"Not," Prudie said, but Bernadette had spoken at the same time and Bernadette was the one who carried through. Berna-dette was the one who carried on. The rain ticked off the time while she spoke.

The fire turned from blue to orange, pole to pole. The log in the stove fell.

Bernadette was capable of speaking and enjoying the stillness of the scene at the same time. Nothing disturbed her peace less than the sound of her own voice. Sylvia's house was so much quieter thanJocelyn's. Sylvia lived downtown, near campus but back from the street, directly behind the Phi Beta Pi sorority, un-less it was the Pi Beta Phi. This was a hidden, tranquil location, except during rush, when the girls gathered on the lawn for a week, singing, "I want to be a Phi Beta Pi [or the other], boom, boom,"

like sirens to sailors. Of course, the club wouldn't have met here if it had been rush week. If Daniel had moved out dur-ing rush week, Bernadette would have completely understood. Jocelyn had told her that Daniel was seeing someone young enough to be his sister.

Jocelyn knew how a child felt when her father decamped. But surely it was different when the child was grown-up and had a place of her own. Allegra had every right to miss her father, just not the way Sylvia did. Sylvia was daily deserted; Allegra had merely had her Christmases spoiled. From now on there would be no place to come where she felt entirely at home. Her holidays would be split down the middle, like a grapefruit.

December was still months away, but Jocelyn knew enough about Allegra to guess that she'd already thought of it. Christmas had always been such a big deal to her. As a child she'd spent the days leading up to it sick with apprehension, so afraid that she wouldn't like her gifts, that the wishes closest to her heart would go unattended. She would cry herself to sleep at night, antic.i.p.at-ing her disappointment. By Christmas morning she'd have, the whole family exhausted and peevish.

In fact, her requests were never difficult or expensive, and there was no reason not to indulge them.

From the moment the actual getting began, Allegra was wild with delight. She loved surprises and ripped her presents open, with cries of joy for whatever was inside. "For me?" she'd ask, as if it were too much to believe. "More for me?"

Every year she'd be given a sum of money with which to buy presents as well, and she spent it thoughtfully, but it never went far enough. So she added things that she'd made, drawings for her brothers and books of stapled pictures for her parents and Jocelyn. Ashtrays and ornaments. Stones and pine cones painted with glitter. Bookends and calendars. As she grew older these handmade gifts outstripped the store-bought ones. She was not-she was quite insistent on this point-an artist. But she was clever. Her father taught her to use power tools, and she opted for shop in high school rather than the cooking cla.s.s. By then she was designing furniture and jewellery. The gla.s.s-top coffee table on which Jocelyn had just set her purse was something Allegra had made back then, and it was as nice as anything you saw anywhere.

Now she sold her things in stores, online, and at craft fairs. Her current project was to collect damaged jewellery at flea mar-kets, dinged beads and bad cameos, and crush them, pressing the resulting bits into fish-scale mosaics. Sylvia was wearing a new bracelet made of mismatched earrings caught together in a deli-cate chain. It was a great deal prettier than it sounded, and showed that Allegra's heart, as always, was in the right place. The year before this she'd joined a carolling group in San Fran-cisco and spent her Christmas Eve singing second soprano in a round of hospitals and nursing homes. Sylvia had a picture of her on the mantel, wearing a purple robe and carrying a lit candle. A silver frame of Allegra's own making. A madonna with fire bright cheeks, eyes like mirrors.

Austen's minor characters are really wonderful," said Grigg. "Good as d.i.c.kens's." Sylvia was very glad to have Grigg speak-ing right up this way. She wouldn't have taken issue for the world, and anyway, what was there to possibly take issue with? There were authors whose names she didn't like to use in the same sentence with Austen's, but d.i.c.kens had written some very good books in his day. Especially David Copperfield.

"And speaking of d.i.c.kens," Grigg said-were they never to be done speaking of d.i.c.kens!-"I was trying to think of con-temporary writers who devote that same care to the secondary characters, and it occurred to me that it's a common sitcom de-vice. You can just imagine how today Austen would be writing 'The Elinor Show,' with Elinor as the solid moral centre and the others stumbling into and out of her New York apartment with their wacky lives."

