The rug in the waiting room is Oriental and patterned in a satisfyingly complicated design, more complicated even than the design of the rug in their dining room at home, which Isabelle has spent hours memorizing while lying under the table with Maggie. Maggie lies always in a spot one third of the way down from the top of the rug and one third of the way over from the rug’s left edge; she has worn the blue spidery shape there thin. This rug, the one in the waiting room, has similar spidery shapes, but really Isabelle can’t call them spidery, because they have twelve legs, not eight. The length of the rug is twice the width, and when Isabelle breaks the rug neatly into imaginary squares, she can see how certain squares consist of the same patterns as others, but inverted, or colored differently, and suddenly the overall design of the rug seems much more simple, the making of a rug like this more manageable, something that Isabelle, if she knew how, could do. What puzzles her most about this rug in the end is the part of the rug that seems at first the easiest to understand. She blurs her eyes at the outermost border. It consists simply of interlocking triangles, the blue triangles coming down like the top teeth in a grimace, the red ones standing up like the bottom teeth. The question she can’t answer as she looks at the border is which color is the border’s background? The blue or the red? The background of the body of the rug is clearly a bronze color on which the spidery designs have been laid; but as for the border, do the blue triangles rest on a red background, or the red triangles on a blue background? In her mind, it must be one way or the other. To think of them both as triangles and neither as the background unsettles the rug somehow, but to decide which is which seems as impossible as deciding which came first, the chicken or the egg.