PART ONE

1968–1970

THE MEMBERS

A Fuller Brush salesman had the unfortunate task of trying to sell his wares to the women of Freesia Court during the fifth day of a March cold snap.

They were like caged animals, he complained later to his district manager. I felt like any minute they were going to turn on me.

Brushes? Faith Owens had said when he offered up his bright smile and sales pitch on her icy front doorstep. "I’m sorry, but I’ve got a little more than brushes to worry about right now. Like wondering if spring is ever going to get here. Because I truly believed it might really be coming when boom—here it is, twenty below zero with a windchill factor that would bring Nanook of the North to his knees."

Thank you for your time, said the salesman, picking up his case. You have a pleasant day, now.

And what exactly is a windchill factor anyway?

Faith, called her husband, Wade, from the living room. Faith, don’t be rude, honey.

Well what is it? she asked, slamming the door with her hip. "What exactly is a windchill factor?"

This is Minnesota, said Wade, ignoring her question because he wasn’t quite sure of the answer. What do you expect?

"Oh, I don’t know—maybe a little damn relief?"

Might I remind you, said Wade, how you cried with delight seeing your first snowfall?

I cried with delight the first time I had sex with you, but that doesn’t mean I want it nonstop.

You’re telling me, said Wade with a wistful sigh.

Ha, ha, ha, said Faith, surveying her neat and trim husband as he brushed his crew cut with his palm, a gesture he always made after what he thought was a joke.

It was no surprise to Faith that her husband had less trouble adapting to the frozen north. Hell, he was flying out of it all the time. Right before Christmas, Wade had been transferred to Minneapolis from Dallas, although to Faith, it may as well have been Siberia.

That very morning he was leaving for a three-day trip with a layover in warm and sunny Los Angeles, and as she stomped upstairs to finish his packing, anger seethed through Faith like steam through their loud and clanking radiators—Los Angeles! In just a few hours Wade could feasibly be lying poolside as some flirtatious Nordic stewardess (why did every Minnesota stewardess she’d seen have to look like Miss Sweden?) rubbed suntan lotion on his shoulders, while she, Faith, rubbed ointment onto the chapped little bottom of their son, Beau.

She pitched a rolled-up ball of socks into Wade’s suitcase with the velocity of a teenage show-off trying to knock down a pyramid of bottles at a carnival booth. There had been a time when she actually enjoyed packing for her husband—when she’d fold his shirts into neat rectangles, slipping a sheet of tissue paper between them so they wouldn’t wrinkle; when she’d tuck a love note inside a pair of boxer shorts or dab her perfume on the neckline of an undershirt—but routine had long ago tarnished that thrill.

Now Faith had an urge to pack a different sort of surprise—perhaps a used diaper from the bathroom pail that reeked of ammonia, or maybe a sprinkling of itching powder.

She smiled then, remembering one of her more innocent teenage pranks. She and Melinda Carmody had ordered itching powder from the back pages of True Confessions magazine and, sneaking into the classroom during lunch hour, sprinkled it on their algebra teacher’s cardigan sweater, draped over the back of his chair. When tyrannical Mr. Melscher (who rewarded wrong answers with a sarcastic "Think again, Einstein") put the sweater on, Faith and Melinda held their breaths in anticipation. Although the man’s shirt seemed to have blocked much of the powder’s itching powers, he did tug at his collar and squirm a bit, giving the girls far more entertainment than they had trying to figure out if x equaled y.

Closing the suitcase, Faith sighed, realizing how far removed she was from things like best friends and practical jokes and giggle fits.

How far away I am from everything fun, she thought—from rides in convertibles with boys who drove with one hand on the wheel and the other one on her; from parties where couples necked on the porches of fraternity houses; from gently turning down, on the same night, two boys who wanted her to wear their pins.

Who are you kidding? Faith thought, sitting heavily on the bed. You’re starting to believe your own press. It astounded her sometimes, the ease with which she assimilated into her present life: how she could get huffy about a visit from a Fuller Brush man or about packing her husband’s suitcase as if she were some normal housewife. As if she weren’t Primrose Reynolds’ daughter.

She shuddered. It was as if her memories had a geography all their own. In the most recent ones she was on safe and firm ground and was the Faith she wanted and tried hard to be; further back she was the neglected little girl who seemed to be ground zero for lice infestations, the wild teenager who could just as easily have gone to prison as to college. In these memories, she struggled through swamps and quicksand.

Faith’s life had been one of constant upheaval, and if she had learned anything, it was not only how to adapt to it but how to go beyond it. But maybe it was to be the great irony of her life that while she survived years of chaos, a few months as a lonely housewife in the frostbitten north had the power to finally do her in.

Stupid godforsaken frozen tundra, she muttered, refusing to trespass in the dangerous territory of her past. As she dragged Wade’s suitcase off the bed, she looked out the window laced with frost to see the Fuller Brush man take a tumble on the slippery walkway of her neighbor’s house.

