disrespectful to my grandmother and had sworn under my breath on eleven different occasions. Then, in the most humble voice I could manufacture, I confessed how I had sat wickedly by while I watched my good friend Rosalie Pysyk deface her religion book with a filthy, immoral picture. I listened, somewhat amazed, to the treacherous catch in my voice. "She's really okay, Father. I'm sure she didn't even mean to do it... For these and all the sins of my past life, I am heartily sorry."

For my penance, Father Duptulski gave me ten Hail Marys, something that struck me as a reasonable punishment for an accomplice, a mere bridesmaid in crime. I knelt and prayed-not for forgiveness but for the accuracy of my assumption: that the sanctity of the confessional applied more to murderers than kids.

Back in class, Miss Lilly was talking about apostrophes when Sister Margaret Frances appeared at the door. "Miss Lilly?" she said in a sweet voice. "We'll be doing a seventh-grade textbook inspection."

Miss Lilly looked bewildered. "Will this be next week?" she asked.

"This will be today. This will be right now."

Outside after school, Stacia milled around impatiently. "You seen Rosalie?" she kept asking everyone. "You seen Rosalie?"

Rosalie Pysyk was absent on Thursday but word had gotten around about what she'd done. So had the news of her punishment, which broke all school records for its severity: every afternoon until Thanksgiving vacation, Sister Margaret Frances would make an X on the blackboard. Rosalie would stand for one-hour sessions with her nose affixed to the intersection.

I walked home from school that afternoon so free of burden that my steps felt like a preliminary to flight-as if, at any next moment, I might be airborne. Power had made me hungry and I was already eating out of the bag of potato chips as Connie rang up my sale.

Grandma watched as I poked my finger into the corners of the bag for salt and crumbs, then ate two of the tapioca puddings she'd made for supper.

"My gracious, school certainly gives you an appetite," she observed.

"It's a free country," I said. "Granny babes."

That night up in my room I pulled Ma's flying leg out from behind the dresser and saw, for the first time, that it was beautiful.

I hung it above my bed.

IN JANUARY THE HOSPITAL GAVE us BACK A NEW VERSION OF Ma: a smiling, twitchy woman with plucked eyebrows. She smoked menthol cigarettes now and was thin again- thinner than ever. Bony. She told me she'd spent half her months in the hospital circling the grounds with a pedometer hooked to her leg, thinking about things and walking off her "bucket seat." Mileage-wise, she'd gotten three quarters of the way to California.

On her first weekend home, we sat together watching the Beatles on "Ed Sullivan." Ma, next to me on the sofa, tapped her foot against my foot to the beat of the music. I cried silently for Paul McCartney. Across the room, Grandma shook her head and scowled.

"What's your problem?" I snapped, when the camera left the group to pan the hysterical studio audience. My hatred for Grandma at that moment was as pure as my love for Paul.

Her problem, she said, was that she couldn't tell the difference between the singing and those screech owl girls in the audience. If people thought this was hot stuff, then she guessed she just gave up.

"Fine, give up then," I told her. "Be my guest."

Ma intervened, wanting to know which Beatle was which.

"That one's George. He's the quiet one. That's Paul McCartney, the cute one..."

"Cute?" Grandma scoffed. "You call that homely beatnik cute?"

Ringo Starr's face suddenly filled up the screen. "And that's Ringo," I said. "By the way, Grandma, he's the one."

"The one what?"

"The one who's the father of Diane Lennon's illegitimate baby."

Her face registered a fleeting look of alarm before she dismissed the comment "Nuts to you," she said, then rose from her chair and announced that she was disappointed in me, my mother, and Ed Sullivan-the three of us-and that she was so disgusted, she was going to go to bed.

"Fine with me," I said. "Make like a tree and leave."

When Grandma's bedroom door slammed, I looked my mother in the eye. "I can't stand her!" I said. "She's so mental!" Ma's face twitched and I looked away, down at the rug, at my feet next to her feet. "No offense," I mumbled.

