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"That was nice," Chip tells me, his body leaning against tile. When his hair is wet, you can see his impending baldness, and
you can tell it won't be a graceful exit. He doesn't have the head for it. "Really," he says. "Great."

"Sure," I answer.

"Wasn't it?" he says. "I mean, yeah."

I say, "Fine," knowing that this word kills him.

"Fine?"

"Yeah." And now that I have him thinking, I touch his face and say, "Fine is good."

"Fine is. Well, fine. It's just. Kind of. The thing is." He stammers like a method actor. "You fucking with me again?"

I turn off the water and sweep aside the shower curtain as if an opening night ovation awaits me on the other side. "I'm getting
a little sick of that question. All of a sudden, that's all you can say." My voice deepens into the international parody of
an oafish man. " 'Are you fucking with me? Is this a joke? Duh, what's going on?' Jesus, get a clue."

Chip is upset. "Where are the fucking towels?"

"In my room."

"No towels in here?"

"No. You'll have to brave the wilds of the hall, big man."

Before leaving he turns around and says, "It's just that I like you. Okay?"

My reply devastates. "That's sweet," I tell him. "Really sweet."

I linger in the bathroom, letting Chip stew on his own, even though I'm starting to feel cold. The heat in the house has been
turned off early this year because of the ecoconscious Libby Plower and her whole Greekology movement. Recycling, composting,
conserving, letter-writing, protesting, campaigning, raising consciousness, all that crap. Under the direction of Ms. Plow-me—Chip
and I fucked in her room about two weeks ago; I wore her "Earth Day '95" T-shirt—the girls of Kap Gam go out every other Saturday
and clean up a three-mile stretch of highway, a good mix of environmental concerns and community needs. As if this will make
a difference, as if anything will make a difference. Save the world. No chance. All you're doing is setting yourself up for
disappointment, for tears when the last elephant is killed, for heartbreak when the seas become oil, so much emotional energy
wasted on the inevitable.

The door opens. This frightens me, but it's only Chip, and he throws me my bathrobe and says, "Here. I'm going downstairs."

"Okay."

"See ya."

I wrap myself in terry, loving the feel of that fabric, rough yet soft, and I rub myself in order to dry off, arms crossing
over my torso like I'm a madwoman in the bathrobe version of a strait jacket. After showers, I always find myself thinking
about cutting my hair, chopping it all off and not bothering with hair dryers and not fearing frizziness and not worrying
about how long it would take to grow back out. But these are just crazy thoughts. Through the frosted window the red and white
of a passing police car flashes by, though there is no accompanying siren, the emergency not that desperate, probably student-oriented.
This is a safe place. This is a safe college town. I pull tight the sash and tie a loose bow, and feeling thirsty, I make
my way to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

The stairs creak.

"Hey, Chip," I call out.

Nothing. Maybe he left.

"Chip, listen, I'm sorry." I play the word "sorry," trilling the syllables.

I open the fridge. The special items—the wheat germ, the fancy juice, the French grain mustard—have Post-it Notes stuck to
them with the names of the purchasers. They wave at me, pleading for someone to save them from their anal owners. I start
to sing, "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" a song I learned when I was ten and elbowed at the TV in my parents' living
room. My mother used to love to perform the opening montage of
The Sound
of Music,
her body spinning, her balance drunken, her arms making a mess of any precious thing. She was more of a tornado than a nun.
And my father would change the words to Mr. Von Trapp's heart-wrenching anthem, crooning "Addled Vice" with just the right
amount of bathos.

There's a noise—the noise I've been expecting, the thwump, pause, pause, thwump noise—coming from the basement.

"Chip, you down there?"

I step toward the door, as if closeness will reveal something. "Chip, is that you?"

I know, I know, only a moron would go down into the basement. In all of those slasher movies, the girl in peril—the cute coed
alone at the sorority, simply a number in a growing body count—is found posed in some god-awful way, hanging upside down with
her throat cut, a tableau of death for the last living sorority sister to run into as she flees the maniac. And you, the knowing
audience, scream at the screen, "No! Don't be so stupid! Don't you realize what will happen?" And you turn to your friends
and say, "That's so ridiculous. Who would do that? I'd run out of the house, stark naked if I had to." And, of course, you'd
be saved, and you'd graduate, and you'd find your place in this world, but years later, you'd be left with the emptiness of
your survival, the nolo contendere of such instincts. Whom did you leave behind? Trust me, there will be someone.

I reach for the knob to the basement door, my palm pressing against its brassy reflection. FDR had it all wrong. Nowadays,
we have nothing but fear, just the fear itself, to sustain a sense of fleeting reality, and the days and nights of infamy
loom ahead with bright-eyed appeal.

cpr

IT WAS THE winter of phantom heart attacks. While Paul slept, Kate listened to his breathing, his snores, his wet tasting
of dreams, and she'd wait for an unfamiliar sound to destroy, suddenly, the rhythm. What was that? And she'd roll over and
watch the sheets over his chest, watch his face for any signs of pain. A grimace. A scowl. She could almost see him on the
gurney in the hospital morgue, just his head exposed for her identification. "Yes, that's him," she'd say, "that's my husband,"
and the doctor would nod and cover him and slide him back into that human filing cabinet. Kate would begin to feel sick at
the prospect of sleeping with a corpse, of waking up with cold flesh at her side—blue lips, dry eyes—so she'd pay close attention
to Paul, waiting for something to happen. Those moments were like the initial moments after an airplane's takeoff, when landing
gear retracts and flaps grind and engines throttle. But soon, Paul's disruption would fade into a smooth flight, and Kate
would feel silly for worrying. He might not have been in the greatest shape, smoking a pack a day and eating recklessly, but
he was only fifty-six and had no history of heart disease. Still, it was a wary age, too young to die but too old to qualify
as a tragedy.

