"Ruby wanted pancakes and I wanted waffles, and Daddy said he'd flip a coin. But she cried, so of course, the big baby got her choice."

I knew the story ran deeper, and the prospect of digging it out wearied me. "Get in, sweetheart." I held up the sheet and blanket.

Ca.s.sandra slipped under the sky blue comforter and took a deep breath, readying herself to list off her grievances. My daughter smelled like my expensive soap, which she believed should belong to all of us, especially her.

I didn't have to be at work until ten, though soon the girls would leave for whatever summer vacation activity Drew had planned for them. Beach today, I thought. Drew worked from home; we'd transformed the attic rooms on the top floor into his studio.

Ca.s.sandra snuggled close. My bedroom gave off a clean, cool feel. The white cottage furniture reminded me of Martha's Vineyard. White shutters on the windows, my collection of porcelain vases, and the translucent bowls on the bookcase and dresser all soothed me. Drew had painted the walls a snowy white and hung the painting he'd done that I loved most, blue irises against a sun so intense it burned from the canvas.

"Daddy always gives in to Ruby," Ca.s.sandra complained.

"I'm sure he'll make you waffles tomorrow."

"But I wanted them today. She's just a crybaby. I don't think the cut even hurt."

"What cut?" I sat up.

"It's nothing, Mom." Ca.s.sandra drew away, shifting to her back and crossing her leg over her bent knee. "It's stupid that Daddy even let her cut strawberries. Anyway, it wasn't anything. She just cried and pretended so she could get her pancakes."

"I'd better check on her."

Ca.s.sandra tugged at my nightgown, trying to pull me back down. "She didn't even bleed except maybe one little drop. Everyone does everything for Ruby."

"Enough, Ca.s.sandra." My impatience grew. I needed to see Ruby before taking my shower.

"You're not being fair," Ca.s.sandra complained. "No one is."

"What do you want?" I struggled to keep my voice even, knowing I'd already failed, my irritation already spilling over the nice white and blue room.

Motherhood had never been my dream. I'd never thought I'd be very good at the job. See, Drew. This is why you're the mommy and I go to work. Not that he'd argued with me about our division of labor. Drew had worked hard in his campaign to sell me on motherhood. In the end, his strong want had won me over, though the thought of being a mother had terrified me. It still did; it had turned out to be worse than I'd ever imagined. I hadn't known how much they'd own me, how every fall they took would raise b.u.mps on me.

"Why can't you take us to the beach today?" Ca.s.sandra asked.

Why are you so hard to please when we give you so much? "Daddy's taking a friend for each of you, right?" I said. "You don't need me."

Maybe we gave them too much.

Ca.s.sandra got up on her knees, pleading with me to understand. Her lank brown hair falling over her shoulders reminded me of my own. "Yes, I do need you," she said. "You never come. You haven't even seen how good I swim the crawl now."

"We'll all go this weekend. I promise."

"Sure," Ca.s.sandra said. "I bet."

She sounded as though I broke promises every day. Was that how she viewed me? "And we'll go to the bookstore and get a new batch of summer books."

Every way I turned as a mother, I disappointed someone. Ruby and Ca.s.sandra were warring nations, always needing different things, never satisfied at the same time. At any moment, I faced disappointment, failure, or terror. At some point, all these were certain to occur, right?

See, Drew? I knew it. Having children ensured enduring life's worst c.r.a.p. By hounding and bribing me into pregnancy, Drew had forced me to become a hostage to terror. You give birth, and then worry becomes your lifelong caul.

Had my mother felt that way? Had thoughts of danger threatening Merry and me kept her up at night? Trying to catch memories of Mama felt like trying to hold rain. I didn't remember sensing her worry, but she was my mother, she must have worried. I gave myself comfort with those thoughts.

Ruby ran through the door. Drew walked behind balancing a mug.

"Did you wake her up?" Ruby asked Ca.s.sandra. She turned to her father. "She's in trouble, right?"

"No, she's not in trouble," I said. "Don't be an instigator."

"What's that?" Ruby asked.

"Instigator means someone who starts something, but not in a good way," I said.

"Someone who acts like a baby," Ca.s.sandra said. "And who cries all the time."

"You p.o.o.ped in your pants!" These were eight-year-old Ruby's final words in most fights.

"Ruby! How many times do we have to tell you not to say that?" Drew said. He placed the coffee in my hand. Ever since Ca.s.sandra had had a horrible bout of food poisoning on the way home from the Cape and couldn't hold out for a bathroom, this had been Ruby's favorite taunt. "You know Ca.s.sandra was sick."