Sylvia could imagine no such thing. It was all very well to point out fairy-tale themes in Austen; Sylvia had done this her-self.Pride and Prejudice as "Beauty and the Beast."Persuasion as "Cinderella," et cetera, et cetera. It was even all right to suggest that d.i.c.kens also did well what Austen did superbly. But "The Elinor Show"!She did not think so. What a waste those eyelashes were on a man who watched sitcoms.

Even Bernadette was silent with disapproval. The rain drummed on the roof, the fire sputtered. The women looked at their hands or at the fire, butnot at one another. It was Allegra who finally spoke.

"Good as the secondary characters are, I do think Austen gets better at them in her later books. The women-Mrs. Jennings, Mrs. Palmer, and that other one-are kind of a mishmash. Hard to keep straight. And I loved Mr. Palmer's acid tongue, but then he reforms and disappears very disappointingly."

In fact, Allegra had instantly recognized herself in the sour Mr. Palmer. She, too, often thought of sharp things to say, and she said them more often than she wished. Mr. Palmer didn't suf-fer fools and neither did Allegra, but it wasn't something she was proud of. It didn't spring, as Austen suggested, from the desire to appear superior, unless lack of patience was a superior quality. "Plus"-Allegra allowed herself one more moment's irritation over the silencing of Mr. Palmer-"I do thinkSense and Sensibil-ity stretches our credulity at the end. I mean, the sudden mar-riage of Robert Ferrars and Lucy Steele! The later books are more smoothly plotted."

"It requires some hand-waving," Grigg agreed. (That stern moment of silence utterly lost on him! What would it take?) "You see, of course, the effect Austen's going for, that moment of mis-direction, but you wish she hadn't had to go to such lengths for it."

The Austen-bashing was getting out of hand. Sylvia looked to Jocelyn, whose face was stoic, her voice calm but firm. "I think Austen explains it very well. My credulity remains unstretched."

"I don't have any trouble with it," Sylvia said.

"Perfectly in character," said Prudie.

Allegra frowned in her pretty way, chewing on a fingernail. You could see that she worked with her hands. Her nails were short, and the skin around them rough and dry. You could see that she took things to heart. Hangnails had been teased loose and then stripped, leaving painful peeled bits by her thumbs.

Prudie would have liked to take her somewhere for a manicure. When your fingers were long and tapered like that, you might as well make the most of them. "I suppose," Allegra conceded, "if the writer's not allowed to pull an occasional rabbit out of a hat, there would be no fun in writing a book at all."

Well, Prudie thought, Allegra would be the one to know where writers found their fun. Prudie herself had no problems with girl-on-girl. She opened her mouth to tease Allegra about her book-writing girlfriend, which would certainly make this point, as well as alert Grigg to the lay of the land.

But Grigg was agreeing again. Really, he had become very agreeable where Allegra was concerned! He was seated next to her on the couch, and Prudie tried to remember how this had come about. Had it been the only seat left, or had he schemed for it?

Usually Allegra managed to work her s.e.xuality into any con-versation. This was a point of contention with her mother, who thought it rude to press s.e.xual details onto slight acquaintances. "Your paperboy doesn't need to know," she'd say. "Your me-chanic doesn't care." Allegra would never believe that h.o.m.o-phobia wasn't at the bottom of this. "I won't be closeted," she declared. "It's not in my nature."

But now, just when the infor-mation might be usefully shared, she was suddenly, irritatingly silent on the subject.

"How's Corinne?" Prudie asked impishly. "Speaking of writers."

"Corinne and I have gone our separate ways," Allegra an-swered, which Prudie then remembered she'd been told. Alle-gra's face had turned to stone. But that business with Corinne had been months ago, surely. Prudie trusted that it wasn't too sensitive a subject to be raisednow. No one had told her they were never to mention Corinne's name, because she was certainly capable of holding her tongue when necessary.

Grigg was flipping through his enormous complete-works-of. Why did men always have to have the biggest books? It wasn't clear he'd even heard.