ACROSS THE STREET from the Owens residence, in the big colonial that in Faith’s estimation needed a little TLC, Audrey Forrest lay in rumpled sheets, staring at the ceiling. Her five-year-old was bullying her three-year-old, but it was her belief that children settled their differences faster when adults didn’t intervene. Besides, she didn’t want to get out of bed.

She stretched her arms to the ceiling, admiring the delicacy of her fingers and wrists. At the moment she was on a diet that called for entirely too many grapefruits and boiled eggs, and until she saw progress on a scale, she would admire those few things, such as her wrists and fingers, that were in no need of size reduction.

Thinking about her stupid diet, her good, lazy-cat mood faded—why was Paul so adamant that she lose twenty pounds anyway?

It’ll help you feel better about yourself, her husband had said the other day, handing her the diet paperback he’d bought on his lunch break downtown.

"I feel fine about myself, said Audrey, piling her thick dark hair on top of her head and posing like a pinup model. She liked her curvy body, ample seat, and full breasts. And fine about my body. She leaned over, wrapping her arms around Paul’s neck. You usually feel fine about my body." She pressed herself to him, nibbling his earlobe, but what normally drove him crazy now seemed to alarm him, for he pushed her aside as if she were transmitting a germ he did not want to catch.

Paul, she said, unable to believe he didn’t want to ravish her right there on the kitchen floor, what do you expect? I’m Italian. In truth, she was mostly Dutch and German, but she felt far more affinity toward the Italian grandfather who spiced up her genetic mix.

No, said her husband, looking at her with the glasses he thought made him look like a more experienced attorney than he was. Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren are Italian. He pulled the sports section out of the paper and snapped it open. You’re just fat.

"Paul," said Audrey, her voice wounded.

Oh, baby, I was just making a little joke.

Well, it wasn’t funny.

"I know. I’m sorry. I do think you’re beautiful, Aude. It’s just that, geez—he swatted the newspaper he was reading—every one of these models in here looks like that damned Sticky."

Audrey had to laugh. Twiggy, honey. Her name’s Twiggy.

"Well, compared to her, Miss America—which you could be, babe—looks hefty."

He certainly hadn’t been thinking of where her weight fell in the current fashion curve that morning, when he’d pulled her to him, pushing up the fabric of her nightgown until it was a lacy roll around her waist. Audrey had been in the middle of a dream about her grandfather’s backyard garden, the place of some of her happiest childhood memories, but she was always welcoming of Paul’s advances and kissed him hungrily. After he climaxed, he jumped out of bed, his arms held up to the ceiling, and said, Thank you, God, for letting me marry a sex maniac!

There are worse things to be a maniac about, wouldn’t you say, big boy?

Paul didn’t turn around to acknowledge her little Mae West impersonation, but skipped off to the bathroom to shower.

That’s mine! Give it back!

A crash accompanied her three-year-old’s plea, and then there was a moment of silence before both her children began screaming. Wrapping her robe around her, Audrey got out of bed, ready to seize the day—or the scruff of her children’s necks.

A SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER had once told Merit Iverson that God had held her face in his hands and sculpted it himself. It was true, she had the face of an angel, and had anyone been observing her that morning, it would appear also true that she had the smoking habit of a pool hall hustler. She lit her third cigarette of the hour, dragging on it as if it were oxygen and she were tubercular. If moving to Minneapolis from Iowa had been the first subversive act of her life, smoking was the second. Her father, a Lutheran minister (from whom she hid her habit), thought smoking—at least for women—a vice as well as a mark of low moral character. But waiting for her bus one day, Merit saw a billboard of a woman lighting up, a sophisticated, elegant woman who looked as if she had the world on a string, something Merit decidedly did not. She bought a pack of Kools that day.

Her husband, Eric, didn’t mind if she smoked; he thought a woman smoking an occasional cigarette was glamorous. But she knew he’d mind how much she smoked. Even she was surprised how quickly a full pack deflated into an empty, crumpled one, but if cigarettes calmed her nerves, what was the harm?

Are you sure it won’t hurt the baby? she had asked Eric, because if anything would make her give up her beloved habit, it was her beloved baby, growing inside her.

Her husband had given her one of his bemused, dismissive looks, which made her feel like a cute but pesky kindergartner, and said, I’m a doctor, aren’t I? (Somehow he seemed to think Merit needed to be reminded of this fact—as if she hadn’t typed millions of invoices in a drafty accounting office to help put him through med school.) I’m a doctor and I smoke—would I do anything to endanger my health?

But the Surgeon General—

"The Surgeon General’s talking to heavy smokers. Moderation, Merit. Things done in moderation are fine."