"You shouldn't be rude and mean," I added.

Ca.s.sandra stuck her tongue out at Ruby, and then turned accusing eyes on Drew. "I told Mommy you made Ruby her pancakes, even though I won."

Looking for ways to knock out my daughters' bad traits-Ca.s.sandra's need for hair-splitting fairness and the mantle of victimhood, Ruby's attempts to push her way to the top-appeared to be a Sisyphean task. My girls had so many wearying qualities. Civilizing them overwhelmed me. How much easier it would be to simply throw them gobs of goodies as though they were rabid dogs. Candy! Toys! Hot dogs! Come get them, girls! Ruff! Love me!

"But I got hurt," Ruby said. She held up her hand, showing me a Sleeping Beauty bandage on her tiny palm. "See?"

"Ca.s.sandra, Ruby did get hurt. We talked about this," Drew said. "Tomorrow you'll get waffles."

Ca.s.sandra collapsed in on herself, leaning back against me. I stroked her fine, light hair, wanting to run far from all of them. Ca.s.sandra sighed out her loss. She turned to me and took my face in her hands, staring as though I were the blood running through her veins.

"Please stay home with me, Mommy," Ca.s.sandra begged. "Let Ruby stay with Daddy, and you stay with me today. Don't go to work. Please!"

"Lulu?" Merry's scream cut through the drama. "Drew? I'm grabbing some coffee, okay?"

"Fine," I yelled back down.

Drew squeezed Ca.s.sandra's knee. "Come on, honey. You know Mommy has to go to work. Plus, we have to pick up your friends."

I grabbed Ca.s.sandra for a hug around her dejected shoulders before she left. "It will be fine," I told her.

Fine was my word of the morning. Fine for me not to see Ca.s.sandra for a single full day this summer and fine for Merry to pour a cup of coffee. It was fine about four workdays out of five, when Drew's already brewed coffee usually trumped the prospect of Merry making her own.

I didn't worry about Merry walking out her front door wearing slippers and pajamas, running around the corner from her apartment to my and Drew's entrance. The unusual was the usual in Cambridgeport. Walking in nightwear didn't come close to earning us a place in the neighborhood freaky line, not in the part of Cambridge where Drew, Merry, and I lived.

The marionette lady, who carried wooden puppets to speak for her, lived on one side of us, and a platinum blond drag queen who stood six foot, five inches without his stiletto heels owned the house on the right. Even more amazing, right here in the heart of Cambridge, we had a Republican. He covered his house with American flags and played Taps each night on his front porch.

Following September 11 the previous year, our ultraliberal neighborhood had declared a brief detente with the neighborhood Republican. For a few weeks, everyone gathered by his house at dusk, listening as he played. Now, almost a year later, the neighbors again treated him as a crazy outcast.

Sometimes I was startled to wake up in the role of mother with daughters, wife with husband, no longer a virtual orphan trying to keep herself to one drawer or one room, but able to spread out from a starkly lovely bedroom to a well-ordered bas.e.m.e.nt. Even after years of living in this house, in this ident.i.ty, I still didn't know how to stretch out to live in all the corners of my world.

Despite my trappings, I suspected that it was only Merry's presence next door that kept me stabilized. Sometimes, even though I didn't tell anyone, the realities of my daughters and my secret father locked away in a New York State penitentiary collided inside me like a clap of thunder. Mama still lived inside me as the beautiful-angry mother of my earliest years. I'd always have to hide the reality of my relationship with Mama from my girls. Sadder, when I searched for ways to be a mother, what motherhood meant, my memories of Mama were of no use.

I drove up the final ramp to the top floor of the garage attached to the Cabot Medical Health Care Building. Staff parking was first come, first served in Cabot's survival-of-the-first-to-arrive plan. By 9:50, time forced us into the Siberia of parking real estate, the outermost corners, where our cars were vulnerable to rain, snow, or the beating sun.

Cabot Medical thrived on malice and discomfort, from the vicious parking battles to our careful tracking of Red Sox wins and losses. Working this close to Fenway Park, we prayed for them to lose, caring only about shortening the season of insane traffic. Screw the pennant.

I'd gone straight through from Cabot Medical School to the Cabot Medical Health Care group practice. They offered a job, and I accepted.