While Allegra liked to describe herself as a garden-variety les-bian, she knew that the truth was more complicated. s.e.xuality is rarely as simple as it is natural. Allegra was not entirely indiffer-ent to men, just to men's bodies. She was often attracted to the men in books; they seemed, as a rule, more pa.s.sionate than the women in books, though actual women seemed more pa.s.sionate than actual men. As a rule.

Allegra was aroused most by pa.s.sion itself. Poems of the con-fessional sort. Vistas, all kinds, even swampy. Swelling music. Danger. She needed to feel to feel alive.

Adrenaline was her drug of choice. This wasnot something she talked much about, and especially not to people who knew her mother. Sylvia believed in being careful, though she also be-lieved that being careful was often not enough. She saw the world as an obstacle course. You picked your way across it while the terrain slipped about and things fell or exploded or both. Di-sasters arrived in the form of accidents, murders, earthquakes, disease, and divorce. She'd tried to raise sensible, cautious chil-dren.

During the high school years, when Allegra knew that Sylvia had been congratulating herself on her daughter's good appet.i.te, good grades, sweet friends, sober habits, Allegra had been cutting herself.

Allegra and Corinne met in a small plane on Allegra's twenty-eighth birthday. She'd spent the night with her parents, and her dad had made her waffles in the morning. Then she'd left, telling them she wasmeeting friends back in the city. Instead she'd gone to a tiny airport in Vacaville for an appointment she'd made months earlier. This was her very first solo jump. She hesitated at the last minute, with the sky roaring past her-she wasn't insane-and wondered whether she was going to go through with it. She was more afraid than she'd been on her first tandem jump. She'd been warned of this, but it still surprised her. If she could have backed down without anyone's knowing, she would have. Instead, merely to save face, she threw herself out. She pulled the cord too soon. The instant she did, she wished she were free-falling again. That was the best part, and she saw she would have to do this again, and better next time. The chute opened, jerking her upward, taking her breath, the straps compressing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She grabbed the cords, pulled herself into a better position. How odd, to be minding the uncomfortable straps at the very moments in which she was plunging to earth from a plane. "That's one small step for a man, and it's a bit hot in this s.p.a.cesuit."

The fall became quiet, contemplative. She was surprised at how long it seemed to last, how she experienced each second of it with such clarity. She came down hard, landing on her b.u.t.t and then tipping so that she crushed the point of her elbow, and her b.u.t.t hurt immediately, but she didn't feel her elbow at first. She lay, looking up, with the chute spilled behind her. Clouds floated, birds flew. Her blood was still plummeting deliciously. Corinne and the tandem master drifted over her. Allegra could see the bottoms of Corinne's boots, which meant Corinne was in the wrong position. Like Mary Poppins.

Allegra tried to stand, and as she tipped herself upright, a white-hot wire shot through her arm. Her ears were full of sea sounds; her eyes were full of light. There was a smell like tar. She took a step, pitched forward into the void.

She came to with Corinne speaking. "Are you all right? Can you answer me?" The words pa.s.sed over like the shadows of birds, and then the darkness spread silently out from those shad-ows. The next time she awoke, she was in Corinne's arms.

It was an irresistible way to meet. By the time they got to the hospital they were partners in crime. Sylvia mustn't be told about the jump, but Allegra was still too faint, too fading in and out, to trust herself on the phone with her mother. "Don't tell her any-thing," Allegra said. She remembered how she'd broken her foot years before, in kindergarten, falling off the monkey bars. She'd spent a night in the hospital and Sylvia had stayed the whole time, sitting by the bed in one of those awful plastic chairs, never closing her eyes. Allegra would have said she was closer to Daniel than to Sylvia-even within the family there was some-thing guarded about Sylvia-but now, with her arm hurting horribly, she wanted her mother.

"Make her come.

She lay on the gurney, her mind drifting over the white swirling contours of the ceiling like snow. Corinne punched her cell phone and then picked up Allegra's unhurt hand while she talked, stroking it with her thumb. "Mrs. Hunter?" Corinne said. "You don't know me, but I'm a friend of Allegra's. Allegra is fine.

We think her arm is broken, but I'm here at the Vacaville Kaiser with her and she's going to be fine."

