Alice couldn’t be a night person with her twelve-hour shift at the hospital starting at seven the next morning. She left Crystal stringing beads at midnight and tried to sleep. But there were bumping and thumping sounds, the smell of marijuana, cupboard doors opening and closing in the kitchen, eating, drinking, water running. Doobie’s toenails clicked on the floor. At three in the morning one of them stood on the back steps and yipped like a coyote. Doors slammed, voices, moist and rhythmic sounds.

“Make love not war,” the bumper sticker said. “What would Buddha do?” What would Buddha do? Alice wondered as she lay in her bed and watched the dawn. Would Buddha ride up and down the interstate highways in a bus with a fuel leak, being photographed? Would Buddha sit up all night with his fat self on somebody else’s sofa, stringing beads? What would Buddha think if he could see the old Elmslie place, where she had all those years ago lived with the hippies and raised chickens and thought she could save the world? Come to find out, she couldn’t even save the old Elmslie place. The Big Blue Hole was now a real estate development, ringed with houses and cluttered with boardwalks. It wasn’t blue anymore either, but a nasty green, slimy with algae bloom and rock snot. Where the old farmhouse had stood with its falling-off kitchen, the top of the hill had been bulldozed flat and a palacelike house with plastic Palladian windows looked out over a vast lawn mowed in herringbone stripes where the Elmslies had pastured their cows.

At daylight it was finally quiet in the house and Alice put on her scrubs and her crepe-soled shoes. She got a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal. Doobie came out of the spare room and yapped at her feet, snarling and making vicious little feints at her insteps. He was not used to seeing such big white shoes. But the hippies, “night people,” did not stir. Alice got in her car and carefully backed out around the green bus. Through the windshield Buddha sitting in an ashtray on the dashboard looked out at her with a mocking smile.

How far she had come from saving the world! Forty years ago she had been hopefully distributing condoms in desperately overpopulated third-world countries, and now here she was delivering babies to dull-eyed children whose grandmothers weren’t thirty years old. “Instant babies,” her friend Linda called them.

Her last patient that afternoon was a fifteen-year-old girl in for her first exam at almost full term. Her answer to every question was “Not really.”

“Have you made plans? Do you have a place ready for the baby? Do you have financial support? Do you have someone to help at home? Will the father of the baby be any help? Do you know the father of the baby?”