Each morning after breakfast, Ma sat at the kitchen table, chain-smoking and checking off want ads from the Easterly and Providence newspapers. She told me getting a job scared her, but she was determined not to shy away from risk. "That's what life's all about, Dolores," she said. "Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off."

My mother's job search miffed Grandma, who had already lined up a position for her as a housekeeper at St Anthony's rectory.

"Look," my mother told Grandma. "One thing they taught me out there is that you cook your own goose when you limit yourself."

"Well what's that supposed to mean?"

Ma made us wait while she lit a fresh Salem. "It means I don't have to clean toilets and fold men's undershorts for a living if I don't feel like it. That was my life for thirteen years and look where it got me."

Grandma shot me a brief look of alarm, then lowered her voice. "There's a parochial-school student in this room, in case you forgot," she said. "I don't see as priests' underclothes are something we need to talk about in front of certain young ladies."

My mother sighed; smoke streamed out of both her nostrils. "Two sixty-two Pierce Street," she mumbled. "The house of repression."

Grandma picked up a dish towel and flapped at Ma's cigarette smoke. "I hate this filthy smell. It's cheap. This whole house smells cheap."

"Oh, for crying out loud, Ma. Just because a woman smokes, it doesn't mean-"

"I see you swear now, too, Miss High and Mighty."

"Ma, 'for crying out loud' isn't a swear. You go ask Father Duptulski."

"Well, in my day, women knew their place." My mother rolled her eyes at God or the ceiling and turned her attention to me. "You can be two things if you're a woman, Dolores. Betty Crocker or a floozy. Just remember your place-even if it kills you."

"What makes you such an authority, I'd like to know?" Grandma huffed.

"Ma, where do you think I've been for seven months? Disneyland?"

Grandma and I looked away.

"You take poor Marilyn Monroe, for instance," Ma continued.

Grandma's eyes widened angrily. "You take Marilyn Monroe!" she said. "I certainly don't want her. For instance or otherwise." Marilyn Monroe's death-how her wickedness had finally caught up with her-was a favorite subject of my grandmother's. To Grandma's way of thinking, Marilyn Monroe resided in the same trash bin as Roberta across the street.

"But, Ma, can't you see it? The poor thing got trapped.

Limited by what everyone expected from her. There was this book about her in the hospital library. Deep down she was just a scared little girl."

Grandma clamped her lips so tightly together they were white. She got up slowly, walked over to the plastic tray where she kept her medications, and took a blood-pressure pill. When she finally spoke, it was to the stove. "This she says about a sexpot who made three pictures condemned by the Legion of Decency. This she says about a woman who didn't even have the modesty to kill herself with a bathrobe on."

Ma and Grandma didn't speak to each other for the next several days. Mostly, Grandma sat scowling in front of her soap operas and westerns or trailing after my mother with a jet spray of Glade. Once, when a Salem commercial was on, Grandma stuck her tongue out and gave the TV the raspberries. If she wanted to say something to Ma, she used me as a transmitter. "Dolores, tell the chimney stack my cousin Florence is having gallbladder problems again." Or "Dolores, tell Marilyn Monroe's best friend that the doctor says my pressure's sky-high."

None of the places where Ma filled out job applications called her back. Each evening after supper, she put on her peacoat, wrapped her striped muffler around her neck, positioned her ear muffs, and rigged her pedometer to her sneaker.

"You want to walk with me?" she'd ask. I didn't want to. I was a quiet detective, collecting each small sign of weird-ness: the way she now made a cup of tea with two teabags, not one; the way she said, "Will do," when you hadn't even requested anything. She'd be gone over an hour, then come back-red-faced, nose dripping from the cold. The back door opening, the stomping of her boots in the pantry, always surprised me. Each time she went out, I braced myself for the news that Grandma or unemployment had broken her-that she'd hiked back to the hospital to be crazy again. I couldn't walk with her. I couldn't.

Somewhere during the school year, word had circulated that my parents were both dead. I didn't bother to correct the misconception. My mother's condition and my father's girlfriend were my business, not anyone else's. At St.

