Afternoons: worst in the winter, for the city was slippery, greasy, and cars coming down the slope and around the corner just above our house often slewed dangerously. I spent hours terrified for the children, picturing some fool careering down that hill, missing the curve, gliding gently, always in slow motion in my mind, sliding irrevocably into them. I watched for them from the living room window in the afternoons, grateful almost to tears when I saw one, then the other, struggling up the street; holding my breath until they got to our walk, running to open the door for them, helping them get their winter clothes off, hugging them. Sometimes if friends were with them or they were in a hurry they would be impatient with me, and I tried to let them be, I truly did. But they seemed so precious, so delicate, so very fragile that it was all I could do to keep myself from holding them, guarding them — against what? Sometimes I did hold them tight, squeezing them, as if something were trying to tear them away; and other times I was almost afraid to touch them, for fear they might break.

Evenings: warm inside and safe. The children home, and Stephen too, unless he had a meeting. If he did, I would sit in the living room after the children were asleep, reading, enjoying the solitude that was a treat, a luxury. If he were home, which was most often, we would sit together, both of us reading, and have a drink and listen to soft music on the stereo, and now and then we might speak, the quiet easy conversations of people who are accustomed to each other. Sometimes if we felt especially lazy we would wheel in the portable television set from Stephen’s den and watch terrible programs. If there were a really dreadful horror show on the late movie, like a Japanese monster picture, we would giggle and make popcorn and stay up very late with it. Occasionally, but only very occasionally because one of the children might get up, we would make love on the couch, and the Japanese monsters would howl and lunge and the people would scream and run in terror and we would laugh and hold each other. Stephen had a fine body, very lean, and he liked to laugh in bed; I am sure he was not lonely in that way after I left. There are many women who like to laugh in bed, and many who must still find him kind and handsome.