What I Loved

Candide, whose response to the world was one of profound and never-ending surprise. In truth, Lazlo was a mild and diffident person. He would examine a frog carefully when Matt presented him with one, would make brief pronouncements on any subject when asked, and would dry dishes very slowly and methodically when called upon. It was this evenness of temper that made Erica pronounce him "sweet."
    Erica launched every August with a migraine, which often lasted two or three days. The white or pink stars that floated in the periphery of her left eye were followed by pain so fierce she writhed and vomited. The headache stole all the color from her face and turned the skin under her eyes nearly black. She slept and she woke. She ate almost nothing and didn't want anyone near her. Every noise hurt her, and throughout it all she would blame herself and continually mumble to me that she was sorry.
    When Erica fell sick for the third summer in a row, Violet intervened. The day the headache hit, the weather was damp and humid. Erica sequestered herself in our bedroom, and early that afternoon I went to check on her. I opened the door and found the shutters closed. Violet was sitting on Erica's back, kneading her shoulders. Without speaking, I pulled the door shut. When I returned an hour later, I heard Violet's voice from inside the room — a barely audible but steady sound. I opened the door. Erica was lying on the bed with her head on Violet's chest. At the sound of the door opening, she lifted her face and smiled at me. "I'm better, Leo," she said. "I'm better." I don't know whether Violet had miraculous healing powers or whether the migraine had simply run its course, but whichever it was, Erica turned to Violet after that. When the pain arrived in the first week of our stay, Violet performed her ritual of whispering and massage. I never asked what Violet said to Erica. The affinity between them had thickened into a relationship I interpreted as darkly feminine — a girlish intimacy between women that included caresses, giggling, and secrets.
    There were other intimacies in that house as well — most of them entirely banal. I saw Violet in her pajamas and she saw me in mine. I discovered that bobby pins helped along the tousle in her hair. I noticed that although Bill always washed with turpentine and soap before dinner, he bathed infrequently, and that he was sullen before his cup of coffee in the morning. Erica and I heard Violet moan to Bill about housework he didn't do and listened to Bill complain about Violet's impossible domestic standards. Bill and Violet heard Erica accuse me of forgetting groceries and of wearing pants I "should have thrown away years ago." I picked up Mark's socks that had turned stiff with dirt and his frayed underpants along with Matt's. One evening, I saw spots of blood on the toilet seat and knew that it wasn't Erica who was menstruating. I took a sheet of toilet paper, wet it, and wiped away the stains. At the time, I didn't know that those spots were important, but that same night, Erica and I heard Violet sobbing from the bedroom down the hall, and through the crying, we heard Bill's low voice.
    "She's crying about the baby," Erica said.
    "What baby?"
    "The baby she can't have."
    Erica had been keeping a secret. For over two years, Violet had been trying to get pregnant. The doctors hadn't found anything wrong with either her or Bill, but Violet had started fertility treatments, and so far they had failed. "She got her period today," Erica said.
    Just as Violet's crying stopped, I remembered Bill saying that he had always wanted children — "thousands of children."
    There was no television in the house, and its absence returned us to the entertainments of another era. Every evening after dinner, one of the adults read stories aloud, usually a fairy tale. When it was my turn to read, I would page through one of the many volumes of collected folktales Bill had brought with him and choose a story, carefully avoiding the ones that began with a king and queen who longed for a child. Bill was the best reader among us. He read quietly but with nuance, changing the tempo of his sentences according to their meaning. He paused for effect. Sometimes he winked at the boys or pulled Mark, who was usually leaning on him, a little closer. Bill never tired of the stories. All day he reinvented those tales in the studio, and at night he was ready to read more of them. Whatever Bill's project happened