"First three months she had me puking my guts out. Now she's into gymnastics."

"She?"

"Yeah, I'm ninety-nine percent positive. I'm naming her Isis. Like it?"

"Isis? Yeah, it's pretty."

"My boyfriend's in a band. Wants to name her Cacophony, but I said uh-uh. Til name the ones I carry, and you name the ones you carry,' I told him." A bump moved across her big belly-a foot, clearly.

After break, Roy read aloud what he said were the two best papers in the class. The first one was mine. I'd written about painting Roberta's toenails after all-about how holding down those foot tremors in my hand as I worked gave me some sort of power over her disease. In Roy's voice, the idea didn't sound quite so stupid. The other paper belonged to the huge guy who sat on the floor during class. "My whole life used to throb like a toothache." That was the first sentence. It told about how he cured middle-of-the-night insomnia by tiptoeing into his son's room and watching him sleep-how he regulated his own breathing to his son's, how the son would kill him if he knew.

"Let's have a hand for Dolores and Thayer," Roy suggested. The applause rattled my heart. I couldn't look up, so I looked over at Thayer.

He was hard to figure, sitting back there in his own outskirts, those sequoia legs bent up at the knee. I snuck peeks for the rest of that class and the next one, gradually noticing things about him other than his size. His hair, for instance: a mopful of blond curls so tight you could stack coins in them. His beard was reddish brown. Going in and out of the classroom, he had to duck to miss whacking his head. His step had a bounce; those curls rose and fell as he walked.

"Thayer?" I said.

We were in the corridor on our way out to the parking lot. Hearing his name spoken seemed to alarm him. "I just wanted to say I really liked your paper. The one Roy read last time."

"Sounded pretty ridiculous next to yours," he said. But his face made me glad I'd risked the compliment.

"Can I tell you something? You should try sitting closer to the rest of us. You miss a lot by sitting apart like that. It sets up barriers."

"How do you know?"

Heat rose to my face. "I don't know. I just think it must. This is my car."

"You're really good at description," he said. "When Roy read your paper, I could practically feel her foot in my own lap."

"You could?"

"Yeah. Which was a real turn-on because I have this foot fetish."

I unlocked the Biscayne, got in, locked it again. He was talking at me through the glass. The trouble with those little squirt cans of Mace was that you had to rummage in your purse for them while the pervert waited. I rolled the window down a millimeter or two instead. "What?"

"I said maybe you'd like to go out for a coffee sometime?"

I told him I was pretty busy.

"That was just a joke, you know. About me having a foot fetish. Actually I think feet are kind of ugly."

"Oh."

"I was just trying to be witty. Happens when I get nervous. Sony."

"How old is your kid?"

"How did you know I had a kid?"

"Your paper? You said you watch your kid sleep?"

"Oh, yeah, right. Thirteen-pain-in-the-butt age. Not that he wasn't always one. I notice you don't wear any wedding ring."

I shoved my hands in my jacket pockets.

"I'm divorced," he said. "If you're wondering."

I rolled my window down some more. "The reason I know you miss a lot when you sit apart in class is because I used to do that. When I was in high school. At a table... Because I was fat."

His laugh was one edgy note.

"Not thai you're fat," I said. "You're big-boned. I was... well, I was obese. But anyway, I really liked your paper."

I sat in the Biscayne with the motor racing and watched him walk away. My hands were sweaty on the steering wheel; I wasn't sure why I sat there and stared instead of just reaching down and getting out of neutral. He unlocked a van and got in; the whole vehicle leaned toward his weight.

He waved as he drove past me. "Existential Drywall," the van said. "Responsible Work for Authentic Individuals."

It would surprise you-the number of people who crave Chinese food on Christmas Eve. Roberta had had dizzy spells that day, so I was running the takeout service myself. Mr. Pucci's order was one of the last to come in-the Dinner for Four special. I was nervous driving over there.

"Merry Christmas, Mr. Pucci," I said. My tote box was brimming with brown bags. I shifted a little and almost dropped his entire order.

"Is that Dolores?" he said. "Oh, my God, you're the lost person-do you have time to come in for a drink?"

"Oh, well, not really. I don't want your stuff to get cold. Half a glass, maybe."

The dining-room table was set like something in a magazine. Men were talking and laughing down in the sunken living room. I followed Mr. Pucci out to the kitchen.

For a couple of quiet seconds, we just smiled and took each other in. "How long have you been working at the restaurant?" he asked.

The cup of cider he gave me was warm and freckled with cinnamon. I told him about my divorce, night school, Roberta. "Well," I laughed, "here's to the man on the moon."

His eyes teared over and he shook his head. He looked older, old. "To old friends," he said.

One of the men called up, "The smell of that food is torturing us, Fabio. When do we eat?"

I drained my cup. "Is that Gary? I'd like to say hi to him," I said. "Wish him happy holidays."

"Well-he's been sick. The flu." I watched a nerve jump in his face. "But all right. Come on. Sure."

I nodded and smiled as he introduced me to his company -handsome Jordan Marsh-catalog men come to life in their beautiful cable sweaters and creased pants. The room was sweet with cologne.

"And you remember Gary?" Mr. Pucci said.

I struggled to control my face, to force my muscles to act normal. There was a quilt over his legs. He had become a skeleton.

He squinted up at me. "Who is it, Fabio?"

"It's Dolores Price, honey. She was a student of mine."

He stared without recognition.