A wreath of smoke hovered over Merit as she began to wipe down the counter. Barbra Streisand belted out People on the radio, and she added a little dance step as she attacked the smudge marks on the toaster. She listened to a radio station in whose demographics she did not fit (she knew far more songs by Perry Como than the Rolling Stones), and the waltz step she did in time to the music preceded the Twist or the Pony by centuries.

When she was finally convinced all crumbs and fingerprints had been banished (her husband liked his home as sterile as the hospital he worked in), she sat down at the kitchen table and leaned over to smell the roses Eric had brought home last night. Her pregnancy had been good for a number of bouquets and fruit baskets, one of the latter from the senior Dr. and Mrs. Iverson, who were wintering in Florida. They were thrilled by the news; they’d been pestering Eric and Merit ever since they were married to produce a grandchild. And while you’re at it, her father-in-law would add with a wink, make sure it’s a boy. Sons who became doctors was an Iverson tradition, started five generations earlier.

Merit stubbed out the inch that remained of her cigarette and rubbed her stomach.

Please be a boy, little baby, she whispered. It would make everything so much easier for everybody.

FREESIA COURT was a short dead-end street tucked on a parcel of land a stone’s throw north of Minnehaha Creek. Nearly all the houses had been built in the 1920s and ’30s, and it was such a pretty neighborhood that once in, hardly anyone left. Like many others in Minneapolis, Freesia Court was a cathedral street, so named because the leafy branches of trees on one side of the boulevard met those on the other side, giving those driving under them the sensation of being inside an airy green cathedral. It was only recently, when the original owners had grown too old for the upkeep of their spacious homes, that they had become available for sale. Now more than half of the retirees had moved out, and the sidewalks were littered with tricycles and wagons and chalk drawings belonging to the children of the young couples who’d replaced them. Today, however, the only evidence of children in this frigid winterscape were abandoned sleds and scrawny, weather-beaten snowmen who, with their missing stone eyes and broken and sagging twig arms, looked like Civil War veterans returned home after battle.

Faith’s stucco Tudor (she still could hardly believe she lived in such a nice house) was at the end of the cul-de-sac, and the south side of her yard gradually eased into a hill that ran down to the creek basin. She had splendid views from her kitchen window, hundreds of trees and the creek itself, but it was not this view that was making Faith teary-eyed; it was that of her husband, Wade, backing out of the driveway. Seeing her standing at the window, he gave a jaunty salute, which she returned with a limp little wave.

At least the twins were sleeping, thank God. In January, just after their first birthday, they had taught themselves to walk, giving themselves a gift Faith often wanted to take back to the returns department. If they weren’t contained in a playpen or crib or high chairs, Faith was chasing them through the house, plucking them off stair landings and couch backs and other dangerous perches that were so attractive to them.

Faith had been an athletic girl—you can’t be a college football cheerleader and not be athletic—but all the jumps and splits in the world couldn’t have prepared her for the all-day marathons her twins put her through.

She raced to the living room, where she could watch Wade turn out of the driveway. She blew against the windowpane, and as a foggy circle of condensation expanded, she waved again to her husband, by now halfway up the street. She felt a sadness tinged with panic (she was used to Wade leaving on trips, but unused to being left in a place that still felt alien to her) settle on her like the cold and unwelcome hands of a stranger.

She took several deep breaths until it no longer felt her lungs were seizing up on her, then said, Bye, Wade, as she sat down on the window seat. Distracted from her misery by what was going on outside, she leaned toward the pane for a better view.

Faith sniffed. She knew she was capable of working herself into a really good cry, but a really good cry would interfere with the surveillance of her neighbor—the same neighbor who had shown up at Faith’s door with an older woman, presenting her with a sheet cake and a welcome to Freesia Court. The flu had prevented Faith from inviting them in, and the second time they showed up—this time on Valentine’s Day, with a tray of heart-shaped cookies—Faith only had time to apologize: They look wonderful, but we’re on our way to the airport! (Wade had surprised her with a trip back to Dallas, a Valentine’s present that rivaled the engagement ring she got in ’65.)

Now, as Faith watched her neighbor break the big icicles that hung from her front eaves, she tried to remember the woman’s name.

Slim? Faith said out loud. Slinky? The older woman’s name was Kari (when she introduced herself, she’d said, It’s Kari as in ‘car,’ not as in ‘care’ ), but for the life of her, she couldn’t recall the funny name of the one her age. She knew it started with S—Snoopy, Sailor, Swifty, Skippy? Spot, Sport, Slut?

No, she thought, sinking into the quagmire of memory, slut was what they called me.

SLIP WAS THE NAME Faith was trying to think of, and it belonged to a woman whose father, seeing her for the first time, exclaimed, Why, she’s just a slip of a thing!

