Another time when she telephoned the school she was told that her classes had been taken over for the remainder of the semester by one of her colleagues. Yes all the arrangements had been made. Yes the decision was irrevocable. Monica asked who the colleague was and was told ——: a name she recognized but forgot immediately, as if this conversation were occurring in a dream and nothing could be retained. Licking her parched lips, swallowing, trying to clear her head Monica heard herself apologize . . . heard herself accuse Farley of deception, prejudice . . . heard herself pleading for another chance. She could get there, she promised, for her afternoon classes. For the next morning’s classes at least.)

At any rate the birthday came and went without incident and now she was in her thirty-first year and would surely survive.

Monica is a good sport, she overheard.

She was grateful for the blinding headaches and the sharp stabbing coiling pain in her bowels that signaled yet another attack of diarrhea: these sensations meant after all that she existed; she still lived; she had not yet melted into the surrounding air. (And the air hurt, chafed her delicate skin. There was an element of rapacity to it, as if it were greedy to devour her, to penetrate her and carry her off.) After the abortion she had spent days, perhaps it was weeks, months?—in a twilit state, feeling very little, caring about very little, examining the blood-soaked sanitary pads as if they were evidence of another’s folly and not her own. Then, she had been numbed by drugs as well as by the trickery of her own mind, but now her punishment was her own, it inhabited every cubit of her flesh, and must be borne bravely.

There were rumors, whisperings, that Sheila Trask was going away again; and not alone.

Yet Monica was driving Sheila along the Poor Farm Road in Sheila’s rattling station wagon and nothing seemed to be wrong. A blindingly bright day. Snow banked up high in the ditches. Monica did not dare glance up toward the sky but she felt its pressure, a cold hard ceramic blue like the blue of the tiles in Sheila’s kitchen. The women were speaking softly together . . . laughing . . . Monica couldn’t hear what they said but she understood their mood . . . and she understood that Sheila was joking when she reached out to take hold of the steering wheel and give it a sharp little twist. Monica was in control after all; Monica was supremely in control; it could do no harm, if Sheila teased.