Laelia’s father steered her across the room. He held champagne in the kind of glass that is supposed to look like Marie Antoinette’s breast, and as he walked, the golden liquid kept sloshing over the edge. “Paul, this is my daughter, Laelia. Laelia, my colleague, Dr. Gibson.” He said. “Laelia just got into Columbia. She dances.” Laelia smiled modestly. “Dr. Gibson” – he paused for effect – “is an actor.” Her dad turned, champagne splashing, and walked away. He always introduced people well.



“Pleased to meet you.” Dr. Gibson had dimples and a tiny southern accent.



“Nice to meet you.” Maybe thirty-five, Laelia guessed. He held himself like an actor, easy posture and a boyish face with a big, ingenious smile. They smiled at each other for a moment.



“Congratulations on Columbia. Do you know what you want to study?”



“Not for sure, but I think I’m going to be pre-med. What kind of doctor are you?”



“Radiation oncology.” Great dimples. “Your dad’s my boss.”



“And you act?”



“Your dad’s kidding. In college.”



She swayed a little to avoid a girl carrying a tray and he stepped closer and put his hand out to keep her from falling. “What kinds of things?”



“Different stuff. *Equus*. A lot of Shakespeare.” Laelia moved toward him again to let the girl pass. “The most fun production I was in was *Twelfth Night*. I liked comedy. What kind of dance are you interested in?” He had nice eyes. Gray.  She looked down and then up again.



“Ballet. Or that’s what I do. But I’m interested in everything.”



“Can I get you some champagne?”



This was the first year her mom let her come to her dad’s New Year’s party, which, according to her dad’s dumb girlfriend, was always a big deal. More people kept coming in, handing her father’s girlfriend their coats, shaking hands, kissing on the cheek, and adding their voices to the murmuring crowd. Laelia had met two doctors, an anthropologist, and now Paul. She smiled into her glass. He was totally hitting on her. She was having a ball.



Laelia always spent the last week of Christmas break in New York City. Her dad took her to late lunches at fancy restaurants, and shopping, and to the ballet. This year there was the Chaconne she wanted to see, and something by Twyla Tharp. And he loved taking her shopping, waiting outside dressing rooms, rolling his eyes. It was a little ritual. Laelia wore black jeans and heels and a sequined gray tunic top her dad had bought her, on her advice, for Christmas. The sequins were tiny, smaller than normal sequins, and arrayed in diagonal lines. It was a little casual, but she was glad she wasn’t overdressed. And she liked the way she looked in heels. Heels and jeans made her look older. Her face, in contrast, looked very young. She wore no makeup because she liked the effect.



The apartment was built to entertain.  People were pressing in on all sides, but the room didn’t feel crowded. The living room was large and bare, just two sleek couches on a wood floor. And house plants. Her dad liked plants. There were orchids, and a few trees in baskets. The ceilings were high, and the whole west side of the apartment was one big window looking out over the river. It was dark outside, and it was very bright in the living room, and the window became a huge mirror.



“Grace, this is my daughter, Laelia. Laelia, this is our chief surgeon and very dear friend, Dr. Palmer. Laelia just got in early to Columbia.” Laelia smiled modestly. “Columbia is Grace’s Alma Mater.” Grace was wearing a black shift that clasped at the waist with heavy heels and heavy eyeliner. You have to be post-menopausal to wear that much makeup. She did it well.



“Well, Congratulations! And you go to school in New York?” She had a low voice for a woman.



“I live with my mother in Boston, actually. I go to school there.”



“I grew up in Boston! What school?”



“Concord Academy.”



“No!”



Laelia’s wasn’t coed until the seventies, probably after Grace’s time. There were still more girls than boys. Laelia didn’t feel especially close to them. The girls at school, the older, artsy set with whom she had naturally fallen in, graduated last year. She knew a lot of ballerinas too, but they were, well, dumb. Dumb, she thought, but weirdly compelling, throwing their bodies around like dice, like bags of fertilizer on suburban lawns. The girls in her classes knew Laelia was a virgin, but in the locker room they afforded her a perverse kind of respect. They admired her. Basically they were nice girls.