His early assessment had proven true: Marjorie McMahon as a full-grown adult barely passed the five-foot mark, and only if she was standing very straight. But what she lacked in size, she made up for in strength; it was one of her adult cousins’ shame that at last year’s family reunion in Jersey City, she’d beaten him in an arm-wrestling competition (her own brothers were not so foolish as to challenge her any longer, having learned through the years they could just as easily lose as win). No girl had ever done more pull-ups or thrown a ball farther on Athletic Skills Competition Day, and at any social gathering, a request was always made for Slip to do her backflips. She used to be able to do four in a row, but at the same family reunion where she had brought down the arm and ego of her blustery cousin, she had only managed three.

It must have been all the dessert I ate, she said to her husband later. I had two of Velma’s seven-layer bars and a piece of Orpha’s gooseberry pie.

Any of Beata’s fudge? asked Jerry, who loved attending any gathering of his wife’s family because of the company and the food.

Slip nodded. But Ollie’s doughnuts were gone by the time I got to them.

They were good, said Jerry, remembering.

He was as big as Slip was little, as tawny as she was freckled, as mild as she was fierce, but a more perfect match neither of them could imagine.

Jerry McMahon was a research scientist in the meteorology department of the University of Minnesota, a man who found delight in dew points and barometric pressure as well as the really exciting weather that his native Minnesota brewed up—blizzards and severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.

He and Slip had met at the U—she was a scholarship student from New Jersey, and he was smitten as soon as he heard this tiny redheaded girl reproach a teaching assistant in an accent that sounded automatically pushy, "Sorry, bub, but you don’t know what you’re tawking about."

I know what I’m talking about, Jerry said, approaching her after class. I know I’d like to take you out for coffee.

I’m on my way to a lecture, said Slip, by a nuclear power proponent. Wanna come? We need more protesters.

Always a big believer in social change, Slip was already out of school and a mother by the time the Vietnam War made college protest practically a credit, but she returned to campus regularly to march in picket lines, to sit in sit-ins, to pass out flyers. She also volunteered two nights a week at the McCarthy for President headquarters, leaving Jerry in charge of the kids, a job he loved.

"But don’t they drive you nuts? Paul Forrest asked at the neighborhood Christmas party. I mean, I love my kids, but that doesn’t mean I want to baby-sit them."

Jerry was about to launch into the joys of child care—just the night before, Flannery, his precocious four-year-old daughter, had read him a bedtime story—but then Eric Iverson, who had ignored the rum punch in the crystal bowl in favor of the stronger offerings from the bar, stumbled toward them, demanding to know just what the hell the two men thought of these goddamned draft dodgers. Slip, who was helping the party’s hostess fill the peanut bowls, piped up, I think they’re people with a conscience—at least the ones I met at the march on the university were.

You were at that march? croaked the young doctor, doing a very good Joseph McCarthy impersonation.

We both were, said Jerry, putting his arm around his wife. And we’ll be at the next one.

Eric Iverson stood hunched over, slack-jawed, staring at the couple as if they’d just stepped out of the pneumatic door of a flying saucer.

Commies, he said finally, shaking his head. We’ve got commies in the neighborhood!

This announcement he made while turning in a semicircle, a movement that apparently affected his equilibrium, because he fell down in a heap.

Merit had rushed over to him, mumbling a continuous refrain of I’m sorry, oblivious to Slip’s cheerful reassurance that it was all right, she’d rather be called a commie than a hawk. Then, making more apologies, Merit half dragged and half pushed her cursing husband out the door.

Under the arch that separated the living room from the small foyer, the commie-hater suddenly stopped and, braying the word Mistletoe! grabbed Merit, kissing her as if a kiss were food and he were starving.

There had been a hush after the Iversons’ departure, and then the hostess put a Tony Bennett album on the hi-fi (Slip had brought the Beach Boys album Pet Sounds, telling Kari to put it on when she wanted the party to really rock) and, holding out her arms, asked Jerry McMahon if he’d care to dance.

That hostess, Kari Nelson, was the same woman who had accompanied Slip twice to Faith’s doorstep when they’d welcomed the newcomer to the neighborhood, the same woman Faith now watched walking up the shoveled sidewalk to where Slip stood decimating icicles.

Faith watched the two women talk for a moment, vaporous plumes tumbling out of their mouths. Something funny must have been said, because both women tipped their heads back, laughing.

Faith felt a pang as real as a pinch, jealous of the women’s merriment. How long had it been since she’d shared a laugh like that with a friend? She watched as both women began pushing what looked more to Faith like a stalactite than an icicle. It was monstrously big, and when they had dislodged it from its perch, they jumped out of the way like two lumberjacks trying to dodge a falling spruce. They laughed again, and Faith had a deep urge to grab her coat and run out and join them. But then Beau began to cry (even when they were newborns, she’d been able to differentiate the twins’ cries), and the urge crumbled under the call to duty.

KARI NELSON, meanwhile, took a rain check on Slip’s invitation to come in for a cup of coffee.