I hurried to the staircase, ran down to street level, and crossed the hot courtyard to the gla.s.s-and-bronze entry. Running stairs was my only form of exercise.

"Morning, Doctor Winterson." Jerry the coffee guy had the lobby concession. A paraplegic with ma.s.sive arms, he'd designed the operation to his reach and comfort, daring anyone to complain about having to crouch down for their sugar or creamer. I admired his skill in using his disability to blackmail his way into extra income. No one dared not to buy something, not with Jerry's hints that turning down his m.u.f.fin, tea, or ready-made sandwich reflected on your generosity toward the handicapped.

"Jerry probably has a mansion by now," the receptionist, Maria, had muttered last week. Even so, she said it while clutching a chocolate chip cookie baked by Jerry's wife.

"I've had my coffee, and I brought my lunch," I said as I pa.s.sed Jerry's cart. I held up my L.L.Bean lunch bag as proof. "I'll pick up a dozen cookies for the staff meeting later."

"If we have any left," Jerry said darkly, as though if he sold out it would be a bad thing, and probably my fault.

"I'll take my chances." I opened the door to the inside staircase and ran up three flights to Internal Medicine, coming out in a large open hall carpeted in industrial gray and leading to pods labeled A, B, and C. As I entered the B pod, Maria waved from the circular reception area, nodding as she spoke into her headset. Patients leaned toward my white coat like drooping weeds seeking sun.

Sticky notes fluttered from my computer screen. Area secretaries stuffed our mail slots so full with administrative memos and junk mail from drug companies that we of B pod communicated by stickies and bits of paper taped to chairs.

Cabot Medical had become a hatred-inducing practice, hounding us daily with reminders about money: Bottom line! Remember capitation! More patients in less time! Accrete or burn! I waited for the day the Medicrats told us to troll through bingo parlors for new patients.

My patient roster had gradually changed into a solid block of women whom I considered the almost old; doctors seemed to have less patience for these transitional women. I felt for them. I'd be one someday soon, and, unlike many acquaintances, I didn't pretend otherwise; I didn't want to be one of those females who were surprised by their swift fall, women who barely had time to wave good-bye at being beautiful, being needed, or being wooed as they slid toward retirement and the gray world of invisibility.

I made time for the almost old; in return, they clucked and fussed over me as if I were their personal miracle worker. So clever, this one.

I peeled notes from my chair and computer. A larger-size hot pink Post-it screamed from my desk lamp.

Where are you? I had to drink coffee alone with the master of boredom. Doctor Denton kept me prisoner for twenty minutes of soul-killing tales of gardening. Please, come cleanse my aura and hear about my DATE. What are you planning for your birthday tomorrow? Can I take you to lunch? Check schedule for upcoming patient crush. Sorry. Kisses, Sophie Sophie, the nurse with whom I teamed, had become my closest friend since Marta had left Boston for a rich husband. Patients came to Cabot as much for Sophie as they did for me. She knew how to comfort and give hugs when they cried for their lost wombs, their vanished s.e.x lives, and the alopecia that horrified them each time they looked in the mirror. They, in turn, kept an eye out for a suitable husband and father for Sophie and her three nightmarish boys.

"Sounds great," I'd said when Sophie told me about yet another patient's eligible nephew. "Remind Mrs. Doherty that her son should bring his whip and lion-taming chair when he picks you up."

Sophie stuck her head in the door. "Your ten-twenty is waiting, and your ten-forty is checking in. In addition, I had to squeeze in Audra Connelly. She found a job and she needs a full physical before starting."

I studied my schedule laid out on the computer, color-coded courtesy of the Medicrats upstairs. "And just how do I manage this? Magic?"

"You're the doctor. Figure it out."

I nodded. Audra's husband had recently died from pancreatic cancer, the once-ma.s.sive and cheerful cop becoming skeletal and yellow as he suffered the pain by folding in on himself. I'd figure it out. "What time?" I asked. "Oh, wait-I see."

She'd squeezed Audra's appointment into 4:10. I ma.s.saged the back of my neck.

"How about a birthday lunch tomorrow?" Sophie asked.

Birthday tomorrow.

Anniversary of my mother's death today.

Merry and I dreaded memorializing the event, but if we didn't recognize the day in some way, we'd wait all year for the inevitable punishment, so we always marked it together. Some years we'd snuck to her grave, bringing red roses. My mother had become Snow White in my smoky memories, with lips the color of fresh blood, hair blacker than lacquered china, and skin white as a geisha's.

