But really probably, I was going there because once, through my window at night, when I’d been cleaning, I’d seen Nell walking past the cafe alone. At least I’d thought it was Nell. What I’d seen had been a woman alone that really could have been her, and she had hurried past the window, almost you could say stumbled past the window, and I had said, Oh, and put down my rag and spray and almost opened the window to say, Wait, let me, but of course she was already gone.

7

On Saturday M took us to look at the lake and to ride in the yellow boats that taxied people across. We all dressed as if for a picture. I put E in a white dress and braided her fine blonde hair, first one side, then the other. B was put in a blue romper and settled into his stroller. I smoothed his hair with a licked finger. I wore a dress that I’d brought with me, that I’d bought at the last minute, just before we left, when all of our things were gone or in boxes, and we’d sold the house.

Normally, I didn’t wear dresses. This dress was a dress that I’d bought for someone else, a new person, a person that was not yet me. I bought it for a person living in some place I had never yet been, and yet here I was living in that place. I had yet to really become that new person I suppose because the dress caught me in the wrong places. It gathered me up, pinched me. Wearing it, I was turned this way and that on the end of its finger. I hesitated before I left the apartment. I thought about changing into something different but B began to cry. There was no time.

The lake was beautiful, dotted with the white sails of boats manned by people who looked good in any kind of light, people who maybe didn’t even need a boat to float across the water. People who packed champagne in picnic baskets and found it still cold when they were ready to drink it. E waved at these people from the side of the lake, some of the people on the boats waved back, everyone was so good-natured. M smiled at me, seeing E in her white dress by the lake all the way here in this different place, and we were just like that for a while, smiling and being smiled at.

We bought an ice cream for E, pink, two scoops piled high on top of a waffle cone. The lake was so clear that we could see the birds diving all the way to the bottom, scrabbling against the rocks on the lake bed with their bills. Their feet pumping underwater, we could see every bit of them. Nothing was a mystery to us.

There was so much sun. I knew that I would begin to sweat, knew that there was only minutes, perhaps seconds, before terrible stains would begin advancing across the fabric of the dress. The dress that was not proving after all to be for me. The treacherous stains would creep out from underneath my arms, they would stretch across my back.