Her mom liked the ballerinas. She thought Laelia should have more friends. But she also kept warning her not to slack off just because she had gotten into college, which was insane. Laelia always did well in school. Laelia had done so well on her Latin final that Mr. Arnold gave her a copy of the Aeneid with his annotations in the margins. An early Christmas present, he said. Her mom was irritable. She just seemed exhausted all the time.



“Did you ever have Mr. Arnold?”



“Oh my god,” Grace said, blinking her made up eyes. “Yes. He taught me Latin. He was ancient even then.”



This was the first time her mom had let her drive down alone. Don’t speed. Don’t talk on your cell phone. Call me if you get lost. Her mother was more nervous than her father. She was probably smarter, actually, but her dad was lucky. She was a nurse, and he was a doctor. She had gray hair; he had a new girlfriend. Children liked him. Dogs liked him. He had a green thumb. Laelia drove herself every day from Brookline to Concord for school and then downtown for ballet. She drove stick, clutch out gas in, like a dance, and she was good at it. She drove her mom’s old Saab. She left at seven the day after Christmas — she was an early riser — and drove west through Massachusetts. She stopped once for gas in Connecticut and bought herself a Diet Coke. She drank it in the dirty snow next to the pump, feeling competent and alone.



The caterers were cleaning up in the kitchen, which was almost as crowded as the living room. Guests were waiting in line for the bathroom. Her father and his dumb girlfriend were making out. She was wearing an awful dress, cranberry red. He was leaning against the island and she was standing in front of him, and he was holding her to him and nibbling on her ear. Laelia didn’t think you should kiss ears in public. On principle. Laelia was next. No one ever used this kitchen to cook. She tried to make cookies once, for her father, not for herself, and she couldn’t find a cookie sheet. A bald man left the bathroom rubbing the top of his head.



There were three white orchids on the marble counter. The shower didn’t have a shower curtain. Her dad had lived here for six years. How could you shower every day without a shower curtain? She checked her outfit in the front and the back. There were three mirrors set up around the sink at angles, so you could see all the way around. Her thong, which she worried about, was not peeking out.



She had had two glasses of champagne and a spinach canapé. Three hundred calories, probably. There are a hundred and twenty-five calories in a glass of champagne, something like that. There was Listerine. Throwing up was only gross if someone else saw.



Dr. Gibson sat down next to Laelia on the far couch.



“How are you doing?”



“Good, you?”



“Good.”



Just outside, two other couples were leaning over an enormous flower, amaryllis maybe, arguing about someone named James. Laelia could hear her father laughing in the kitchen.



“So are you going to dance in college?”



“I hope so, yeah.” He wore a white button-down with rolled-up sleeves. He was tan. “Barnard has a dance program. I’d like to keep taking classes there.”



“What’s your favorite ballet?” She laughed. He was teasing. He was leaning his head back against the wall.



“Favorite that I’ve done or favorite that I’ve seen?”



“Both.”



“The most fun thing I’ve been in was probably a hip hop workshop. Don’t laugh. Instead of having a performance we went to a club at the end. They had to sneak me in.”



“How old are you?”



“Eighteen.”



“You’re poised for eighteen.” Laelia was usually good at accepting compliments, but she didn’t know what to say. She shrugged.



“What’s your favorite thing you’ve seen?”



She took a deep breath. She had a good answer. “*Pierrot Lunaire*. It’s this atonal Schoenberg piece, have you ever heard it? It’s a German translation of French poems set to music.” He shook his head but raised his eyebrows. He was interested. “Anyway, there are twenty-one poems, and this guy Ratmansky did twenty-one little ballets. They’re sad and sort of toy-like. It’s really cool. I saw it with my dad last Christmas.” She shrugged again. She was enough shorter than Dr. Gibson that she had to look up. “Where did you say you were from, Dr. Gibson?”



“Washington. Virginia.” He smiled down, “Paul.”



Laelia wondered if he knew he was flirting. She couldn’t tell. He kept holding her eye a second too long. Maybe he flirted with everybody. Or maybe he was doing it on purpose. She was poised.



“Ten.” Some people started counting down. “Nine.” Two buttons of his shirt were open at the collar. “Eight.” He looked professional and clean. He was tan and blond with lots of gold hair on his arm. “Seven.” She wondered if he thought they might. “Six.” She bet she probably could. “Five.” She bet it was like driving stick. Takes confidence. “Four.” She bet she could. “Three.” She stared at him. He had nice dimples. A boyish face. And nice eyes.  “Two.” What long lashes. “Happy New Year!”