"I barged in on you once," I said. "You two were going On a picnic. You gave me some cookies and played Billie Holiday on your jukebox." I suddenly noticed the jukebox, pointed to it. "There it is," I said.

His shaking was wilder than Roberta's. "Now I remember," he said. "The big fat girl."

Mr. Pucci laughed and blushed. "I'm sorry," he said. "He's not himself."

Roberta was up when I got home. I flopped down on the water bed next to her and stared up at that collapsed ceiling. "Now I wish we'd gotten a tree after all," I said. "No matter what it looks like in here."

"I know what you need," she said. "You need your Christmas present."

She opened hers from me first: a Chippendales calendar we'd sold down at Buchbinder's. We thumbed through the months, choosing our favorites, giggling together at the sexy men. My present from her was wrapped in red foil and had cascades of curled white ribbon. "It's so beautiful, I hate to open it," I said.

"Red and white," she said. "Polack colors."

Inside the box was a satin Chinese robe-orange blossoms falling on peacock blue.

"What the hell you crying for?" she said. "Come on, now."

I took it out of the box and it fell to its full length. "It's just so beautiful. You rat! We agreed not to spend more than ten dollars apiece. Now I feel even cruddier."

"Oh, go on," she said. "Johnny down at the restaurant got it for me from New York. Half-price."

The robe slid coolly against my skin; we both stroked it.

I told her about Mr. Pucci's lover.

"If it's that stuff, it's catching, ain't it? The teacher must have it, too."

"I feel scared," I said.

"I'm sure you can't pick it up just by walking into their house."

"Not scared of that. I'm just scared it's there-that it exists. I can't stop seeing him. He looked like a concentration-camp man."

We held hands, tight.

"Roberta?" I said.

"Hmm?"

"Nothing. I'm just... I'm just glad you're here."

Thayer Kitchen did the ceiling job for three and a quarter during our January semester break, moonlighting for a week's worth of evenings. Sometimes I'd watch from the doorway as he hammered and hefted Sheetrock or clunked around on his steel-spring stilts, whistling along with his Bob Seger and Springsteen tapes. During his break, he set the stove timer for fifteen minutes and flopped back on a kitchen chair. I sat with him, but he did most of the talking.

"You see, it's tricky enough now that he's gettin' hair under his arms and I'm noticing crusty underwear when I do the laundry. But him being half black on top of it makes it a little tougher. Hard on the kid, you know? Lately he's gone heavy-duty into his ethnic thing. Hangs out at the Y with the bros. Gets pissed off if I forget and call him Arthur instead of Jemal. Or Chilly J, I should say. That's his rapping name."

"What about his mother? Isn't she around here?"

"Claudia? Lives down in D.C. He stays there for part of the summer-August, usually-but he hates it. Claims all the McDonald's in Washington water down their milkshakes, but I think he gets lonesome. Claudia's got a killer work schedule, so it's pretty much him and the VCR... I mean, we drive each other nuts, him and me, but we're tight. Chilly J. My man."

"I'm divorced, too," I said.

"Kids?"

I shook my head.

"Yeah, well, he must have been a big doofus."

"Who?"

"The guy who let you get away."

The comment took me off guard. It was several seconds before I heard the droning of the stove timer.

"You got a crush on that big drink of water who's fixing the ceiling, don't you?" Roberta said that night. She'd caught me humming "Against the Wind" while I helped her into her pj's.

"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "What makes you think that?"

"Because all week you've been walking around here in a daze."

"Paint fumes," I said.

At the start of spring semester, I reduced my hours down at the store and signed up for two courses, Psychology 112 and Herstory: A Feminist Look at the Past. "I don't really want to major in business, Mr. Buchbinder, so it's not fair to keep letting you pay for my courses," I said, pushing back his second envelope of money.

"Don't force her if she doesn't want it," Mrs. Buchbinder said.

A.

"You keep out of this, Ida," he scolded. "This is business between the girl and me." I smiled at the word "girl." I was thirty-three.

Allyson was in my Herstory class, too. By then she had broken up with her boyfriend, thrown her Boy George screenplay into the wood stove, and given birth to Shiva, a ten-pound baby boy. I visited them one afternoon with a present, one of those snuggle sacks that lets the baby sleep against your chest while you carry on with your life. It cost $39.99, a splurge, but it was the only thing I felt like giving her. Allyson and I read the instructions and she tried it just before I left. "Whoa, it feels primal," she said. "Third World or something."

The only man in the Herstory class dropped out after the second week. Some nights, class turned into a kind of group-therapy seminar, though, personally, I kept my mouth shut. The more my classmates shared their stories and raised each other's consciousness, the more horrified I became with the marriage Dante and I had put together. I looked up "existentialism" in the library. If I had the theory right, I was just as much to blame for my bad marriage as Dante had been. Roberta's your family, I told myself. She's all you need. Yours is an authentic life.

Thayer was taking word processing on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Sometimes we sat together in one of the student-lounge booths, but whenever he started talking about new movies or restaurants he'd heard about, I broke in with complaints about my busy schedule.

One evening I spoke out in class. I hadn't meant to; those women just drew me in. "I think..." I said, "I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape your life takes." My voice hesitated a little but I kept talking; everyone seemed interested. "Instead of, you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy."

"What might make you happy?" my professor asked.

The rest of the class took over. "Prince Charming," someone sighed.

"Small thighs."

"My boyfriend finding my G spot."

Allyson hooked her bare feet around the chair in front of her. "Prince Charming locating my G spot between my thin thighs."