“‘This I do being mad: gather baubles about me, sit in a circle of toys.’ Edna Millay.” He raised his coffee cup, exhaled a lungful of smoke.

“My favorite poet,” I answered. “‘Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand.’ No, listen to this. This is my absolute favorite. ‘What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain under my head till morning.’”

“‘But the rain is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh, upon the glass and listen for reply, and in my heart there stirs a quiet pain. For unremembered lads that not again will turn to me at midnight with a cry.’”

“Oh, my God, you really know it.” I jumped up, ran up to my room, got all my books of poetry and we sat in the den for half the afternoon, reading poetry out loud, talking about death, drinking coffee, smoking Pall Malls, totally enraptured with each other. Irise fell asleep on the sofa, all curled up in her soft white dress and sandals. Charles William sat cross-legged on the floor, his fat legs sticking out of his camp shorts. I sat on a chair, my fat stomach sticking out of a midriff. We kept on listening to the Ravel while we read. Wanda Landowska’s brilliant renditions of “Pavanne pour une infante défunte,” “A la manière de Chabrier,” “A la manière de Borodin,” and “Sonatine” played over and over on the record player.

They stayed all afternoon. At six I took another one of my pills and Mother asked Charles William and Irise to stay for dinner. “Rhoda’s on a diet,” she said. “But we can fix you a real dinner.”

“I’ll go on the diet with her,” Charles William said. “I’ll eat whatever she’s having.”

“I can eat anything,” Irise said. “Let me help you set the table.”

At six-thirty I sliced the artery between my thumb and index finger with a steak knife in my excitement over not being hungry for the four-ounce steak Mother cooked me.

Irise and Charles William rode with us in the car to get my hand stitched up at the hospital. “We needed some excitement,” Charles William said, when we were driving home with my hand bandaged. “And here you are, willing to amputate your hand, just for us.”

“He loves excitement,” Irise said. “He never stops doing things.”

“Neither do I. Well, meeting you has made this town seem like someplace I can live. I’ll see you in the morning, won’t I? Will you come back over?”

“As soon as we get up,” Charles William promised. “We’ll go find Ariane a mantel and have you an ankh made.”

“A what?”