A Room to Live In

Beauty is a matter of size and order, and therefore impossible either (1) in a very minute creature as it approaches instantaneity; or (2) in a creature of vast size—one, say, 1,000 miles long.

—Aristotle

I decided to give the boys little slingshots and toy trains. For the girl, I made a tiny doll; I had to use my most powerful magnifying glass to paint the freckles and eyelashes.

“Classic, well appointed,” Mrs. Perlman had told me over the phone. “Deep plush carpets, a piano, filigreed wallpaper in the master bedroom.” She hoped for me to re-create, in miniature, the apartment in Vienna where her mother had lived as a child, before the war sent the family into poverty and exile. There were two boys and one girl, though one of the boys—Otto—had died in transit.

I gave him the better slingshot.

  

Carl and I were washing the dishes that night, in our usual way (side by side, I in rubber gloves, he armed with a towel), when he abruptly cleared his throat. “I was thinking,” he said, carefully, “that we could do something.”

“You mean sex?”

“Well, actually, I was thinking in larger terms.”

“What terms?”

“Well, I was thinking we could have a child.”

“Tonight?”

“No, just sometime.”

“I don’t know. Where would it sleep?”

“Well, it could sleep in my room, and I could sleep in yours.”

“Where would I sleep?”

“In your room too.”

“With you?”

“Yes.”

We’d been over this before. Carl had suggested, many times, that as my husband he had the right to share my bed. But I always maintained that anything seen too close up grows fuzzy and indistinct. Carl’s head next to mine on the pillow displaced too much air, the wrong air. I could only see one of his features at a time: his nose, or his eyelashes, or his nipple. It gave me a sort of horizontal vertigo.

But sometimes, when I peered through his open doorway and saw him sitting on the floor cross-legged, plucking his banjo, I felt a desire of exactly the right size. Then, when the desire grew bigger, I asked my feet to take me into his room. They obliged. Then our bodies asked things of each other, and they obliged too.

“Carl,” I said. “You know how I feel about that.”

“Well, I know the words you’ve told me before,” he said.

“I’ll try to think of other ones.”

“This isn’t an issue of words, really, though. It’s more an issue of our bodies and where we put them.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

  

Later, in my own room, I thought about it. I tried to think with my body and not just with words. I tried to trick my body into different positions, to put a new angle on things. I lay prone on my bed, then sat on the floor with legs splayed wide, then attempted a headstand against the wall and failed. My body made a loud noise when it crashed to the floor.

“You OK?” Carl called.

“Yes,” I called back. But I was curled in a fetal position, clutching my knees to my chest. This seemed to be the default position I ended up in when I thought about Changing Things. I did this only when Carl asked me to: infrequently in the first few months of our marriage, and then more and more often, and then pretty much weekly. Tonight marked an escalation in the seriousness of the request; Carl’s dissatisfaction with our system had grown more urgent. When I thought of his unhappiness growing sharper and sharper, like some pointed thing, I grew unhappy too.

But I still couldn’t imagine sharing my bed every night, let alone having a third person in the apartment, someone possibly very loud, who oozed bodily fluid and need. No, no, my position wouldn’t change.

I used my hands to pry my knees away from my body. I got up and did the only thing that reliably calmed me: I got to work.

  

I carved the two younger children from imported Tahitian balsa wood, with a blade designed to perform thoracic surgery on insects. I modeled them after a blurry black-and-white photograph Mrs. Perlman had provided. In the photo, the family stood squinting in the bright sun. The parents, in back, were the kind of couple who looked like siblings (parallel genetics? or a harsh molding by convergent life experience?)—both thin and pinched-looking, with the same severe shoulders and eyebrows.

The sun shone down on the children, twelve-year-old Franz and eight-year-old twins Otto and Gretel. Franz had curly hair and the open, handsome face of a future homecoming king. (He killed himself in 1972.) Gretel had two braids wound tightly around her ears, like Princess Leia. She had fat cheeks and an impish smile, a girl who clearly expected to be fed and loved ceaselessly. (She grew up to be the mother of Mrs. Perlman and of two other children who both died in infancy. She lives in a nursing home in Bedford, New York.)

Otto, on the other hand, was thin and angular, like his parents, and from the piercing yet opaque expression of his eyes, I could tell he would have grown up to be a soldier or a scientist, a man of great privacy and precision, and that he would have loved one woman secretly for his entire life. But nevertheless he was a child, so I tried to give him the look of recklessness and delicacy common to all eight-year-old boys everywhere.