But just a short rain check, she assured her friend. Say around one o’clock? I told myself I couldn’t have any fun until I finished my niece’s coat.

Kari’s sewing talents were much admired and much employed—if she wasn’t sewing a pair of bell-bottoms for one niece, she was making slipcovers for another. She had four nieces, and even though two had moved out of state, it still didn’t stop their requests (her three nephews had no desire to wear hand-sewn shirts or pants; they were more inclined to solicit care packages of chocolate chip or almond crescent cookies). Kari really didn’t mind; her nieces were always so grateful and sent thank-you notes, occasionally accompanied by chocolates or, when they were really flush, her favorite gift: books.

Up in her small, sunny (when the sun wasn’t in winter hibernation) sewing room, Kari pinned a sleeve to a cuff made out of fake acrylic fur, which was all the rage but certainly not a fabric she would choose to work with. Kari was a snob when it came to her material—she loved fine worsted wools and soft silks and Egyptian cottons. Even though she had just celebrated her fortieth birthday, she felt the generation gap everyone was talking about was more a crack than a chasm, and one she felt she easily skipped across, although for the life of her she couldn’t understand or appreciate the fashions of the day.

A paisley jacket with green Day-Glo fake fur cuffs? This particular abomination was for Mary Jo, her niece who last fall had left for Berkeley a demure college coed wearing pleats and Peter Pan collars and come back at Christmas break a full-fledged hippie. Kari didn’t think they were going to have any luck fabric shopping (Mary Jo opined that the tartan wool was too Tricia Nixon and the wheat-colored linen was something a sorority sister would wear), but when Mary Jo spotted the fake fur and the wild paisley, it earned a rapturous Far out.

Not that Kari, like much of her generation, dismissed the whole peace/hippie movement out of hand; no, she had been shaped as a liberal thinker by her Norwegian immigrant parents, North Dakota farmers, who had been instrumental in organizing the Democratic Farmer/Labor Party.

She agreed with the hippies’ antiwar stance but not with their drugs—hated hearing those awful stories about LSD takers jumping out of windows and bright and responsible students all of a sudden dropping out of college to go smoke dope in crash pads.

"You’re not smoking marijuana, are you?" she asked Mary Jo as they had pie and coffee after their fabric search.

The long dangly earrings her niece wore jingled as she laughed.

Well, of course I am, said Mary Jo, who was honest with her aunt in a way she wasn’t with her own mother. "Not heavily—but yeah, I like a good toke now and then."

Unconsciously, Kari shook her head in small, rapid movements. She was often torn when her nieces confided in her—should she tell their parents or, like an attorney, consider their confessions privileged information? It was times like these when she yearned for the wise counsel of her dear husband, Bjorn, dead now for five unbelievably long years. It wasn’t just she who considered his counsel wise; he had been, after all, a district judge, and a more reasoned man she had never met. The only problem that Bjorn Nelson could never solve was why he and Kari could not have children.

Both sets of plumbing, as one doctor had put it, were in fine working order, but after years of trying (trying had been fun and exciting the first couple of years, but when they realized conception might be more of a problem than they thought, their trying took on a sense of game team spirit, then melancholy, and finally desperation) they came to the sad and puzzled conclusion that they were not going to bear children. Then God threw them a reminder that we never know what we think we know, and there was a pregnancy. But it survived only the first two months, and as blood poured out of Kari, she thought all chances of a life with meaning were pouring out too. She was certain of this when, six months later, she suffered another miscarriage.

She truly thought she was living a hell on earth, but in retrospect, she’d take hell any day over what followed.

Passing the adoptive-parents tests a year later, she and Bjorn were given a beautiful week-old baby girl and had her for two blissful days (Kari had known motherhood would be wonderful, but this bliss was hard to imagine) before the hand-wringing woman from the adoption service showed up at the Nelsons’ front door, accompanied by a lawyer, telling them she was awfully sorry, nothing like this had ever happened before, but they had evidence the mother had been coerced into signing the release papers, making them invalid. They had come to take the baby back.

A noise began in Kari’s head, a great roaring, as if she were holding giant conch shells up to her ears, and she entered a zone that was devoid of all feeling; she was sucked into a gray fuzzy hole of nothingness.

Of course they hired a lawyer, but there were two nurses who had overheard the birth mother’s boyfriend threaten her life if she didn’t give up the baby, and even Kari knew that the rightful place for Bettina (named after Kari’s mother) was with her seventeen-year-old mother, who had never wanted to give her up.

In anguish, Kari pleaded with God to let her know what she had done so terribly wrong to have such terribly wrong things happen to her.

Maybe he knows something about me that even I don’t know, she cried. Maybe he’s taking these babies away from me because he knows I’d be a bad mother.

Then He would be a God I couldn’t believe in, said Bjorn, because He wouldn’t know anything.

