“Yes, sweetie, yes, I’m coming,” Sylvia calls over her shoulder, fumbling with a stack of clean diapers atop the new bureau. One-handed, she manages to loosen two from the devilishly folded stack, picks up a pair of diaper pins, and carries Nick to his sister’s cot. “Look, Frieda,” Sylvia exclaims, her voice bright with drama. “It’s Baby Nick come to visit! Good morning!” Frieda mumbles sleepily and watches as Sylvia lowers her brother onto the mattress, sweeping the animal quilts aside to make room. “Here, Nicky. Let me put on your nappy and then you can play while I make breakfast.”

Already, as Nick rolls agreeably onto his back and Frieda, suddenly awake and good humored, pats his head and chirps encouragement, Sylvia rethinks breakfast. Downstairs in the kitchen, last night’s supper dishes are undone on the drainer, the fatty rind of lamb chops curled on the greasy plates, larval and white. Sylvia’s appetite has come back only in spurts; mostly, eating seems obscene, food absurd. Days have gone by when even preparing meals for the children hasn’t sparked her body’s memory. She had never been anything but slim, despite her trencherman’s gusto; now she’s lost twenty pounds. Her bones stick out like a refugee’s. When she doesn’t feel weak and desiccated, she feels lithe, pure and righteous, surreptitiously proud of her boniness, how noticeably it marks her suffering.

Though even starving hasn’t stopped her milk. Nicholas weaned himself anyway, losing interest gradually as his curiosity about the world beyond her—Frieda’s toys in particular—expanded. First the midday feedings went, then mornings; bedtime was the last abandoned rite. Though she feels an occasional pang of nostalgia—awake at night, alone in her dark room, or like this, his silky head, his happiness on seeing her—it was just as well that he had stopped. She had been so distracted during the last months of nursing that Nick’s time at her breast had seemed endless. Even he seemed ambivalent: no longer driven by a passionate need, but caught with her in a limbo of faltering habit. He began to favor his cup; he fell asleep with a back rub instead of her. Now she sometimes sat in the tub and squeezed drops of her milk into the water, watched the tiny Hiroshima as it penetrated the surface, then the spreading grayish lacework, then it was gone. Her milk, just like that.