This proved difficult, even with such a small blade.

  

On my way to bed, I heard a soft, rustling noise coming from the dollhouse. I got up to investigate, fearing mice. We had a problem with them last winter; Carl caught them in a shoe box and released them in the park.

But it wasn’t mice. It was Otto and Gretel. They were rolling around on the floor of the master bedroom. They appeared to be wrestling.

“Give me the slingshot!” said Gretel.

“It’s mine!” said Otto. “Slingshots are for boys.”

“You two are being awfully loud,” I said.

They froze, pulled apart, looked up.

“Who are you?” asked Otto.

“I’m Irene. I made you.”

“Are you God?” asked Gretel.

“No,” I said. Then I considered this. “Well, not in an absolute sense. But in reference to you, yes, I suppose so.”

  

This had only happened once before, this coming-alive. Six months ago, I awoke to find that Drexel, modeled after the teenage son of my blue-blooded client, had stolen my charcoals, scrawled MY DAD IS A GIANT COCKSUCKER FAGET all over the walls of the dollhouse, and fled from my apartment—probably through the fire escape. I had to completely repaper the inside, of course, in addition to replacing Drexel; it cost me nearly a week of work.

I had to admire his audacity: the real Drexel—dour, inbred-looking, personalityless—would never have dared such a thing. Also, his misspelling of “faggot” seemed oddly apt, perfectly descriptive of his father’s Francophile pretensions.

Still, it was unsettling, and I didn’t tell Carl. This was the second reason for keeping him out of my room: who knew when someone would come alive again? And if they did, and he saw, then what would happen?

On the one hand, I suspect that Carl would be less perturbed than a normal person if he came across a four-inch talking human: unlike anyone else I know, he believes in the inherently secret nature of everything. He believes in the dream life of penguins, in the quiet longings of plants, in the muscles and heartbeats of prehistoric fish. He eats oranges slowly, out of respect.

On the other hand, who was to say? Perhaps he’d become terrified, and leave me; or perhaps they’d go dead in his presence, and I’d have to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing. There were too many potential outcomes, running around my imagination like wild animals, impossible to corral. One thing was certain, though: if my creations spoke to him—if these two compartments of my life overlapped and interacted—it would complicate everything, in ways I could not apprehend. It was not a development I felt I could risk.

  

The children asked if they could play. I told them yes, if they went to sleep in an hour.

“Let’s play Pretend,” said Gretel to Otto. “You be the man and I’ll be the lady.”

“Here,” I said. “You need costumes.” I handed Otto the bowler hat I’d made for his father, and Gretel her mother’s shawl. Gretel promptly lay down on the table and threw her arm across her face, in a pantomime of distress.

Otto tipped his hat. “Hello, missus,” he said. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“Well,” said Gretel, “I have terrible dreams, about black ants crawling up my nose holes.”

“Well, I am a doctor, so I can help. Do you have a washcloth?”

“Let me see.” She got up and looked around the worktable until she found a stray square of cloth. “Yes. So what do I do with it?”

“You soak it in Forgetting Liquid.”

“And then where do I put it?”

“You don’t put it anywhere. I put it.” He lay down on the floor, and put the washcloth over his own face.

  

In the morning I awoke to find that Otto and Gretel had made their way off my worktable. I followed the high-pitched sound of their voices into Carl’s room—which, fortunately, was vacant; he’d already gone out on his piano-tuning rounds.

Otto and Gretel had climbed up onto Carl’s turntable. Gretel stood on the record, and Otto at the base of the needle. “Are you ready?” he asked. “I’m about to do it.”

“I’m ready,” said Gretel. “Just start.”

Otto took hold of the record with his little hands and hurled it sideways, so that it began to spin. Gretel, standing on top of the spinning record, fell down to her knees and screamed with glee. “Wheeee!” she cried. “This is the most fun I’ve had my whole life!”

“That’s enough, young lady,” I said. I brought one finger down to halt the record midspin. The two of them looked up, terrified. I could see their tiny hummingbird heartbeats through their clothes.

“We were just—”

“We got lost.”

“Because we fell off the table, and—”

“Well, first of all,” I said, “I know you didn’t fall off. You’d be dead. I know that you shinnied down the table leg.”

I was bluffing, but I’d caught them: they looked down at their feet, ashamed.

