"We never had a park, or a zoo. But we had the whole outdoors to play in."

"You had animals too, didn't you? Chickens, cows, pigs—even horses." Erika sighed happily. "Do you think we'll ever be rich enough to live in the country and have a horse?"

"And a barn for it to live in, and corn and hay to feed it? You and your horses!"

"But they smell so good. The stables smell so nice, straw and grain and that clean horse smell. Even their droppings smell good, like oats and sunshine."

"Okay, when we're rich we’ll buy a horse. Maybe we should buy a ticket on the Irish Sweepstakes."

"Or win the puzzle in the paper."

They walked along, not touching, but pleased with their Sunday leisure and the beauty of the afternoon. The park was swarming with children, warmly sweatered but running wild with spring in the air. Young couples moved along hand in hand and older people walked around slowly, as if their feet hurt but their minds were at rest. It was the outdoors for people who had no grass or trees of their own, and no time to enjoy themselves except on weekends.

"Do you want some ice cream? Shall we be ten years old, like those cute little girls, and walk along licking ice cream cones?"

"That's another thing we didn't have on the farm. Except at my grandmother's when she was alive, we used to make it in a freezer. The one who turned it got to lick the dasher."

Erika said, remembering, "On the way home from the zoo we used to stop in a little café, and my father would have beer—draft beer, you know, dark and foamy and so good. He used to let us taste it, Kurt and me. We didn't really like it but we always drank it because it was supposed to be only for grownups."

"Like coffee."

"Exactly."

A scatter of knobby-boned boys, twelve or thirteen years old, parted to let them by and grouped again in a little clearing, where they turned into a soft-ball team. Kate walked a little faster to get out of pitching range.

"We had chocolate with Schlagobers—whipped cream—and such fancy pastries. With more whipped cream on them, and cherries and nuts and little shavings of chocolate."

"You do want an ice cream cone," Kate said laughing.

"When I first came to the States I lived in New York for a while, and one day I went into a Viennese bakery and had exactly the kind of cakes my father used to buy for me. It wasn't the same. Being a child, that's what makes things taste so good."

"Store baloney."

"What?"

"Nothing. You'd have to grow up on an Indiana farm."

"That's what I meant," Erika said. She slipped her arm through Kate's in the familiar hugging motion as they walked toward the animal cages.

They stood before the lion enclosure and watched the lion pace back and forth, slow and sullen, his wide cat-eyes slitted when he came into the sunny corner of the cage. Back and forth, his tail switching, his smooth-muscled body turning at the end of the cage as though its limits had become part of him.