In Latin class, Mr. Arnold once told Laelia that she was the namesake of a Vestal Virgin. She said, “I was named for a flower.”



People had started leaving. Someone put on Benny Goodman and a few couples danced in the living room. The sounds of peoples’ voices had changed. Earlier the clamor sounded bright, and now the crowd made more of a murmur. Everyone was sloshed. Her dad was sitting down, and Laelia knew that meant the party would be over soon. His girlfriend was handing people their coats.



Laelia sipped from her fourth glass of champagne. She was standing by Paul. They were standing in the corner by the kitchen, over the amaryllis flower. They had made friends. He kept smiling at her, with his dimples and his big ingenious smile, like the two of them were in on a joke. She kept *Mona Lisa*-ing back at him. Look sexy. Look bemused. She was charming. She was charmed. He wore a tiny trace of cologne.



“Want to dance?” She asked. He offered his hand. This is not so improbable, she thought. I’m interesting. I’m poised.



When you dance with a partner, the man has to know what to do. One, two, back step. There you go. Paul knew how to lead. He indicated direction with pressure on her hip. The girl doesn’t turn on her own. Turn her. Start the spin with your arms. Toss her away from you, spin, and catch. He knew how to do it. He knew how to catch her, too. Some of the other couples had stopped to watch Paul and Laelia. Her heels made her just tall enough for this. She came up to his chin. He was not too tall. He dipped her. Someone clapped. Paul laughed.



“You’re good,” he said.



“You’re good,” she said.



She let him move her across the room and tried to guess what he was thinking. She moved closer as they moved out of what was left of the crowd. She stared at him hard, so he would know that she was staring on purpose. They were standing near the kitchen when the song ended. Paul held onto her for a second, then he bowed.



“Come with me to get a glass of water,” Laelia said. She pulled his hand — she was still holding his hand — to show that he should follow.



No one was in the kitchen. The caterers had gone. She poured herself a glass of water and drank it, then poured him one in the same glass. She jumped up and back onto the black counter next to the sink. She had seen someone do this in a movie once. When he handed her the cup, he moved forward, and she pulled him forward, and, hands on his shoulders, she kissed him on the mouth, and he didn’t pull away. Laelia hopped off the counter and pulled his hand again. There were two doors to the kitchen, one to the living room, and one to the hallway with the bathroom and bedrooms, and if they went into her bedroom no one would see.



“Do you want to go somewhere?” He asked, when he saw where she was leading. He had his arm around her waist. They stopped and whispered in the hall.



“Do you live far away?”



“In Brooklyn.”



“My dad’s about to pass out. It’s okay”







Close the bedroom door. Stand on your tiptoes and kiss him. Let him spin you. Giggle and stand on point. Kiss him again. Reach for the hem of your shirt. Laelia had a ballerina’s body, and she never wore a bra. The watery top came off and trickled onto the floor. Paul reached for her hips. His hands were warm. His lips were touching her ear.



“Do you have a…?” he asked.



She shook her head. “We can—I won’t—.”



“I can think of other things.”



“It’s ok, I haven’t had my period since September.”



“We can—” he stared at her stomach, then her ribs, then he ran his hands up and down her arms and shoulders.



“Are you okay?”



“I’m fine.”



“Maybe we…You’re a beautiful girl.”



Laelia stood up straighter. Her posture was very good. She was not embarrassed.



“Maybe we…”



He should be embarrassed. She didn’t put her shirt back on. She stared at him in the eye.



“I can count your ribs.”







God, the kitchen smelled. Everyone had gone.



Laelia put her hand on her dad’s back. He was gripping the black countertop. There was vomit in the sink, along with cocktail sauce and shrimp tails and a leftover tray of spinach canapés. All of the muscles in his stomach and esophagus were reversing at once and wrenched what was left of the spinach and champagne up and out into the sink. Like revving an engine in neutral. All wrong. His face contorted again, and his body heaved, but a little spinachy mucus was all he brought up. He coughed and spat. “That’s good,” she said, “Shh, shh.”



