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a narrow-minded, scheming blonde who plays with boys like a cat, Lee thought.
    One day Peggy came home from the Safeway and walked in on a wasteland. Arms full of groceries, she scanned a little forest of pottery figurines at her feet as she walked through the living room to the kitchen. There was more pottery next to the trash can. She had made these statues at the college art center and considered them emblematic of her frustration as a housewife. They were pinched pyramidal figures with tiny round heads, done in dull shades of blue. Their necks were very thin and easy to break. Most of the heads were gathered in a pie tin on the floor.
    “Lee!” she yelled. There was no answer. She set the groceries down and walked out the back door. And there he was, in a net muscle shirt, getting in the canoe with a boy. Making his getaway as soon as he heard the car, right in the middle of letting some teenager help him turn her sewing room into a weight room because she didn’t have time to do any sewing.
    It was a betrayal of just about everything—her privacy, her pottery that was a cry for help intended to be heard by no one, her struggle to be a good mother and sew little dresses for Mireille. The intimacy she and Lee still shared. The vestiges of heterosexuality she occasionally saw in him and cosseted like rareorchids. All of it gone. The more sacrifices she made for her family, the more he took his power for granted. He got all the love in the world, and she got none at all.
    She drove to the college. She had a vague notion of storming into his office and breaking something.
    As she rounded the main building, she spied the grassy slope under the tulip poplars going down to Stillwater Lake, and she followed a mad impulse.
    She stopped the car and said, “Byrdie, could you take Mickey and stand over there by that tree?”
    He said, “Yes, ma’am,” and toted his little sister and her blanket over to the tree, warning her with a gesture to stay put, came back to close the car door, and rejoined her in the shade.
    The lake made Peggy angry. It ought to be bringing Lee to her, on his knees in the canoe, to offer her an explanation and an apology. But the lake was empty, because Lee was not alone and would never come to the college dressed as his true self. He was back at the house by now, sweeping up her art with no pants on.
    “Don’t move, Byrdie,” Peggy said. “This’ll just take a second.” She put the car—more precisely, Lee’s irreplaceable VW Thing—in second gear and drove slowly and deliberately into the water. She watched the water pour in around her feet and kept going. She revved the Thing until the wheels were in mud up past the axles, even up past the lower edge of the doors.
    As the engine died she heard a sucking sound. The car was still moving forward and tilting.
    Peggy felt an anxiety she had not anticipated. She had expected it to be like driving down a boat ramp. She floundered to shore, up to her knees in mud that ripped her shoes right off her feet, and turned to watch the car settle into place nose down, rear bumper in the air. Around it, a maelstrom was forming. It didn’t look like it would be easy to get back out.
    A security guard ran up behind her to ask if she was all right.
    “Where’s my kids? Byrdie, Mickey, c’mere. Come on, honey. It’s all right. I love you, baby. I just didn’t like that car.”
    “You’re crazy, Mom. I’m going to tell Dad.”
    “Now, sweetie, ain’t nobody crazier than your dad. We’re all crazy!”
    The campus security officer asked, “Mrs. Fleming, are you saying that was not an accident?”
    “Nope. That was theater of cruelty.”
    The officer sighed and said, “Mrs. Fleming, you’re a card,” and they went together into the administrative building to call Lee. That was one advantage of being a wife. It was Lee’s job to discipline her, not that campus security would have involved the police in anything short of murder.
    A week later, they