Corinne described, in great detail, an unfortunate chain of events. A friendly dog, a boy with a ball, a pebbly patch of road, Allegra on a bicycle. Sylvia bought it all. These things happened, even when dogs were friendly, even when bike helmets were worn. Allegra had always been so careful to wear her bike helmet. But sometimes it just didn't matter how careful a person was. She and Daniel would be there as soon as they could. They'd hope to thank Corinne for her kindness in person.

Allegra was impressed. Anyone who could lie as effortlessly as Corinne was someone to keep on the right side of. You would want her lies told for and not to you.

But Corinne turned out not to be the thrill-seeker Allegra as-sumed. Later, when Allegra mentioned some ideas that might add a touch of adrenaline to their lovemaking, Corinne was un-receptive. She'dbeen skydiving only as an antidote to writer's block. She'd hoped to shake something loose. She saw the void as the blank page; she was throwing herself onto it. The skydiving had been a metaphor.

But it hadn't helped, and she would be a fool to repeat the ex-periment. "You broke your arm!" she would say, as if Allegra didn't know this. Corinne kept herself on the ground, at safe speeds, inside her apartment, drinking cups of fretful tea. She was a dental hygienist, but not a pa.s.sionate one-she'd chosen it because it seemed like a job that would allow her time to write. Really, she lived the most boring life, though Allegra was totally in love with her before she saw this. The only part of Corinne that Allegra had seen clearly in those hours at the hospital when she was flying on painkillers and falling falling falling in love was the lying.

Sylvia had uncorked a nice Pet.i.t Syrah, something that went well with cheese and crackers, the rain and the fire. Jocelyn had drunk just enough to feel companionable, not quite enough to feel witty. She was holding up her gla.s.s so the firelight came through it. It was a heavy, faceted crystal, a wedding gift once, now unfortunately clouded by thirty-two years of hard water in the dishwasher. If only Sylvia had taken proper care.

"Sense and Sensibilityfeatures one of Austen's favourite char-acters-the handsome debaucher,"

Jocelyn said. "She's very sus-picious of good-looking men, I think. Her heroes tend to be actively nondescript." Twirling her gla.s.s so the ruby-coloured wine rose in thin sheets and fell again. Daniel was a nondescript man, though Jocelyn wouldn't say it and Sylvia would never con-cede it. Of course, in Austenworld, that was all to his credit.

"Except for Darcy," Prudie said.

"We haven't gotten to Darcy yet." There was a warning in Jocelyn's voice. Prudie took it no further.

"Her heroes have better hearts than her villains. They're de-serving. Edward is good people," said Bernadette.

"Well, of course," in Allegra's smoothest, most melodious tones. Probably only her mother and Jocelyn would know how impatient such an obvious point made her. Allegra took a gulp of wine so big Jocelyn could hear it going down.

"In real life," said Grigg, "women want the heel, not the soul." He spoke with great bitterness, eyelashes pumping. Jocelyn knew a lot of men who believed this. Women don't want nice men, they cry out over beers, to any woman nice enough to listen. They condemn themselves loudly, lamenting their uncontrollable, dam-nable niceness. In fact, when you got to know these men better, lots of them weren't as nice as they believed themselves to be. There was no percentage in pointing this out.

"But Austen's not entirely unsympathetic to Willoughby in the end," Bernadette said. "I love that bit where he confesses to Elinor. You can feel Austen softening just the way Elinor does, in spite of herself.

She won't allow that he's a good person, because he's not, but she lets you feel for him, just for a moment. She has to balance it on a knife edge-too much and you'll be wishing him with Marianne after all."

"Structurally that confession bookends the long story Bran-don tells her." Another writerly observationfrom Allegra. Co-rinne might be gone, Jocelyn thought, but her ghost certainly remained, reading Allegra's books, making Allegra's points. Per-haps Jocelyn had been too hard on Allegra earlier. She'd neg-lected to factor in Corinne when calculating the loss of Daniel. Poor darling.

