“I always talk to ’em,” Aunt Lizzie said comfortably. “They’s always a chance they can hear.”

The children were ordered to stay at Aunt Lois’s, but Marcia hung back and hid under the living room couch to watch the funeral catfeet shuffle to and fro. She could tell Aunt Lizzie by the soft, heelless kid shoes with holes cut out for bunions, but even without opening her eyes she could recognize Aunt Lizzie by the moldy smell scattering from her black skirts.

“Like cellar rats,” Marcia thought, sniffing again to make sure there wasn’t a faint whiff of sheep barn in it, too. She could hear the insistent questions, “What’s to become of the children? Who’s to take the children?”

Isobel and Chris came, Grandpa Willard came, Aunt Betts and Uncle Louie came, and all of them changed into funeral faces, so it was as if you had never known these favorites any more than you’d known the other innumerable aunts and uncles.

“We wanted to be with you in your sorrow,” they all chanted to Papa, Grandma, and Aunt Lois.

So this was Sorrow. Sorrow smelt of carnations and cellar rats and potato salad. People sat in the kitchen eating potato salad at all hours of day and night, as fast as Aunt Lizzie made it in the washboiler. Sorrow separated you from everyone else and Sorrow was a puzzle with no answer. Sorrow wasn’t bad or good; it was just there making each person strange and lonely. Sorrow made Lena keep her face screwed up, sniffling, as if something hurt her.

“Where does it hurt?” Marcia asked, mystified. “Is it like being spanked?”

“It doesn’t hurt exactly,” Lena replied. “It’s more like being homesick. You ought to cry, too. I heard people say it was funny you didn’t cry.”

“I didn’t cry because I was glad to see Aunt Betts and Uncle Louie,” said Marcia. “A person can’t cry when they just can’t.”

Florrie was noisier than ever in her grief. She cried steadily until Mrs. Friend was afraid she’d have a convulsion. Her little body stiffened, a look of wild terror was on her face, and she refused to be fed or let anyone touch her without screaming. This manifestation was looked upon by all the funeral people as highly satisfactory, and Marcia heard many say, “The baby is the only one who realizes. The middle one hasn’t any feelings at all.”

It was a commendable thing to have feelings, for feelings were to feel bad with, and feeling bad was what everybody liked to see. Marcia watched Florrie and then Lena to find the secret of feelings, but her only sensation was one of limitless wonder at why people were different from herself. She thought maybe she was bewitched, for she was sure her secret self, the one with no feelings but intense sensations, was utterly separate from a little girl in a blue hair ribbon named Marcia Willard. The little girl named Marcia could be pinched or bruised without feeling pain, because she was filled with the numbing fragrance of death, an immense thing by itself, like a train whistle blowing far off, or an echo in the woods. There were no people in it, not even Mama, here or gone. But nobody knew this. Nobody knew it but Marcia’s secret self, and it filled her to the brim with such a tangle of desperate wonder there was room for nothing else.