“You should know,” I said, “that this room is forbidden.”

They continued to look down at their feet. I thought I could see Gretel’s little round shoulders shaking.

“You are going to have to think about what you’ve done,” I said.

I took them back into my room and put them in a shoe box and shut the lid, punching a few holes for air. Then I sat down at my table and attempted to carve the clawed feet of the bathtub.

The children stayed quiet for a long time, and then I heard them mewing softly, like kittens.

I had decided to make them suffer until they learned a lesson—the last thing I wanted was for them to walk into Carl’s room again—and so I tried to ignore the sound of their weeping. But I felt a growing heaviness: forcing other people to suffer, even if for their own good, has got to be the loneliest feeling in the world.

I stopped working. I sat there and sympathized with God.

Finally, I went into the kitchen, found a wide soup bowl, and filled it with sugar. I brought it back and set it down on the worktable.

“Here,” I told the children, plucking them out of the shoe box and dropping them into the bowl. “You can play around in this.” I quickly carved them a pair of shovels and gave them some thimbles to use as buckets.

“I wonder what it is,” said Otto, sifting it through his fingers. “Is it manna?”

“What?” said Gretel.

“You know, you blockhead. The white food that fell from the sky, when the Israelites were wandering?”

Gretel shoveled some grains directly into her mouth. Her eyes grew wide. “It’s sugar!” she cried.

“Impossible,” said Otto. “It’s too big.”

“Just taste it!”

He put a grain into his mouth, and the frown on his face slowly softened. “It is sugar,” he said, incredulous.

I pinched some between two fingers and sprinkled it down on their heads, as if dusting the top of a pie. They giggled and caught it in their palms and put it into their mouths.

In spite of myself, I smiled.

Watching them scamper through the sugar, I thought about Mrs. Perlman’s family. “My grandmother never recovered from Otto’s death,” she’d told me. “She kept thinking she saw him. Always eight years old. Even when she was in her eighties, when her own kids had grandkids. She’d go up to random children on the street and slap them in the face and yell at them in German for how worried they’d made her.”

Otto and Gretel had such hard lives ahead of them, I thought; perhaps all three of us did. I felt with sudden force that I wanted to keep them, and keep them happy.

“I invented a new dance!” Gretel called out. She hurled herself down into the sugar and proceeded to do something that can only be described as humping.

“That’s disgusting,” I said, plucking them out of the sugar, trying to stifle a smile.

“Can you show us something else?” asked Otto, brushing the grains of sugar off his trousers. “Something fantastic?”

“All right,” I said. I hunted around my desk and found a dried-up orange leaf. Carl liked to bring them home from the park when they were particularly vivid, little gifts for me from the outside world. I held it up for the children to see.

“That has got to be from the time of the dinosaurs,” said Otto.

  

Carl and I met in the park. I was new to the city, and I still didn’t know anything to do with my free time besides painting in my room and going to the park to sit and stare at things. So I was sitting and staring one day, and I noticed him. He sat on the ground, playing his banjo and singing softly. He wore a blue button-down shirt and a long red beard.

I came back at the same time the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. He was always there. I felt free to stare, because he never looked up from the banjo—not once. But on the fifth day, he suddenly stood up, walked over, and sat down next to me.

“I’ve been watching you,” he said.

“What?”

“You have very nice hands.”

I looked down, as if to verify his statement. No one had ever told me this before. “But how—”

“I’m good at noticing things,” he said, “when I don’t seem to be noticing them. What’s your name?”

“Irene.”

He lifted the banjo into his lap and played “Goodnight, Irene,” very softly.

Sometimes I live in the country, sometimes I live in town

Sometimes I have a great notion to jump in the river and drown

Then he got up and resumed his spot, on the grass across from me, and continued to play without looking up.

I came back every day, and sat on the same bench. Each day, exactly once, Carl would take a break from his playing and come over next to me. Neither of us would say anything; he would just sit, and play a song.

Then, one day, he packed up his banjo and slung it onto his back. He came and stood in front of me and said, “Let’s go somewhere, Irene.”

We went to the Museum of Fabulous Entomology, Carl’s favorite place in the city aside from the park. He took me through the insects one by one, explaining why each was a marvel of creation. “This is the merifluvian Java beetle,” he’d say. “It changes color upon the approach of rain, and has six distinct emotions.”

