The Summer Without Men

even voice, “Shut up, Regina. Someone help me adjust my bra before it chokes me.”
    Regina looked offended. She folded her hands and sank back on the sofa, a ladylike frown on her still remarkably pretty face.
    Together, my mother and I managed to pull down the offending garment, which had slipped upward in the excitement, and settle our mutual friend on the sofa.
    “Abigail,” my mother said. “I was so scared.”
    Falling was a universal fear at Rolling Meadows. Some people, like George, never got up. Hips snapped, ankles cracked, and they were never the same. Old bones. That Abigail had not broken some piece of her frail skeleton struck me as supernatural. I discovered later that my mother, perhaps unwisely, had intervened with her own body and turned a crash into a slow tumble.
    At some point during the conversation that followed, I understood that Abigail felt considerably better, because she began to signal me with her eyebrows, a gesture followed by peering down at her lap. I had no idea what she was up to until I saw that she had her hands in the pockets of her embroidered dress and was exposing small parts of their red linings. The woman was wearing a secret amusement. Concealed inside her pockets was some subversive message, erotic needlepoint, or other undie, no doubt created years ago. I telegraphed back my silent comprehension that the dress was loaded, so to speak, another hidden fabric in Abigail’s private arsenal, and this tacit knowledge between us appeared to give her genuine pleasure, because she smiled slyly and gave me some extra eyebrow lifts to confirm our complicity. Peg arrived then and, after hearing the story, took it in the vein most true to her nature, declaring Abigail “blessed” and my mother a “hero” (a designation my mother adamantly disavowed, but which she clearly enjoyed), and then she moved on to Robin Womack, a local television personality with abundant hair. She ended her eulogy with the phrase “He can put his shoes on my bed anytime!” Although I found the reference to shoes superfluous, this permission clearly imparted a fancy for Womack and his serious hair.
    Exactly how we arrived at poetry I am not certain, but the Swans fondly recalled some loved lines from their earlier days. Peg wandered lonely as a cloud, and my mother read aloud Wallace Stevens’s “The Reader.” There are no words on his reader’s page, only “the trace of burning stars / In the frosty heaven.” And Regina recalled Joyce Kilmer’s immortal American “tree,” and I recited Ron Padgett’s poem “Haiku.” “ That was fast. / I mean life.” I had always laughed aloud at that poem, but not one of the Swans emitted even the briefest chuckle or snort. My mother smiled sadly. Abigail nodded. Peg’s eyes glazed over with what I gued were memories. Regina appeared to be on the verge of tears, but then she hoped aloud that I hadn’t given my girls “that poem,” to which I responded that it would be entirely lost on them because at their age life truly is long. Time is a question of both percentages and belief. If half your life ago you were six or seven, the span of those years is even longer than fifty for a centagenarian, because the young experience the future as endless and normally think of adults as members of another species. Only the aged have access to life’s brevity.
    Regina then informed me, in a muddled speech of frustrating vagueness, that something had “happened” to one of the girls in my class. She simply couldn’t remember the name of the child, “Lucy perhaps, no, Janet, no, not that either,” but whatever the girl’s name was, Regina had heard from Adrian Bortwaffle’s brother-in-law, who was a close friend of Tony Rosterhaus’s (Tony’s connection to my class was completely unknown to me and to Regina), that there had been an accident of some kind, and the girl had spent a night in the hospital.
    There are times when the fragility of all living things is so apparent that one begins to wait for a shock, a fall, or a break at any moment. I had been in this state since Boris left me and my nerves exploded—no, earlier than that, since Stefan’s suicide. There is no future without a past because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition. I had begun to expect calamities.
    My mother and I walked Abigail to her apartment and then helped her get comfortable on her sofa. She ordered us several times to “stop fussing,” but in