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come loose. I got out needle and thread and spent ten minutes mending it. The dress was mauve and white, striped and long. While I mended I read a story in the paper about a woman who had carried her sewing into the living room, her needle in one hand, what she was sewing in the other, and accidentally knocked against the doorway and driven the needle into her heart.
    I miscarried that afternoon, and two months later Maureen was telling me she was pregnant.

    There is a process in friendship of becoming the other person, and of erasing yourself and the other person in the process. You see the friend turn away, and in that momentyou stop seeing the friend and see only yourself as someone turned away from.
    I was never able to keep all of her in my mind at once, the person I had liked and the person I came to dislike. I remember standing beside her in the Korean fruit store while she bent down to smell a hyacinth in a pot, her long unwashed hair swinging into her face and mingling with the other smell – one sweet and otherworldly, the other salty and human. The smell of spring and the smell of panic.
    Whenever her son whimpered in the night, she left Danny’s side and lay down beside him till morning. She slept poorly because of the narrow bed and because of dreams in which young men appeared, intent on following her and eager to make love. She would wake in tears at the contrast between what she might have had, and what she had.
    Her mother cornered me in the playground. Another visit, almost the same time of year: April, and the wind kept blowing her words away. She couldn’t understand why Maureen’s talents had borne so little fruit. If only she had more time. “She is
so
jealous,” she said, “of the time you have to write.”
    In that moment I felt a cool wind of ill will blow against my skin – just enough to open up my own storehouse of negativity. I remembered the Russian tale I had read with such a sense of recognition. A peasant was given the chance to choose anything he wanted so long as his neighbour got twice as much. He thought and thought, and finally chose to have one of his eyes put out.
    What was the word Maureen used as we went upstairs, the German word for joy at another’s sorrow?
    “I don’t mean that,” she said. “Not that dramatic. But, yes, I’m jealous of anybody’s time, especially my husband’s,” and she laughed.
    We were halfway up the stairs, she turned around to speak to me, and there was a small smile on her face. The Germans have a word for it.
    I walked back home and looked out the window at Clara’s garden next door. It was one of the most beautiful gardens I had ever seen. A narrow sidewalk, two steps, and where the steps rose, a low, roughly made stone wall. Beyond the wall under the magnolia small stones separated semi-circles of ground. It was a poor, graceful, hardworking garden that would produce abundantly all summer long. I opened the window and in surged the smell of laundry soap from down the street. A last snow flurry, a late spring.
    A day later it surprised me how much her comments still bothered me. Bothered me more as I didn’t hear from her, as I deliberately left the house early and unplugged the phone when I came home, so that I couldn’t hear from her. Then walked down the block looking for her in the distance.

    What saved her was the lanolin she always rubbed into her nipples after nursing the children. She made a habit of spreading it around her chest and in the end it protected her skin from the fire. Jill wrote that she healed very quickly. In a few months she was probably an older version of the wedding snapshot taken when they were twenty-two. Danny and a friend of his had their arms around her thin shoulders,she was looking down at the ground, she was smiling (unlike the child who knew enough not to smile), and her hair was cropped close to her head. It formed a soft helmet, and yes, she looked like a boy.

Cézanne in a Soft Hat

    S oon after