When I went home, I carved and painted replicas of his favorite insects. I strung them together so that they hung, heads down, like beads on a necklace. I presented the string to him the next time we met. He stared down at it and blinked. “This is the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me,” he said.

I took it from his hand and tied the string around his neck. I felt as if I were performing some tribal mate-choosing ritual. I stepped back and viewed him, the string of insects gleaming around his neck in the sun. My heart beat wildly.

We were married, officially, six weeks later.

  

By the afternoon, I was so caught up with the children that I forgot to listen for Carl. We were playing a game I’d devised to tire them out. It was called Run, Scream, and Fall Down.

Gretel had introduced her own modification: rather than just screaming an open vowel sound, like “ahhh,” you had to scream the name of an imaginary person. Gretel screamed “Hermann Klass,” “Linus Hoffenpepper,” and “Frau Umbrella.” Otto, clearly more cosmopolitan, screamed “Lord Kensington,” “Hoopa Loopa,” and “Samurai.”

They were screaming “Uncle Moses” and “Hitachi Electronics” (which Otto saw on my radio and mistook for a person’s name) when I heard Carl’s footsteps, loud and sudden, in the hallway. He was home early.

“Shhh!” I cried, scooping the children into my lap. “Be quiet!” I placed one finger over each of their mouths.

“Irene?” Carl called.

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Who are you talking to?”

“Um—that was just the radio.”

“The radio?”

“Yes. It’s a new program that transmits the sound of street noises from all over the world.”

It was unclear to me whether Carl had heard the children or just me, but I needed to assume the worst. Through a series of gestures, I conveyed to the children that they needed to stay very quiet or something terrible would happen. I gave them a piece of paper and a pencil as high as their bodies. Working together silently, they pushed the pencil across the paper and drew a series of triangles. Each triangle was more competent than the last, and at number seventeen—a perfect isosceles—they stopped. Exhausted, they lay down on the desk and slept.

  

To throw Carl off the trail, I was very accommodating at dinner, practically solicitous. I found this surprisingly easy: the adrenaline of the narrow escape, and the thrill of having such a robust and vibrant secret, made me feel reckless with things I’d previously confused for my dignity.

So when Carl said, “Have you considered my question,” like a statement (perhaps because he expected a disappointing answer, and did not want to signal false hope by a rising inflection), I said, “Just give me some time to think about it. All I need is some time.” I was basically lying, but at the softness in my voice, I sensed him relaxing.

As we washed the dishes, our elbows touched, and I felt a new sexual charge between us. I had never thought of the elbow as an erogenous zone before, but now it made perfect sense: it’s so exposed, so sensitive, so easily bruised.

Usually, after dish washing, Carl and I retired to our separate rooms to practice our respective arts. But tonight, without a word, I followed Carl into his room. He looked surprised when he turned around to face me, but not displeased. He reached out and initiated sex the way that he always did, the way that I usually liked: by lightly playing his fingers over my ear, until I nodded, giving him permission to move the wandering fingertips down to my breast. But tonight, things seemed more urgent; I took hold of his hand and moved it down to step two.

Carl smiled, and before I knew it we’d skipped three and four entirely and we were on five. We did five and then we did it again. Five, five, five.

  

I awoke the next morning to the sound of the children’s voices.

“No, they live in caves,” Gretel was saying.

“Everyone knows,” said Otto, “that in China, dragons are pets. So they live in stables, like horses.”

Leaving them to their discussion, I performed my midweek cleaning ritual, happily humming along with the vacuum. But the noise terrified Otto and Gretel. They huddled in the empty drawing room, curled into each other, hands covering each other’s ears.

To console them, I uncovered the only dollhouse I’d ever made for myself: a replica of our apartment. Kitchen with tiny dining/living room area, bedroom, back room (which became Carl’s; I made everything—the snowshoes, the turntable, the banjo). There was a Carl doll, of course (red beard, blue shirt, bare feet), and an Irene (pale skin, thin dark hair, round glasses). Under the Irene doll’s worktable sat a dollhouse, an exact replica, and in the bedroom of that dollhouse was another dollhouse, and inside that one, another.

I let them walk around inside. Otto and Gretel fit right in, as if the house had been designed specifically for them. But still it was uncanny to watch them: the house had never contained anything living before.

