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believe her reputation was ripe for the picking. These guys are greedy. They would eat her up, inch by inch. Scavengers. Brutes. This is a wicked world, and the innocent need protection.
    Which is why I find it impossible to forgive myself for losing her notebook.
9
    It’s been lost for several days. Since Monday probably, maybe Tuesday.
    I’m not willing yet to admit that it is
irretrievably
lost; it is just—what?—misplaced. Any day now, tomorrow maybe, I’ll find it under a pile of letters in my desk drawer. It might have got slipped into a bookcase, it’s so small, one of those little spiral notebooks the colour of cheap chocolate. It’s just waiting, perversely, to surprise me one day when I least expect it. It might be under a corner of a rug. Or right out in plain sight somewhere, only my eyes are too frantic to focus on the spot.
    I’m not a careless person, though I remind myself a dozen times a day, as a kind of palliating commentary, that this is not the first thing I’ve lost. Once, when I was married to Olaf, I lost my wedding ring. I was devastated, almost sick, and hadn’t been able to tell Olaf about it because I knew he would see it as a portent; and there it was, two weeks later, in a little ceramic dish where I kept my paperclips. Another time I lost my first-edition copy of
The Second Sex
, which I’d bought at Stanton’s for ten bucks back in the good old days. For months I’d wandered around like a mad woman, wrenching cushions off chairs and wailing to the walls, “Books don’t just get up and walk away.” In the spring a dear friend, Lorenzo Drouin, the medievalist, found it wedged behind a radiator in my living-room.
    About the lost notebook my mother is sympathetic but vague. She asks if I’ve checked the pockets of myraincoat or lent it to a friend or thrown it out with the newspapers—preposterous suggestions all, the utterance of which points to her essential helplessness and to how little she understands my life. “It’ll turn up,” she murmurs and murmurs, my comforting plump spaniel of a mother. But helpless, helpless.
    I visit my mother every Sunday. On Sunday morning in the city of Chicago other people wake up thinking: How will this day be spent? What surprises will it bring? Sunday is a day with a certain lustre on it, a certain hum. The unscheduled hours seduce or threaten, depending on circumstances, on money or friends or on health or weather; but there is always, I’m convinced, an anticipatory rustle, a curtain sliding open onto possibility.
    Not for me, though. You might say I’m a professional daughter, or at least a serious hobbyist. On Sundays I get on the L and go to see my mother, who lives in a third-floor apartment on the west side. She expects me at 1:00 P.M. give or take five minutes. She watches from the window as I come trotting down the tree-lined street, slips the brass chain off the lock, and enfolds me in her heated feathery arms, saying, “Hi there, sweetie pie.”
    Immediately the two of us sit down in the dinette to a full dinner, roast chicken or ham with mashed potatoes, frozen peas or string beans, and for dessert ice cream in a cereal bowl. My mother and I talk and talk, and if I stop now to think of those scattered others outside in the streets or parks of Chicago who are freely disposing of the day, it’s with scornful pity. The beckoning Sunday spaces are revealed in all their dinginess. Whatever possibilities had winked and chittered in the morning have by this time dried up, and here sit I, the luckiest of women, brimming with home-cooked food and my mother’s steady, unfocused love.
    Nevertheless, I’m full of jumps and twitches today.
    “Something’s bothering you,” she divines.
    “That idiotic notebook,” I rage. “I still can’t find the damn thing.”
    “Oh, dear.” The mildest profanity confuses her. “Let me give you some more coffee. It’ll calm you down.”
    My mother’s the only person I know who believes