Bjorn was the reason Kari was able to keep her faith; who but God could have given her a blessing of such magnitude?

But then, just as Kari was thinking she was strong enough to go through the adoption process again, Bjorn died in his sleep at the age of forty-five. She lost her life then too—except people made the mistake of thinking she was still alive. They kept coming over with food, kept coming over to sit with her, to hold her hand, to take her on walks during which she wondered why they didn’t hear the wind whistling right through her. Grief strangled her heart as surely as a blocked artery strangled Bjorn’s, but grief didn’t have the grace to finish off the job.

Her family truly became her life support. Her sister Wanda from Grand Forks came down and stayed with her for the first two months, followed by her sister Anna from Bismarck. Her brother, Anders, and his wife, Sally, who lived in Minneapolis with their three children, were over constantly. They helped her keep alive what was still alive and coax back to life what was dead. This was achieved because of their vigilant care and kindness, and in no small part because of their children, whom they brought with them.

Kari had always been a favorite of her nieces and nephews, and they crawled on her lap, placing their little hands on her face and asking her things the adults were too adult to ask.

Do you hate God for taking Uncle Bjorn away?

Did Uncle Bjorn die because he did something wrong?

I heard people turn blue when they die. How blue was Uncle Bjorn?

"Do you think if maybe we both wished really really really really hard that Uncle Bjorn would come back, he would?"

These questions were a tonic for Kari because, in effect, she was answering questions she herself asked. And because she was a teacher by nature as well as by profession, she demanded that her answers be carefully thought out. Trying to explain to a child things that were unexplainable was like being thrown a life preserver—a leaky one, but one that would keep her afloat for at least a moment.

About a year and a half after Bjorn’s death, she still lived in grief’s house, but the walls weren’t so pressing and the ceiling wasn’t so low and she felt strong enough to resume some of her old aunt duties, hosting her nieces and nephews for long weekends and rainy afternoons occasionally when the parents took adults-only vacations.

Her sister Wanda and her husband, Butch, took a Caribbean cruise, leaving their two battling boys and fussy daughter with Kari, and came back to find their sons the best of friends and their daughter happily eating meat loaf and broccoli.

You’re a miracle worker, Wanda had told Kari, who turned the compliment around, saying, Well, then they’re the miracles I got to work with.

More than half her nieces and nephews were no longer children—in fact, Randy was getting married in the fall and Cynthia was expecting her first baby (Kari had already crocheted a yellow blanket and would have started sewing baby clothes if she’d only known the sex)—but Kari enjoyed them just as much as when they were little and felt a sense of pride in their accomplishments, a pride that was deserved, as her steadfast love and good humor had influenced them all.

But marijuana! she thought now, trying to ease the pesky sleeve to fit the cuff. Would that lead to stronger stuff like LSD or, heaven forbid, morphine? Or was it heroin? She’s ask Slip, she decided, trimming the seam. Slip was much younger and knew about these sorts of things.

SLIP WOULD HAVE BEEN HAPPY to offer what minimal knowledge she had on the subject of drugs (she and Jerry had tried marijuana at a Pete Seeger concert, accepting the passed joint like old hands, but Slip’s inexperience was evident after her first inhale, when she coughed so hard she thought her brain might hemorrhage). It certainly would have been a far lighter conversation than the long-distance one she was having now with her younger brother.

Fred, you can’t enlist—that’s insane! You can get a college deferment! Remember how happy you were to get into Penn State? Come on, Fred, finish college, and if the war’s still going on, then you can think of enlisting.

She heard her younger brother’s easy laughter and then a thunk.

Sorry, Slip, I’m making a sandwich and I dropped the phone. What were you saying?

You know what I was saying, said Slip. She tugged at the towel she had wrapped herself in when the phone rang, interrupting her shower. You cannot be so stupid as to want to enlist in the army.

Who said anything about the army? I’m thinking about the marines.

"Oh, Fred, breathed Slip with relief. I don’t find that funny at all."

You shouldn’t. It’s not a joke.

In the thick, staticky silence that followed, Slip realized it wasn’t.

Fred, please. It’s a stupid war. It’s not worth it.

It’s worth it to Miles Coons and Todd Hagstrom, my two best friends in the world.

But Fred, you said Todd and Miles were drafted! They wouldn’t have gone unless they were forced!

So I shouldn’t go just because I don’t have to?

Exactly!

Fred sighed. Slip, not everyone’s a big liberal peacemonger like you.

"Peacemonger? Fred, are you on something? Tell me you’re having a bad trip or something, please."

I feel the need to serve my country, said Fred crisply.

Well, serve it! Join the Peace Corps or VISTA or—

Talk to you later, Slip.

