The heavy car began to slip and slide and skid along the road. Monica tried to wrench the wheel away from Sheila’s strong fingers, she pressed hard on the accelerator, suppose I call your bluff, Sheila, she whispered, but both women were laughing, both were enjoying themselves immensely, what danger in such sport? such childlike play? Monica gripped the wheel tight and Sheila tugged at it and the road dissolved into a blinding wall of light and both the women were laughing, convulsed in laughter.

24

Ten days, two weeks, and Monica began to recover.

It was late May and deceptively warm, in the afternoons in particular. One might be tempted to wander outside. To poke about in the old barns, to lie in the wet lush grass, to wander in the fields. It would be a humid spring, a balmy lilac-rich spring: the season of suicide: of raking over old humiliations and regrets like rotted matter in a compost heap.

The diarrhea was chronic but since she ate and drank very little she suffered less. Her stomach had shrunk to the size of (perhaps) a walnut. Her head was hollow, buzzing with static electricity, but the pain had subsided: now it was simply a matter of waiting.

Even at her sickest she had known the importance of not allowing anyone to guess what had happened. This sudden astonishing weakness, this exposure of her condition. The scar, the female gash, quivering nerve ends, repulsive to contemplate. She would be patient, she would not give in to the ignominy of terror. (When the roach had fallen into her hair, for instance. When everyone including Sheila had shrieked with laughter.)

She lay down, and was too weak to raise her head again, for hours, for hours. Still!—the blessed peace, the calm. She held herself tremblingly erect and opened the door of the medicine cabinet and saw, there, on the lowermost shelf, the razor, the packet of razor blades, that exciting consolation. (What had Sheila told her once? . . . she’d visited a morgue, a dissection laboratory, she had forced herself to look at the bodies, she had forced herself to listen to the jokey medical student, the first incision is the only difficult task, Sheila was told, after that it’s business as usual, after that you get completely caught up in technique, but the first incision is difficult, you’d better believe it, would you like to watch . . . ?)

Monica shook herself out of her doze, Monica thought about going outside again, risking the fresh air. If she raked over anything surely it should be a literal compost heap; in that direction, surely, lay health.

But she was too weak, suddenly. She wasn’t going to make it after all.

25