"Poor Elinor! Willoughby on one side, Brandon on the other. She is quiteentre deux feux." Prudie had a bit of lipstick on her teeth, or else it was wine. Jocelyn wanted to lean across and wipe it off with a napkin, the way she did when Sahara needed tidy-ing. But she restrained herself; Prudie didn't belong to her. The fire sculpted Prudie's face, left the hollows of her cheeks hollow, brightened her deep-set eyes.

She wasn't pretty like Allegra, but she was attractive in an interesting way. She drew your eye. She would probably age well, like Anjelica Huston. If only she would stop speaking French. Or go to France, where it would be less noticeable.

"And Lucy, too," Bernadette said. "Something about Elinor. Everyone wants to tell her their secrets. She encourages intimacy without meaning to."

"Why doesn't Brandon fall in love with her, I wonder?" Joce-lyn asked. Jocelyn would never second-guess Austen, not in a million years, but that was the match she would have tried to make.

"They're perfect for each other."

"No, he needs Marianne's animation," said Allegra. "Because he has none of his own.

Corinne craved confession. Where Allegra wished to be teas-ingly intimidated before lovemaking, Corinne wished to be soothed with secrets afterward. "I want to know everything about you," she said, which was just what a lover should say, and roused no suspicions. "Especially the things you've never told anyone.

"Once I say them, they'll change," Allegra protested. "They won't be secrets anymore.

"No," said Corinne. "They'll beour secrets. Trust me.

So Allegra told her:

1. There was a special cla.s.s at my grammar school. A cla.s.s for r.e.t.a.r.ded children. Sometimes we saw them, but mostly they were kept away. They had a different recess, a different lunch-time. Maybe they only came for half the day.

One of these children was a boy named Billy. He carried a basketball wherever he went, and he sometimes talked to it.

Nonsense, gibberish. I used to think that he was only aping human conversation, that he didn't understand it involved actual words and people who talked back. He wore a hat, squashed down on his head, which made his ears stick out like Dopey inSnow White. His nose ran a lot. It made me unhappy to think about him, or about any of them. Mostly I didn't.

One day I saw him at the edge of the playground, where he wasn't supposed to be. I thought he'd get introuble if anyone else saw him. The teacher for the special cla.s.s always seemed to be shouting at someone. So I went up to him, congratulat-ing myself the whole time on how caring I was, how I could talk to Billy just as if he were a real boy. But when I got close I saw he had his p.e.n.i.s in his hand. He showed it to me, laid it flat along his palm for me to look at. It twitched there, like it was being poked with pins. I went back to my friends.

A few weeks later, there was a day when my father picked me up after cla.s.s. He was distracted by something; I felt ig-nored. So I told him how there was this boy at school who'd made me look at his p.e.n.i.s. An older boy. Daddy was more up-set than I'd bargained for; right away I wished I'd kept my mouth shut. He demanded the boy's name, stopped to look the family up in the phone book at the drugstore, drove over to their house, banged on the front door. A woman came. She had braids like a child, but grey hair; it struck me as odd. She wore those winged gla.s.ses. Daddy started to talk and she started to cry. But angrily at first. "None of you give a d.a.m.n about us," she said. I wasn't used to people swearing, so I was shocked. And then she wasn't angry anymore; it was more like despair. "What do you expect me to do?"

"I expect you to talk to your boy-" Daddy was saying, when Billy appeared behind her, holding his stupid ball and muttering. Daddy stopped mid-sentence.

Daddy had a younger brother who was r.e.t.a.r.ded. He died when he was fifteen, hit by a car. I've always been afraid that I wouldn't love a child unless it was beautiful. I've always been afraid to have children because of that. But Daddy says his mother loved her r.e.t.a.r.ded child best. She always said that a mother's love goes where it's needed.

After his brother died, Daddy tried to get his mother to go out more. He and Mom tried to take Grandma to movies and concerts and plays. But she usually said no. He would drop by to see how she was doing, and she'd be sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window. "I can't think of a blessed thing I want to do anymore," she'd say.

So Billy was standing behind his mother, talking to his basketball with more and more agitation in his voice. Daddy was apologizing, but Billy's mom was having none of it. "What do you know?" she asked.

"With your pretty little girl going off to college one day. Marrying. Having more pretty children for you.

