E) Begin tentative chitchat (in line again, a day later) regarding quality of doughnuts: the sourdough are unearthly and the regular cakes are highly irregular. Your voice is melodic and slightly cruel and investigative. Included in your discourse are weather-related comments referring to the past two weeks of glorious clear blue skies and only one day of high surf with those lonely waves rolling in, born out of some distant tropical depression. You agree that those waves were amazing (last Wednesday), something fantastic in their immensity, not to mention (and you don’t) the sense you had—seeing them come in—that their history was off in the heart of the sea, and that each wave carried with it some indication of the wind’s original intent. There must be—between the two of you—a clear-cut sense of the tribulations that your current conjugal states have offered up; there must be a long backlog of unresolved fights in the docket (the mention of waves might hint at these things). A pleasing sense that you have both resigned yourselves to finding love somewhere else, under specific conditions, lingers beneath your words.

F) Lucinda. Steven. Delightedly, with great ease, as if sharing a drink, carefully, with precision, you exchange names.

G) Little Maggie digs viciously with a small yellow shovel, throwing swoops of sand into the air and into your eyes; she’s making soft little cries with each toss and you sense that perhaps she, too, has had enough of the whole thing. She’s small for her age, delicate, prone to catching strep throat. She’s had it six times in the past year and a half, and yet her tonsils—big flaring adenoids—still cling to the back of her throat because Ron refuses to have them removed (it’s an outmoded procedure), and he’s knowledgeable because he’s an internist. But his specialty is cardiology. I don’t know shit about pediatrics, he admits. It’s impossible work because the little buggers can’t speak, explain themselves, I mean, it’s guesswork of a sort, hit or miss. A couple of sore throats. You don’t just hack the things out. Used to put a guy in traction when he had a broken femur; now you wrap the leg in fiberglass and throw a pair of crutches at the patient and send him on his way. Ron has a habit of smoothing down the two patches of hair that frame his bald spot. I’m gonna shave it all off when it gets too thin, he says.

H) Sky and sand and the backbone of the Cape cradle their movement. They are suddenly now equally matched in the world, working their way, with longer and longer throws of the Frisbee, into the proximity of two girls in blue bikinis. (They’ve staked out this same part of the beach for three days straight, and the kids have exchanged some opening banter.) Two sons—Adonises, my sons. You quote from what? You were teaching a play a few semesters ago that had the word Adonis—but which one was it? Was it Williams? Maybe it was Brando saying the words. No, it was Willy Loman, talking up his sons. Talking them up in a big way. Talking them up the way you’d talk up product. Maybe he’s right; maybe your kids are product. And here I am, you think, watching my sons playing catch, prancing before the beauties (and they were the personification of beauty, all leg and body, all movement and grace and glory and flesh) and talking them up, too. They’re subtle kids, somewhat silent, sneaking softly around your tensions with Irene, who dotes on them but in a sidelong, conspiratorial way. Behind you she’s fingering a magazine, following the line of your gaze at the kids. Low on her brow her straw hat keeps the sun away.