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for a piece of coffee cake. They were cut of different bolts, as Hayes put it. The first time Mark brought her home, she’d swept in as if she were some highly colored exotic bird Mark had captured. Thirty years ago, she couldn’t imagine how Lorraine would fit in, in Tall Trees—well, the Tall Trees they’d grown up in, anyway, before part of town became a sort of northern suburb grown up to house executives and workers at the big Medi-Sun plant. There’d always been mom-and-pop-type tourists, and there were more swanky ones now that the monks had converted Fidelis Hill into a ski resort. At the same time, original Tall Trees people still called acreage after the farmers who’d owned it, years after the farms were made into subdivisions. They might buy their paper toweling at the big Sam’s, which looked like an alien installation glowing in the darkness of the pines at the junction of Q and the interstate, but they would buy meat at Wilton’s. If you turned off the radio, you could pretend it was 1955.
    But Lorraine had found her fit. She’d made her place as a teacher, and sold her huge paintings, which always looked to Nora like a cross between giant flowers and sexy highway maps. And Mark was kind of a minor celebrity on account of having been the county extension agent for so many years, answering callers’ questions on Larry Miller’s public radio show about why you often saw a small bird chasing a big bird or how mole rats were different from shrews.
    Given that Georgia was adopted, it was peculiar how similar she Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 22
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    was to Lorraine. Two little women with big hands and hips and masses of ringlety hair so dark it was almost purple in the sun. Nora’s son Marty (the rascal) said Georgia and Lorraine had the “uni-brow,” and it swept over eyes so black the pediatrician thought Georgia had a congenital cataract when she was born.
    Lately, Lorraine had withered along with her child, as if eating when Georgia could not was a sin. She didn’t trouble with the pretty auburn highlights anymore, her scraggled hair long, streaked white, witchlike, skewered with what looked like a hatpin. The house was going seedy.
    Whenever Nora came by, she thought how she’d once envied that plushy emerald lawn and stately redbrick foursquare with its white awnings, the awnings alone a badge, to Nora, of ease and education. It was still cleaner than her own farmhouse could ever be, where dried mud and flies made a batter as customary as the bread and butter at the supper table. But Mark had planted no annuals this year; the hedges were parched and stringy, shoots like angry fingers blocking the picture window.
    How much of Lorraine’s life Nora had envied. That special current between her and Mark, for one thing, which was nothing like the stately companionability of her and Hayes. There were times when Nora felt as though she and Hayes were more like brother and sister than she and Mark were. For a time, Nora had thought that Lorraine’s having two careers and a marriage that looked from the outside more like a courtship, was the reason Mark and Lorraine never had kids.
    Then had come that one Christmas Nora would never forget. Dinner was just over, and the men were groaning, too stuffed to move, and Lorraine, for once, got up with the rest of the women to help clear.
    Debbie had been pregnant then with Matt, and they’d got to telling stories about labor, as women will do, and Debbie had told about some woman from her office at Wisconsin Bell who got so big her stretch marks literally tore open, and Lorraine said, “I couldn’t bear that. I couldn’t bear to be torn up like that . . .” And it just spilled out. Nora had said, “Well, I guess you’re going to have that flat tummy of yours all your life . . . I mean, I know your art is like a child, in a sense . . .”

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    Lorraine had given