We got back in the car and drove home. Daddy said, "I wouldn't have added to that woman's troubles for anything in the world." He said, "You must have known there was an im-portant part of the story you were leaving out." He said, "Why didn't you tell me? I would have handled things very differ-ently." "Go to your room," he said. I hadn't known I could make him that angry. I was afraid he'd stopped loving me. He wouldn't take my hand. He wouldn't look at me.

I couldn't defend myself, even to myself. I tried. I thought about how I'd had no idea he would get so upset, no idea she would get so upset. I didn't know there would be tears. I wouldn't have said a word if I'd known. But why had I said a word? I'd just been idly angling for attention. I hadn't told Daddy that Billy was r.e.t.a.r.ded, because I knew I'd get more attention doing it the other way. I hadn't even minded when Billy showed me his p.e.n.i.s. It seemed kind of friendly.

2. One time we went to a museum where there were paintings by van Gogh. I liked how thick they were. Daddy said that artists paint the way they actually see, or maybe he said some-thing else, but I heard it that way. I thought about van Gogh looking out from his eyes at a world thick like that. I'd neverwondered if I saw the world the way everyone else did or if I saw something better or wrong or different.

How would you know? How would van Gogh say, Does everything look sort of thick to you? He wouldn't even think to say it.

The next day I lay out on the gra.s.s in our backyard and I looked straight into the sun, the way my mother had told me never to do because it would damage my eyes. I thought that I would grow up to be a famous artist and everything and everyone I saw, everything and everyone I painted, would be blinding to look at.

3. My parents believed children should have lots of free time. They believed in dreaming. I had piano lessons briefly, but they didn't take, and I didn't do after-school sports or any-thing until I was in high school. I read a lot and I made things. I looked for four-leaf clovers. I watched ant colonies. Ants have very little unscheduled time. Places to go, people to see. I adopted a particular nest, out by a stepping-stone in Mom's mission garden. I was very good to my ants at first. I brought them bits of cookies with sprinkles; I landscaped with sh.e.l.ls and thought howI'd like to find a sh.e.l.l so big I could climb in-side, go exploring.

I made tiny newspapers of ant events, stamp-sized papers at first, then a bit bigger, too big for ants, it distressed me, but I couldn't fit the stories otherwise and I wanted real stories, not just lines of something that looked like writing. Any-way, imagine how small an ant paper would really be. Even a stamp would have been like a basketball court.

I imagined political upheavals, plots and coups d'etat, and I reported on them. I think I may have been reading a biogra-phy of Mary Queen of Scots at the time. Did you read those orange biographies as a child? The ones all about the child-hoods of famous people, and the last chapter would be the ac-complishments that made them famous? G.o.d, I loved those books. I remember Ben Franklin and Clara Barton and Will Rogers and Jim Thorpe and Amelia Earhart and Madame Curie, and one about the first white child born in the Roanoke colony-Virginia Dare?-but I guess that must have all been made up.

Anyway, there was this short news day for the ants. I'd run out of political plots, or I was bored with them. So I got a gla.s.s of water and I created a flood. The ants scrambled for safety, swimming for their lives. I was kind of ashamed, but it made good copy. I told myself I was bringing excite-ment into their usual humdrum. The next day, I dropped a rock on them. It was a meteorite from outer s.p.a.ce. They gath-ered around it and ran up and over it; obviously they didn't know what to do. It prompted three letters to the editor. Eventually I torched them. I was always way too interested in matches. Things got a little out of hand and the fire spread from the anthill into the garden. Only a little, not as bad as that sounds. Diego came and stamped it out, and I remember crying and trying to get him to stop, because he was stepping on my ants.

But what a horrible, heartless queen I turned out to be. I will never seek the presidency.

4. There was this boy I f.u.c.ked when I was twenty-two, just because he wanted it so much. He was a student from Galway, and we met in Rome and travelled together for three weeks. On our last night together, the night before I had to go home, we were in Prague. We went to dinner and then out to the bars, and I drank until I was wetly sentimental, and demanded an exchange of tokens. He gave me a photograph of him hold-ing a cat. I forced my silver ring onto his finger. It caught at the knuckle, but Ipushed it down.