Paul had to pass through the kitchen to get to the living room to get to the door. He was trying not to look at her, but she was staring at him. And then the front door closed. He was gone.



Her father had vomit all down his stomach. She poured him a glass of water and watched him drink. A pink flower behind the sink had come untied from its stake. She tied it up again. “Come on. There you go.” She led him toward his bedroom.



“I’m fine,” he said, dazed. “Did you have a good night?”



She was taking off his shirt. “I had a good night. Shh.  Shhh.”



Laelia left clothes in a heap on the bathroom floor. She ran her hand over the gash on her shin. She would cry in showers, if she were the kind of girl who cried. She sat in the bottom of the bathtub, hot water streaming down the sides and onto the tiled floor, hot water streaming across her back, and drew her knees to her chest. She wasn’t that kind of girl. She folded and unfolded her limbs. With her left hand she counted the ribs on her right side, and with her right hand, she counted the ones on her left.

Something is floating in the pool, the Missus realizes on Tuesday, as she sips the coffee Concepción always brews for her when she starts work. (Fresh coffee is not worth the shame of having to ask for it brewed around noon.) She can’t make out the shape from the kitchen window, but a quick inspection reveals it to be a dead fawn, lying on its side, its front hooves idly playing in the jet of a water filter. “It would be good if they could pick it up before my husband comes home,” she tells Concepción. But when Concepción calls Animal Control, the rude voice that answers, put off by an accent she can’t identify, tells her to call back in the afternoon when a Spanish-speaking operator will be on duty, and so Concepción decides to wash every single one of his shirts instead and leaves the deer in the capable hands of God.



She winds her way through the big house, kneeling periodically to gather clothes strewn in the hallways and across the floors of rooms. Seen from above, her little figure could be that of a penitent monk as he winds his way through a cloister, stopping periodically to touch the ground and mumble a few words of self-abnegation. It’s difficult to keep track of what she has and hasn’t done, in this house. There are so many rooms, and when the husband isn’t home—which is most weekdays and even some weekends at this point—the Missus somehow manages to spread her waking and sleeping hours, her dressing, eating, and undressing, evenly throughout the rooms, so that no room is ever unused. Concepción doubts she’d get a reprimand if she missed one. But her conscience won’t permit her to be like her friend Gloria, who sometimes runs the same load of laundry three times to look busy, and spends most of her workday standing in the kitchen watching soap operas and adding hot water to the cubes of instant mocha that she brings from home.



Each room is very, very elaborately decorated, but Concepción, with her girlhood spent in QuezÓn, can’t see a meaningful difference between the Baroque Revival moldings in the third guest bedroom and the rococo panelling in the ground-floor study. She does have a special fondness for the delicate curves in the gleaming wallpaper of the Art Nouveau room, although she couldn’t tell you why. Today there is a mess in what she doesn’t know is the Victorian room. The sheets on the wrought-iron Murphy bed are in disarray, and a bottle of Pastek that had been sitting open on the floor has been overturned. The whitish, viscous substance oozes across the floor in a two-foot-long slick.



 Only a professional-grade solvent, or paint thinner, will remove the Pastek from the floor, but Concepción can’t drive and doesn’t want to walk to the hardware store in the midday heat. Still, feeling compelled to do something, she fills a bucket with wood soap and water and scrubs meditatively at the stain for the next hour. She knows her efforts will not be rewarded; this is not the first time she’s had to clean up a spilled bottle of this paste. The new wallpaper—an ugly paper, she thinks, imported from a heritage manufacturer in Britain, printed with big fat cabbage roses spilling across a pink and green background—still smells like the store-room and the packages it was shipped in. The shadows of branches and the early afternoon light play across it, and out the window Concepción can see the Missus sitting by the pool, staring out across the lawn and drinking something out of her coffee mug with a straw, while the deer bobs gently in the pool next to her.



Although Concepción is paid a good bit more than Gloria, and probably much more than the other women in her carpool, she sometimes daydreams about leaving this job because the house is so lonely during the day. Other women have houses with children, sometimes little children who don’t go to school yet and need to be fed and bathed. She has a green card, is young and pretty, and could probably find other work. She might even be able to marry an American. The reason she stays is something obscure relating to the Missus. There is something about her mania for decorating that makes Concepción uneasy, and she wonders if the poor woman can’t have children.