Most years we watched sad movies to honor Mama. Repeatedly, we'd heard Mimi Rubee say, My Celeste was beautiful enough to be a movie star. When we'd lived at Duffy, we'd saved the quarters Grandma Zelda slipped us and snuck off to the Loews theater on Mama's death day. After we had moved to the Cohens', we'd continued the practice. Asking them to take us to Mama's grave site never seemed a possibility.

Each year we picked the saddest movie with the most tragic actress, moving through the decades from the Loews in Brooklyn to videos to DVDs, choking with sobs as we watched Sophie's Choice or Terms of Endearment, wondering how devoted our mother would have been had she lived. I couldn't imagine her letting gray roots grow in, as the mother had during her daughter's illness in Terms of Endearment. The thought made me ill with guilt. Merry was supposed to rent tonight's movie. We'd watch. She'd drink. We'd cry. Then we'd go to sleep. Happy anniversary, Mama.

By four o'clock, seeing a patient familiar enough for me to sit and chat for a moment offered more comfort than I'd had all day. Screw the Medicrats. My feet were killing me. Hunger pains growled. Extra patients had cost me lunch.

"Audra," I said as I walked in. "How are you?"

"I'm fine, dear. I think I have a job."

"Are you sure you're ready?" It had been only four months since Audra's husband died.

"More than. A few more nights watching television, and I'll bash the poor screen. I've been going over to help at Ocean View, you know, the nursing home where my mother and Hal's father are, but I think even they're getting tired of me." Audra smiled, her mouth covered with what little lipstick she hadn't worried away. She looked thinner than the last time I had seen her, which she couldn't afford, being one of those spare Irish women without flesh to lose. "The kids are visiting too much. They need to live their lives."

"Let's make this about you. What's the job?" I asked as I skimmed through Audra's vital signs.

"A library a.s.sistant in the Brookline schools. I think it could be perfect for me."

"They'll be the lucky ones," I said. "Blood pressure, good. Weight, too low. Are you feeling okay?"

"It's all fine except for too many nights eating a bowl of cereal for dinner."

"You have to treat yourself as well as you did him." I warmed the stethoscope in my hands. "Take a breath."

"When have you ever known a woman to do that?" Audra asked, gasping out the held air. "We only do it for others."

"Any complaints?"

"Just the usual-I hear all the same things from the girls in my bridge club. We ache. Our feet hurt. Our faces don't look so good." Audra smiled. "Lucky this job doesn't require beauty."

I touched her shoulder. "You'll always look lovely. You have the cla.s.sic looks every woman wants. Like Katharine Hepburn."

Merry had left a message earlier that she'd rented Doctor Zhivago. I liked Geraldine Chaplin-the wife-more than Julie Christie. Chaplin's dark eyes and mild face offered more comfort than Christie's beauty.

I panicked. What color had my mother's eyes been? Were they blue? Had they been deep brown, like Merry's? We had only black-and-white photographs of Mama. Who would know? Whom could I ask?

"Well, I have Hepburn's crinkled neck. But who cares anymore?" Audra clapped her hands together, bringing me out of my reverie. "Will you listen to me? Goodness. I've had a wonderful life, and now I'm getting ready for a new adventure."

"A new adventure, yes. You never know what life holds, right? Now, if you slip open your gown and lie down so I can examine your b.r.e.a.s.t.s, we'll be just about done."

Audra's freckled b.r.e.a.s.t.s exhibited her pregnancies. Her thin, papery skin showed wear and tear; her nipples revealed signs of suckling infants.

"Could you lift your arms, Audra?" I came closer, pushing my gla.s.ses tighter to the bridge of my nose. "Hands behind your head, okay?"

Exam-table paper crinkled as Audra settled back. Bright fluorescence highlighted by the white steel cabinets and chrome fixtures emphasized every mole and age spot on Audra's flesh. I placed the pads of my fingers on Audra's small b.r.e.a.s.t.s, using the new approach I'd learned, covering each spot with three different levels of pressure. Instead of moving in a circle around Audra's breast, I went from top to bottom across the chest area to include the breast tissue that reached from the collarbone to the bra line and into the armpits.

Nothing seemed wrong, except for a roughness at Audra's nipple. I adjusted the lamp, pulling it a bit closer, and leaned in, seeing redness and scaling around the right one. I ran a finger over it, then squeezed, looking for discharge. The left nipple seemed free from any skin changes. I went back to the right breast, tracing the scaling with my finger, then moving around the areola.