Hearing a click and dial tone, Slip hung up, trembling. He couldn’t be serious. She looked up and startled, saw her reflection in the dresser mirror. Inside, Slip McMahon was a big, bold woman, an Amazon who rumbled through life like a Sherman tank. So who was this freckled little thing with carrot-colored hair and a twelve-year-old’s body, shivering under the terry-cloth sarong of a damp towel? As she often did, when seeing her mirrored self, she stuck out her tongue.

THE TEMPERATURE HAD LIFTED SLIGHTLY that afternoon, but then it began to do what everyone, by late March, was thoroughly sick of: it began to snow. And snow and snow and snow.

Faith, making the twins’ supper, was in the mood to mash more than her children’s potatoes and carrots. Watching the swirling snow through the kitchen window, she thought how nothing would give her more pleasure than pulverizing her husband’s face. What was he thinking, taking her to this twilight zone where winters never ended? She banged the spoon against the saucepan, startling Beau, who yelped, and delighting Bonnie, who banged her own spoon against the metal tray of her high chair, shouting, Yang, yang, yang!

It didn’t take Beau long to get over his fright, and soon he was joining his sister in creating an earsplitting, erratic percussion that put the h in headache, as far as Faith was concerned. She tried to distract them, humor them, and, stupidly, to reason with them, but they were as wild and frenzied as tribal drummers announcing war.

Finally, she had no recourse but to take their spoons away—which solved one problem but created another when she served their food. How were they to eat mashed potatoes and carrots with no spoons? Reluctantly she went to the sink to retrieve them, but before she’d rinsed them off she felt a warm splat on one of her stockinged feet, heard a delighted giggle, and suddenly was dodging an arsenal of vaguely orange, mushy cannonballs, launched by her fiendish twins.

She stood at the sink, her heart racing, her hands clamped around the sink edge, thinking how she could so easily march over to those bratty little monsters and slap them from here to Sunday.

Instead, like a drill sergeant advising slow-learning privates, she ordered, You will stop that now! and the raised decibel level of her voice so startled the twins that they clutched their sticky little hands and began to cry.

Time then took on a slow-motion quality, and after Faith got them bathed and into bed, it seemed she had aged several years.

Sighing with weariness, she poured herself a highball and selected a book from the stack she’d gotten at the library. Settling on the couch, under the cashmere throw Wade had given her the day the temperature had plunged to minus forty-two degrees, she felt the familiar mixture of calm and anticipation.

It didn’t matter that a storm raged outside, that her husband wouldn’t be back until Friday, and that she came awfully close to inflicting bodily harm on her twins at the peak of their vegetable bombardment. What mattered was that for a few hours she could forget her world and enter someone else’s.

Books were Faith’s easiest friends. They demanded nothing from her but her attention.

She opened the cover and ran her hand over the page, enjoying the paper’s smooth, cool texture under her hand.

Chapter One. How many times in her life had those two words invited her to go to a different place, a better place than the one she lived in?

She read the words again before plunging into the first paragraph, and then the lights went out.

Faith’s heart clenched. Was there a prowler in the basement messing with the fuse box? Should she run upstairs and get her babies or call the police?

Oh, Wade, she thought, do I have time to get your pistol?

Her heart beating in triple time, she eased herself off the couch, but if stealth was her objective, the edge of the coffee table foiled her.

Ouch! she hissed as pain shot down her shin. She clamped her hand over her mouth, not wanting to give the intruder/murderer/rapist any more clues as to her whereabouts.

She slunk across the living room toward the staircase but stopped at the large picture window, parting the curtain ever so slightly to take note of whatever getaway car might be waiting.

Through the falling snow, she could see that there was no dark sedan occupied by a lookout man, but what thrilled Faith even more was the absence of lights throughout the entire neighborhood. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock, and she knew that everyone couldn’t have mutually agreed to go to bed so early.

The power’s out! she whispered, and relief surged through her so strongly that for a moment she thought she had wet her pants. She pulled the drapes open and then sat back primly on the couch, as if she were waiting for instructions to begin a test. The grandfather clock that the previous homeowners had left behind (it kept erratic time at best) ticked its sibilant ticks. Faith wondered if she should run upstairs and check on the babies—but then the power outage wouldn’t have affected them, seeing as they’d been sleeping in the dark anyway.

Faith shut her eyes and dozed for a few minutes—it had been a long day and she was tired—but she was startled awake by questions. What would she do if the power stayed out all night? Would she and the twins freeze? What about all the food in the refrigerator—would it spoil? Would the hot water heater go out? She got up, determined to find a flashlight and investigate whatever there was to investigate.

Through the picture window, she saw movement in the dark snowy night. Pressing her nose to the glass, Faith saw that more than the power was out—so were several neighborhood kids. She could barely see them, let alone identify them, but, squinting into the blurred darkness, she was able to make out three forms the size of teenagers, although the little one was probably the industrious Hammond girl, who had presented Faith with a card that read, Baby-sitter for Hire—Cheap Rates, Good Service. Faith had accepted the card but never took the girl up on her offer—no eleven-year-old, no matter how entrepreneurial, was going to watch her precious babies.