Anthony's, I was the third student from the top of my class, behind Liam Phipps and Kathy Mahoney. (Miss Lilly rated all thirty-one of us on a section of the blackboard labeled "Do Not Erase." But whenever Miss Lilly assigned team work, Rosalie Pysyk and pimply Walter Knupp and I were the last kids the captains chose. This was the price you paid for privacy. One night Ma knocked at my bedroom door, ashtray in hand.

"Busy?" she asked.

"Studying vocab. Miss Lilly gives us a surprise quiz every Friday."

"Will do," she said. She walked over to my Dr. Kildare collage and studied it. "This used to be my room when I was your age, you know."

"Grandma told me," I said. I thought of pulling open the bureau drawer and sharing her Alan Ladd graffiti with her but decided against it. "You can ask me my words if you want."

She took my list and stared at it. There were tears in her eyes. "This place is so bad for my nerves," she said. "Grandma means well, but..."

"Don't ask me them in order. Mix them up."

"All right," she said. "'Blithe.'"

"'Gay-hearted.'"

'"Blackguard."'

"'Scoundrel.'"

"Okay.'Panacea.'"

"'Cure-all.'"

She put down my notebook. "You and I are getting a place of our own, Dolores, just as soon as I can swing it," she said. "That's a promise."

"'Cure-all,'" I repeated.

" 'Cure-all,' right... It's funny, you know? I spend over half a year down below-straightening myself out, figuring out why my entire marriage was one long apology. So where do I end up? Back here where the whole problem started. Driving Old Lady Masicotte's goddamned Cadillac, no less. The thine is-"

"Are you going to ask me my words or not?"

"I'm sorry. 'Paradox'?"

"'Paradox'?"

'"Paradox."'

"Skip that one," I said. "I'll come back to it."

"I'm a grown woman, aren't I? I can have a cigarette if I want to, can't I?... I hated every second he worked for that rich bitch. But I never risked complaining. Knew my place, all right..."

She got up and paced, then stopped to smile at her flying-leg painting. "You hike this?"

"It's okay," I said. "It's pretty cool."

She passed her fingertips over the painting's surface. "They hung another one of my pictures up in the dining room at the hospital. A still life. But I thought this one was better. This was my favorite."

"What's repression?" I said.

"What?" She scanned my vocab list.

"You said this was the house of repression. What's repression?"

She sat on my bed, flopped back. "Holding everything inside. Feeling guilty about everything. Dr. Markey-this doctor I worked with-told me half my problem was being raised in an unhealthy environment. That it constipated me-emotionally. So that Tony and I... Those were his words for it, anyway."

"Don't tell Grandma," I said. "She'd go berserk."

She reached over and stroked my cheek with the back of her hand. Her touch felt cool. "You know what I was afraid of all the while I was in the hospital? I was afraid that by the time I got out, you'd look different. But you don't. You're just the same."

In her absence I'd defused the Pysyk sisters and begun to write love poems in my key-locked diary. When Grandma got to be too much, I snuck over to Roberta's tattoo shop to smoke and swear about my luck, my life. Ma didn't know, couldn't see that I had changed.

"Just don't ever let it happen to you, Dolores."

"Let what happen?"

"Let people just shit all over you. Don't you ever become some man's personal toilet the way I did... All those flowers she kept sending after I lost the baby. She had crust, all right, I'll give her that much."

"Who?"

"Old Lady Masicotte. 'Aren't you going to write her a thank-you note?' he'd say. There I was, trying to hold myself together from one hour to the next, and the two of them..." She walked out of the room, blew her nose, and came back.

"But that's all water over the dam, now, isn't it? Where were we?'Paradox.'"

" 'A situation... A situation which... a situation which seems contradictory but is nevertheless true.' Something like that."

We studied each other for several seconds. I decided to risk it.

I reached over and took the cigarette from her. She watched me inhale deeply, then blow the smoke over her shoulder.

"There's these two girls," I said. "Rosalie and Stacia Pysyk..."