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Caroline, sinking back into the sofa as a frazzled denture wearer disclosed her most embarrassing moment, “is why it turned out so badly when Jones apparently meant so well.”
    “It’s like Arnold,” said Diana, scratching her own back with a knitting needle. Arnold, the new puppy, was having difficulty grasping toilet training. “His intention exceeded his aim.”
    Smiling, Caroline gave Diana a quick kiss to one side of her mouth and headed for the stairs, leaving Diana, hands frozen in midstitch, looking taken aback by the abruptness of the departure. But if she stayed, Caroline knew her hand would stray over to one of Diana’s breasts.
    Caroline turned on the lamp on her bedside table and glanced around the room. Her loom stood in the corner next to a picture window that looked down to Lake Glass. Exterior walls of logs and chinking, interior walls of pine paneling. -These downstairs rooms were supposed to house the six children Diana and Mike had planned on.
    Diana and Caroline knocked down a couple of walls and turned them into an apartment for Caroline, Jackie, and Jason.
    Caroline pulled her Lanz nightgown out of her pine chest, studying the framed collage of obscene French postcards Diana had done for her, which hung on the pine paneling above the chest. Her cheery demeanor was slipping like an ill-fitting toupee.
    Miss Congeniality offstage. It was a strain to be cooperative in enterprises to which she couldn’t see the point, like therapy and celibacy. But her role in life
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    was to help others feel better. Her parents used to come to the dinner table exhausted from their welfare work, and she’d tell every new joke she could think of, whatever her own prior mood. It had been worth it to watch them smile reluctantly, then laugh. As satisfying as watching the color return to patients’ faces as you resuscitated them.
    Her apartment was uncharacteristically silent because Arnold, Jackie, and Jason were sleeping over at friends’
    houses. All she could hear was the hum of the refrigerator and Diana running a bath upShe pictured Diana in the tub, head back, eyes closed, faint smile on her lips. The water rising slowly over her pale freckled skin, which was smooth as butter to the touch. They used to lie in the bath together, the head and back of one on the other’s chest and abdomen. She removed the gold chain with the ivory sea gull from around her neck. One afternoon last spring she and Diana sat in the thick new grass holding hands and watching hundreds of sea gulls descend on a neighboring farmer’s newly manured field to feast on worms and inDiana and she defined the different groupings as rival sororities and laughed themselves sick inventing stories about their machinations. The next day Diana came home from town with the ivory gull.
    As she hung up her plaid shirt, Caroline looked across her closet shelf to the cluster of pill bottles in the back corner. She shoved a pile of sweaters Diana had knit for her in front of them.
    Walking into the dark living room, she stumbled over a hockey stick and stubbed her toe on the gateleg of the dining table. She didn’t need a calendar; she knew what time of year it was by which sports equipment she tripped over in her living room. Last month it was soccer balls and cleats. Currently she was lacerating herself on skate blades. Before long she’d be dodging baseball bats and catcher’s masks. Unhooking the boys’ video game, she moved the TV into her bedShe piled up pillows and crawled under the huge gold and brown afghan spread Diana had knit for her. As she sipped her coffee, she watched a movie about two career girls on the make in New York City. She realized she’d seen it before. The goodlooking one got Jimmy Stewart and the other one got promoted to editor. If only once the girls would get each other. But probably that was asking too much of Twentieth Century-Fox. Didn’t David Michael once say they were owned by a conglomerate that also