“You’re always following Mom . . . trying to dress like her, live like her, be like her. Why don’t you be yourself?”

“Well, it’s done now.”

Tina distrusted Weezy and her feminist friends with their garlic or yoghurt douches and their overemphatic ways. For snobbish and other reasons she had gone to Angela. Also because she did not like the feel of her little sister being in charge.

But already at that preliminary meeting the thought had entered Tina’s mind that she might have been mistaken going to Angela. Small, fragile-looking, and with protuberant dark eyes, Angela had looked up at Tina and said in her deliberately offhand way, “You’ll need about 250,000 lire. Do you have it?” Tina had stared at the sleek woman whose dark hair was long and streaked with blond lights; she wore the skin-tight jeans that the fashionable women of Rome had just discovered, and no bra under her open-necked silk blouse. Her face was tanned from days at the beach, her eyes carefully made up, her lips pale. She was an interesting-looking woman, and an intelligent one. But hard.

“No,” Tina had said. “I don’t have anything like that much money—and I can’t ask papà. Where will I get it?”

“Did your mother leave you anything?”

Tina thought of her jewelry box and the engagement ring that her mother had said would someday be hers. “Yes,” she said, “her jewelry—she left it to Weezy and me.”

“Bring it to me,” Angela said. “I can arrange it.”

Tina was going to lie to Weezy about the cost of the abortion, ashamed to admit that she was paying 2 50,000 lire when the feminists had doctors willing to do it for so much less. But she needed Weezy’s share of the jewelry in order to raise the money. Weezy, in disgust, had told her to do what she damn pleased. When Tina had taken the ring and some other things to Angela, she asked if Angela had known that her mother was pregnant. “No,” said Angela, “Marguerite didn’t tell me anything of the kind.” Maybe her mother wouldn’t have gone to Angela after all, was the thought Tina then had to live with.

Angela was a wretched driver, and all the way across town to the doctor’s Tina wondered why the hell she hadn’t just taken a taxi and gone by herself. In fact, when they got to the address, there was no place to park and so Angela asked Marco to accompany Tina up to the doctor while she found a place by circling around the block.