Yet for every conceivable holiday--from Easter lamb to Christmas ham--our tin-car car crunches up the drive to the Whitbread estate, which lures me in some ways and yet always saps me dry. This isn't meant to sound peevish, for the Whitbreads are never not nice. But from the second I haul my bag up the curved stair, the place drains me of force like a battery going rust. Maybe it's all the fine wines I take in. Of those many visits, I remember absolutely nil. Beyond sitting at a table while plates appear and get swept away, I can't recount one damn thing we did.

I thought you wanted that party we're having, he says, with your sister coming for a week.

This party--our first--was long negotiated. He's noting the traffic to and from the airport, the hours of writing he'll lose. Should I offer to cancel the party in order to be picked up? When he hangs up, I feel confident that I'll see him at the gate.

Frogs were keeping time in air drenched with honeysuckle.

[...] And so begins what I see as his slow fade from me. We talk less and less, and since we both grew up in houses schooled to letting people vaporize into their own internal deserts with alacrity, we each let the other get smaller.

[...] I tell the husband I've got it because it ticks another plus sign in my column in this game of shit-eating I have composed my marriage to be. Whoever eats the biggest shit sandwich wins, and I'm playing to justify the fact that I'd rather drink than love.

[...] My longed-for circle of family is choking me. The silk bow ties on my cheap business blouses--that middle-class disguise I'd wished for--are choking me. The good family name for my son is a strangle, since it forces me to drive with a restless kid hours in murderous traffic to dine with polite people who never, not in decades, stop being strangers. [...]

[...] I hold my liquor enough to hear--from the mouths of poets--work I'm itching to read, books I can vanish down into from my grind. The night is a burst of sea spray washed across my face, tangible evidence of a fresh existence only slightly out of reach.

[...] The room is swirling with our invectives when--in the doorway--there stands Dev in his three-year-old body. He's naked and gap-mouthed. All the raging that swirls around us arrests into violent stasis. The fury in the room dispels itself like smoke siphoned up with a hose.

The door opens a crack, and in the spilled, triangular glow, a tall kid wearing a red bandana over his streaming brown hair slips out. He stops six feet away and bends slightly forward--almost a butler's bow--saying, Excuse me, Miss Karr. Mind if I join you?

Who is he? With his formal demeanor and gold granny glasses, he could be a student--some Ivy League suck-up.

Join away, I say, adding as I flash my wedding ring, I'm a miz.

My goodness garcious, ma'am, he says, those are some seriously blinding stones you're flaunting. We met before . . .

And we had. David was a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in philosophy I'd once been introduced to at the back of a reading by mutual pals. Some kind of genius, David's meant to be, though his red bandana is the flag of a gangster or biker, ditto the unlaced Timberland work boots.

I ask him how long he's been coming, and he says not hardly any time, and I say it's my first go, and he asks me if I get it, and I say if I got it, I wouldn't be out here smoking. He says same with him, adding while he drank a lot, he mostly did marijuana, which can't be so bad because it's natural.

I say--cleverly, I think--Strychnine's natural.

[...] After you, Miz Karr.

It brings me up short--his outlaw wardrobe paired with the obsequious ma'am thing--and I say testily, Are you fucking with me?

No ma'am, he says, his hands flying to his T-shirted chest.

Then it strikes me that he's just a shy kid from the Midwest raised to say ma'am like I do to every waitress and dry cleaner. We scuttle inside like a pair of field mice from our inept exchange.

[...] One day at a time forces you to reckon with the instant you actually occupy, rather than living in fantasy la-la that never arrives.