Another, taller one joined them, and the advent of a fourth person seemed to inspire the group to break into teams and begin pitching snowballs at each other. One of these snowballs—hurled by the Hammond girl, Faith was sure—smashed into the very window she was looking out of.

She gasped. Normally she might let a little teenage vandalism slide, but because she was at the end of her rope—trapped without power in the middle of Antarctica with no husband and babies who might be double the pleasure but could also be double the trouble—she decided to give those insolent Yankee teenagers a lecture on manners, or at least proper aim.

Groping her way to the closet, she grabbed her winter coat and rushed out the front door. Pulling on her gloves, she marched down the front sidewalk (which had been shoveled but now sported over three inches of new snow) and to the circular turn-around at the end of the cul-de-sac where the young vandals cavorted. Only they weren’t young vandals. They were her neighbors, the two women she’d watched earlier that day and two others Faith saw at various times leaving or entering their homes.

Oh, good, you’ve come out to play! said the statuesque dark-haired woman from the unkempt colonial.

Not really, I—

Sorry about your window, said the slight woman Faith had mistaken for the eleven-year-old baby-sitter. I was aiming for Kari, but she ducked.

I’m surprised you didn’t break it, said the older woman, turning to Faith. She’s got an arm like Sandy Koufax.

You probably think we’re a bunch of nuts, having a snowball fight in the dark. The tall brunette scooped up some snow and began packing it into a ball. But it sure beats being trapped inside with two boys who wouldn’t know the meaning of brotherly love if you hit them over the head with it.

I was vacuuming, said the fourth woman, whose face was so lovely Faith nearly gasped when she saw it. I thought I’d blown a fuse or something—but I wasn’t about to go down to the basement myself and check! She blinked, dislodging a snowflake from her long eyelashes. It’s not that I’m afraid of the dark, she said, smiling shyly at Faith. I’d just rather not be in it alone. She flashed a shiny white smile. By the way, I’m Merit. I know you’ve already met Kari and Slip—

Ah. Slip, thought Faith. Riddle solved.

And I’m Audrey, said the tall woman, offering a mittened hand to shake, as in Meadows.

Or Hepburn, offered Faith.

If you insist, said Audrey, batting her eyelashes.

I’m ashamed we haven’t made more of an effort to get to know you, but it’s been so cold this winter. Kari nodded at the golden retriever leaping through the snow. That’s Flicka. She said if I didn’t start walking her again, she was going to report me to the SPCA.

People go a little crazy when they’re snowbound, stage-whispered Slip as she spun a gloved finger near her temple. Not only do they talk to their animals, they start thinking the animals talk back.

At least I don’t threaten poor salesmen who are only trying to make a living, said Kari.

I had just put on Joe’s snowsuit when I realized he had a dirty diaper, Slip explained, laughing. It was hardly the time to be called on by the Fuller Brush man. She looped her arm through Faith’s. So, what do you say? Join us in a little winter warfare?

Well, said Faith, not exactly sure what winter warfare was, I left my babies sleeping. . . .

Then they’re fine! said Audrey, taking her other arm, and for the first time in her life, Faith joined in a snowball fight.

LAUGHING AND SHRIEKING, they half slid, half tumbled down the moonlit hill to the creek basin to continue their battle, Flicka looking more like a big rabbit than a dog as she bounded after them. Surrounded by a white swirl, Faith was exhilarated. The snow, whose appearance had earlier depressed her so, now looked enchanted, filling the night sky with movement, frosting the tree branches that stretched over the creek, settling on pine boughs and whitewashing the layer of old snow that covered the ground.

It didn’t take her long to learn the maneuvers—scoop, pack, and throw—and she laughed maniacally when her snowball hit someone or a snowball hit her.

Faith! shouted Audrey, who’d paired off as her partner. Incoming! Incoming!

Faith ducked behind a giant oak tree, but not before a snowball exploded on her shoulder.

As she bent to mold her own munitions, another snowball hit her on the back. She packed a handful of snow and threw blindly, repeated the process, then repeated it again. It was the first time Faith had ever played in the snow (once in Oklahoma Faith had been in an ice storm, but what little snow she had seen never amounted to anything), and to do so at night was an experience that delighted her senses, that made her feel like a kid because she was doing something so strange and new. Snow clotted under her collar and the cuffs of her sleeves, and each breath she took seared her lungs with cold, but when a torrent of snowballs pummeled her, she laughed as if she were being mercilessly tickled.

She wiped her dripping nose with the side of her mittened hand and threw a snowball at the older woman.

Uncle! said Kari, holding up her arms. I surrender!

Good, said Audrey. I’m freezing my patootie off.

Oh, please, gasped Faith, let’s stay out a little longer.

Slip laughed. "We