If Concepción had the consciousness to ask the right questions, she might also ask why her employer isn’t working, despite a prestigious Ph.D. that hangs on the wall of the third-floor study next to an equally prestigious B.A. When the Missus is in a black mood, she likes to berate herself by telling herself she’s lazy. (She esteems herself too highly to call herself stupid.) The half-written manuscript of her first and last monograph has been locked in her 19th-century Shaker writing desk since she bought it online six months ago. When she isn’t torturing herself by thinking up possible extensions of the book’s argument—which are always of ambiguous value and which she therefore never makes—she puts her art history background to use. She has planned the interior décor of her house, sourced materials from American and European antique dealers, rearranged and altered furniture, and generally wasted time. She realizes sometimes, with a laugh, that she is worse than one of the future wives she used to make fun of in college.



One came to her senior tutorial and announced, “My boyfriend and I are engaged. We leave for Paris on Friday.” Another, who used to wear her right ring finger the largest emerald the Missus has ever seen on, never spoke but always spent the whole two hours braiding and rebraiding her long golden hair. On warm days these long-legged beauties spilled across the portico and steps of the department’s Italianate building, swapping sticks of gum, painting their nails, and sunning themselves. The professors were grumpy old men with hair coming out of their ears. She wrote a thesis subtly insinuating that one of the most prominent of them was sexist and racist and was awarded *summa cum laude*. When she went to New York for her Ph.D., she fell in love with a very tall and broad-shouldered young associate who swore and talked very loudly and had a habit in conversation of slapping nearby surfaces for emphasis. They saw each other on weekends and went for walks in Prospect Park and then to the bar next to her building to get drunk. In her second year, after each was deeply in the other’s confidence, he told her that he had been seeing a dancer—a man—behind his wife’s back, and that, in celebration of their first anniversary, they were going to look at summer shares in Montauk together. When, six months later, she told him she was suspending her studies to marry and move to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., he asked her to explain herself. When she wouldn’t, he got angry and called her a mercenary. You think you’re so fucking clever, he told her, but if you leave one day you’ll find yourself knee-deep in shitty diapers and you’ll be so deeply fucked that you’ll wish you were dead. She called him a coward, a fag, and a misogynist loud enough for the people in the adjacent offices to hear her.



Their friendship—probably the deepest she has ever had—was an unfortunate mistake and she doesn’t like to think about it. Most days, while she sits by the pool drinking her coffee, she remembers all of the tricks (intellectual and social) that she learned in her six years in higher education. She thinks about the apartment she shared with three other female grad students, all of whom were starved for sexual attention and coped with it by dieting perpetually, denying themselves food so they could forget they were being denied the other thing. She used to pick up men sometimes at the bar next to her building and take them to her room. When they came to the next day they would see the shelves full of books with names like *Representation and Suppression *and* WHO SPEAKS?* and the nude photographs of local women—found at her neighborhood flea market—that she had pasted above her bed. More than one of them pulled up his pants and snuck out of the room as quietly as he could. She would have a good laugh later recounting her night to the roommates, who were always nonplussed by the vulgarity she employed but secretly fiercely jealous and also a little cranky from hunger.



Concepción is more or less the only woman she has had regular contact with in her two years since moving to Potomac. The Missus likes to tease her by asking her about her men, and Concepción evades her by blushing and acting as if she doesn’t completely understand the question, even though the Missus knows she didn’t use an interpreter when she was interviewing for her green card and has been picked up several times in the afternoon by a boy in a pickup truck.



 



Later that summer, when Concepción visits her family in the Philippines, she will be kidnapped along with an aunt when they are walking in the street in Lucena City. The kidnappers are three day laborers, one of whom has a pregnant wife and one of whom wants to replace his Geo van (where they will be held until nightfall) with a flashy yellow sports car. As the kidnappers hustle them down to the humid basement where they will pass the final 36 hours of their captivity, Concepción slips on the stairs and loses the baby she has been carrying for the past ten weeks. She won’t have known she is pregnant, and as a small trickle of blood collects at the hem of her skirt, she will only fret for herself and for the green silk dress she has borrowed from the Missus without asking. After her extended family has scraped together the money for the ransom and the kidnappers have delivered her back to the two-story cinderblock building where they live, she will tear the rich garment to shreds in a fit of anger, supposing it the reason that the kidnappers plucked her and her aunt off the street.