The children dragged the Irene and Carl dolls—larger than them, but light and hollow, like scarabs—into the kitchen, and sat them down at the table. Then Gretel climbed into the Irene doll’s lap, and Otto into the Carl doll’s. It made an odd picture: Irene and Carl stared straight ahead, their wooden faces composed and unmoving, while Otto and Gretel squirmed in their laps.

“Nothing’s happening,” said Otto, after a while.

“What were you expecting?” I asked.

“Just some kind of special feeling,” he said.

“We always wanted to do this with our parents,” said Gretel, “but they never let us.”

They continued to sit there, though, shifting positions every few seconds as if that might change things. Finally Otto sighed and said, “Let’s go play.”

They sat down in Irene’s room, in front of the dollhouse-in-the-dollhouse.

Otto picked up the Carl and Irene dolls. “I want to make love to you,” he said, twitching the Carl doll’s body around.

“Otto!” I cried. “Do you even know what that means?”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s a way of praying. You rub your bodies together and say ‘Oh God, oh God.’” He demonstrated with the dolls.

“We tried it once,” said Gretel, “but we didn’t feel anything.”

“That’s because brothers and sisters can’t do it,” I explained. “Also, children don’t like it very much. Wait until you’re older.”

“When will we get older?” asked Otto.

“Well.” I thought about this. “I guess I don’t know if you ever will.” The thought made me suddenly, profoundly sad.

“Will you?”

“I’m already older.”

“So do you make love?”

“Yes. But not like that.”

“Like how, then?”

There was a real answer to this question, but I couldn’t imagine giving it. “Well,” I began. “For one thing, I don’t say ‘God.’”

Otto nodded with understanding. “Taking the name of the Lord in vain.”

They went back to playing, apparently satisfied.

  

That night, I pulled Carl toward me before we’d even had dinner. We were in the hallway that connected our two rooms when we started touching; after a few minutes, he murmured, “Can we do it in your room this time?”

I hesitated. We were in a rosebud-gathering, hay-making mood, and I didn’t want to ruin it. And, though we’d rarely had sex in my room before, it wasn’t the same as sharing a bed for the whole night. It was a step I felt able to take.

Then again, there was the matter of the children, napping in the shoe box on my worktable. But they usually napped for several hours, and they’d just gone down, so we were probably all right. And the tiny element of danger actually made me feel excited. Maybe part of me wanted Carl to discover Otto and Gretel.

“All right,” I whispered.

  

Carl and I did several things differently this time. We switched the order of seven and five, and we did number eight backwards.

And it was wonderful. It was so wonderful, in fact, that I completely forgot to notice how we were positioned, not just relative to each other, but relative to other objects in the room. We were midway through a particularly vigorous number nine when Carl’s foot swung out sideways from the bed and knocked off the shoe box. It landed on the floor upside down, with a heavy thud.

I leapt off the bed and started to scream. “You idiot!” I cried. “You big clumsy idiot. Get out, get out, get out!”

“But—”

“Get out!”

Carl dashed out of the room, naked, with an air of great shame.

I slammed the door behind him and locked it. Then I opened the shoe box.

Otto and Gretel were all right. They were sleepy and confused, rubbing their eyes, reaching out for each other, murmuring questions: “Was that a dragon? Was that an ogre? Was that a giant?”

  

I lay awake all night, thinking about what I’d allowed to happen. In a moment of abandon, I’d compromised the children’s safety—but not in the way I had feared. How could I have expected Carl to be careful with them when he didn’t even know they existed? By keeping them secret, was I actually placing them in greater danger?

I’d shrieked at him with such venom, as if he were a monster—a dragon, an ogre, a giant. But he wasn’t a monster: just a large, gentle man attempting to love his wife.

I stayed awake all night, trying to gather courage. Was it possible to do a courageous thing fearfully? Perhaps one might propel oneself into the future even in a state of tension and panic, even with one’s fingers curled in a death grip around the past.

  

I got up early and knocked on Carl’s door.

“Come in,” he said, feebly.

“I have something to show you,” I said, my heart pounding, my extremities cold.

I held the shoe box out to him. Silently, he took it from me. He lifted the lid, peeked in, and then removed the whole lid and stared down at the contents.

“Well,” he said. His voice sounded puzzled. “They’re beautiful.”

Only then did I peer into the shoe box myself. And I screamed, a terrible scream, how I imagine Otto’s mother must have screamed when she watched him slip beneath the moving train on that terrible morning—because there were Otto and Gretel, just as I’d left them, but completely inert and unalive. They stared blankly up at the ceiling with their painted eyes, the expressions hardened in their empty balsa-wood faces.

“What’s wrong?” said Carl.

I took back the box. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” I had compromised too much, or perhaps too little. “I think I need to move out.”

  

I moved my things into a rented room on the other side of town. A week went by. Like a delicate idea that loses its viability when spoken aloud too soon, the children failed to come alive again. Their pretty wooden bodies lay on their tiny beds, still and horizontal as corpses.

Despite my grief, I finished Mrs. Perlman’s dollhouse. I wrapped the Otto and Gretel dolls, along with their parents and older brother, carefully in brown paper and twine. I had finished ahead of schedule. But I couldn’t bring myself to deliver them to Mrs. Perlman, not yet.

One morning, I went to the park and found the spot where Carl played. I sat on a large rock, from which I could see him but he could not see me. I sat and listened.

He was playing one of the songs of our early courtship:

And he made a fiddle bow of her long yellow hair

Oh, the wind and rain

It was amazing how small and far away he looked, even from this short distance. I took my hand out of my pocket and lifted it up, bracketing Carl’s body with my thumb and pointer finger. I sat like this for a minute, holding him between my fingers. I held him and I held him and I held him.

  

Back in my rented room, I unpacked my own dollhouse, the replica of the apartment I’d shared with Carl. I set up the Irene and Carl dolls in the dining room chairs where Otto and Gretel had sat on their laps. They stared at each other across the table. I stared at them. Then I reached for my instruments.

I carved without thinking, as always happened when I did my best work. I’d begun working with no specific intention, but the little human took shape beneath my fingers anyway, insistently and specifically, as though I were simply obeying the wood’s will toward a particular form. I watched it become she, a little girl, perhaps five or six years old. Her features were distinctly her own, yet resembled both mine and Carl’s. She had Carl’s blue eyes and my brown hair, Carl’s full cheeks and my hard, inquisitive stare. There was a slight, almost imperceptible twist of impish merriment at the corner of her mouth that seemed to come from neither of us, that was entirely hers.

When she was finished, I held her in the palm of my hand and gazed at her. She was, without question, the best and most lifelike doll I’d ever created—better even than Drexel, better than Otto and Gretel. Still, she was not alive. At least, not yet.

  

The next morning I packed the new doll into a small nut-shaped box padded with cotton: a soft little elfin cradle. I walked to the park, hands in the pockets of my long skirt, fingers curled around my small round secret.

Carl was in the same place as always. I sensed him first, and then I saw him: growing bigger and bigger, more and more detailed, as I approached. His blue shirt, his red hair, his dear sad face.

I watched him look up, notice me, set his banjo down on the ground. I watched him stand and stiffen at my approach, wearing a look of melancholy expectation.

When we finally stood face-to-face, I grew shy. “I’ve come to give you something,” I said.

“Something for me?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“A child.” I removed the small cradle from my pocket and placed it in his outstretched hand. Slowly, carefully, his large fingers eased it open.

We both watched, breathless, as the little girl stirred in her sleep. Then she stretched, yawned, opened her eyes.

She sat up. “Finally,” she said, looking from one of us to the other. “I’ve been waiting forever.”

“For what?” murmured Carl.

“To be born,” she said matter-of-factly. Then she leapt, like a little goat, from the cradle onto Carl’s forearm. She gripped the cuff of his sleeve and hung from it, as from monkey bars, kicking her legs to make herself swing back and forth. “Whee!” she giggled. “This is fun!”

Instinctively I put my hand beneath her, so as to catch her if she fell. Carl just stared at her in wonder—then back at me, then back again at the child. This was what he’d wanted: something that was not just adjacent to me but of me, of us.

The little girl released her grip on Carl’s cuff and dropped, like a small stone, into my hand. She looked up at us. “Shall we go home?” she asked.

Carl looked at me with questioning eyes. I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “We can all go home.”

Carl smiled. “Perhaps first,” he said, “we should have a song.” He sat down on the grass and picked up his banjo.

I sat down across from him, the little girl in my palm. She lay down on her belly, her chin propped in her hands, tiny elbows digging gently into my flesh.

She waited; I waited. The world felt very quiet, very still—an alive kind of quiet, the humming quiet of trees and swarming insects and sleeping penguins, of breath preceding speech. Then Carl touched the strings and began to play.