Was it the pills she is using? They’re an herbal fertility aid that you can find in drugstores in the Philippines. The married women in her family have taken them for decades. Before that, they would make a tea from the same plants. Concepción isn’t married, at least not yet, but she would like to have a baby. Some mornings, when she’s the only one awake in the house, and she looks out the kitchen window to see the lawn with its pool so empty, and there isn’t a sound to be heard and no one who could possibly observe her, she crushes up one of these pills to slip into the Missus’s morning coffee, where it dissolves over the hours, its peculiar herbal bitterness dissolving into the bitterness of the coffee, and by the time the Missus finally rouses herself and comes down to the kitchen, she could not possibly suspect that the mug she holds contains a sweet loam, a sprinkling of tropical soil.



 



On Tuesday night, Concepción dreams that she is sitting cross-legged in a field as the fawn decomposes in her lap. When she comes to work the next morning, it is gone. The Missus has brewed her own coffee. There’s a mess of grounds scattered across the countertop, but Concepción feels obscurely proud of her anyway. She puts some pretzels on a plate, and cuts up some nice cheese to go with it, and brings it down to the pool, where the Missus reclines in a deck chair in her pink robe and sunglasses reading *Architectural Digest*.



“Good morning, mam. Did the town come and pick it up?”



“I called Animal Control first thing in the morning,” says the Missus.



“I’m sorry, mam. I called them yesterday when it happened!”



“Oh, they had a record of your call,” says the Missus. “You have nothing to apologize for—they were rude to you. Someone will be calling for you around 11, go ahead and pick up the phone yourself.”



“Thank you, mam! I brought you some food, mam. It’s early. You never eat breakfast because you always wake up at lunch time!” In Concepción’s warm throat there is a rising feeling of devotion to this funny woman-child who treats the work of making her home like a game but always looks so horribly sad.



While she is waiting, she sees the Missus take off her sunglasses and then stand up and slide off her bathrobe. She is wearing a floppy pink bikini that can barely cover the jiggling of her firm little breasts. A deep voice calls her name. She squints up at the third floor of the house and waves slowly, broadly, as if she’s waving at a passenger on the deck of a departing ship.



Later that night, when the Missus searches frantically in the chest of drawers in her bathroom for the diaphragm that her husband doesn’t know she wears, it will be rattling around the floor of Gloria’s car in its pink plastic case. They are coming back from a dance in Virgina along MacArthur Boulevard in Gloria’s RAV4. Concepción reclines against the floral neoprene seat cover and watches the passing day laborers fish in the polluted waters of the Potomac. They do it at night with flashlights so the police won’t see them.



The diaphragm is wet and floppy like a rubber jellyfish, and this makes her think of an old fertility ritual that her grandmother once explained to her. When they get to the Chain Bridge she tells Gloria to pull over. They get out of the car and walk partway across the bridge. “What’s that?” Gloria asks. Concepción opens the pink case to show her the glistening dome. “It’s a giant condom!”



“It’s for women, you put it into your vagina and it seals it up so the sperm can’t get in.”



Gloria makes a vulgar joke and they laugh. “Where did you get it?”



A secret smile spreads across Concepción’s face and she doesn’t answer Gloria’s question. Instead she hurls the diaphragm, case and all, into the river. It bobs on the surface for a moment, propelled by the surf hitting its concavity, and is swept downstream onto the waiting hooks of the fishermen.

Sitting on a ledge,



observing the landscape



below, she admires



the proportional



beauty



 



 



of the sycamores,



spires, and greens,



but the air smells ornery,



and she is distracted



by a vibration.



 



 



She wants to wash



her hands but cannot.



All things might



change but do not.



Plagued by uneasy thoughts,



 



 



she wishes she’d



taken the drugs.



It’s as if her head were



partially blown off.



Who will find her?



 



 



The view across



the valley reveals



an electrical storm coming in,



squeezing the clouds,



tearing them asunder.



 



 



Long ago,



her parents nuzzled her,



murmuring, My love,



but now her eyes



are salt-choked,



 



 



and a fragrance



blows from the river,



as daylight topples over,



darkness coming



suddenly in the North.