During the day, at home, Kate often found herself ready for that awful phone call, her hand reluctant to answer. "Yes, hello."
Most probably it'd be Jack, his law partner for the past twenty years. He'd be in tears because he's an emotional man, unlike
Paul, who can be rather distant and aloof. Jack would say, "Kate . . . oh God . . . I don't . . . I have . . . there's something
. . ." his baffled tongue unable to form the words, but by then she'd understand everything. It might happen at his desk as
he ate a hot dog slathered with sauerkraut, or maybe on the elevator as he cursed the slowly ticking floors. Grabbing his
left arm, Paul would whiten and his skin would crumple. A massive coronary. He'd hit the ground beyond saving, though a young
paralegal would try reviving him. At the funeral everyone would be shocked but not surprised, the same way divorce and a child's
drug addiction don't seem to carry the same weight as they once did.

But Kate also had another variation on her husband's heart attack. This time the two of them are together, and they're walking
on the beach even though they never walk on the beach anymore. Too sandy, Paul usually tells her. But today he relents because
he's in an unexpectedly romantic mood, and they're holding hands and allowing the cold water to wash past their bare ankles
and blot their rolled-up pants. Kate's not sentimental enough to see this happening during a sunset, but it's a surprising
day, the sun warm and the air cold and the beach empty of people. They are both happy. Paul is singing made-up songs and occasionally
turns her under his arm. He kisses her fingers. He talks about retiring. He calls her "Late" with affection. And Kate's at
ease knowing that he's at ease, her temperament conditioned to his state of mind. Paul stops and steps away, his foot ready
to kick water at her, and then it happens. He collapses. For a second Kate thinks that he's joking, but he's not much of a
physical comedian.

"Paul, what's wrong?"

He can't speak.

She kneels down next to him, her pants getting soaked. He looks like a sky diver whose chute hasn't opened, his arms and legs
spread out in free-fall despair. "What is it?" Kate says rather pitifully. Then a large wave, the first of a set, pushes the
tide past them.

She starts screaming—"Someone, please!"—destroying her vocal chords in a single burst. "Help me!" comes out raw.

The million-dollar beach houses have their shades drawn, their furniture wrapped in plastic, their hi-tech alarms armed for
intruders—this is the off-season on Long Island, where the week and the weekend exist peacefully together. But right now Kate
would kill for time-share crowds. Paul musters the strength to speak three letters. "CPR," he says.

CPR? She has no idea how to do that, only a vague notion from doctors on television. So she fakes it as well as possible,
pounding on his chest, then blowing in his mouth. The salt water splashed on his lips has an almost sexual taste. And now
the waves are really rolling in. And while Kate struggles to resuscitate him, she realizes that she's performing the antithesis
of that famous scene in
From Here to
Eternity,
where Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr are swept away with passion. Kate was twelve years old when she saw that movie, and
in that lush theater, the walls ornate, the seats rich velvet, a group of girls giggled with an uncertain knowledge, and they
leaned into each other and grazed shoulders and felt the excitement of the coming years, its certainty as thrilling as the
crashing surf.

In February, Kate decided to go to the American Red Cross for a basic course on lifesaving skills. They called it Community
CPR, a term she liked. It brought to mind a giant hand descending onto Central Park, onto the arrested Great Lawn, and huge
lips giving mouth-to-mouth to the frozen reservoir. This made her think of spring, and spring was her eventful season. She
was born on April 25. She was married on May 18. She gave birth to Jeannie on May 3, to Sarah on June 6. Funny how it works
that way. But what that also means is that winter is a season of annoying incubation. Her mother was laid up in bed for the
final trimester, and she pointed to stretch marks as if they were wounds from a war. "You were an impossible fetus," she often
said. The months before Kate's wedding were filled with screaming matches about the ever-expanding guest list, mutterings
on the royal cost, and an overall sense of doom that struck Paul in mid-January and hobbled him with a heavy sense of fate.
He took to saying, "Oh, well," in the face of everything. The pregnancy with Jeannie was nerve-racking, as all first pregnancies
are, and when Kate became large, she was scared of stairs and ice and rushing pedestrians and overly excited dogs. The second
pregnancy was less tense but more exhausting. Jeannie, three years old, discovered the joy of running, and Sarah managed to
give Kate the worst heartburn of her life. So, as a result of all the joy in her life, Kate is not a winter person.

She made her way down Amsterdam Avenue. Two inches of snow had fallen the night before, enough to make the streets tricky
and to bring out men with shovels who scraped toward the curb and sprinkled rock salt as if it were chicken feed. Kate went
up the steps of the American Red Cross Center, a stocky building of glass and concrete. Inside the lobby, she unbuttoned her
coat and stepped hard with her boots, leaving behind replicas of tread. A black woman behind a desk stared long and hard at
this performance, her head angled with possible displeasure. Kate asked, "Have I made a mess?"

"Huh?" the woman said.

"The snow." Kate glanced over at what had been tracked in.

"Ask the janitor. His problem, not mine."

Kate told her, "I'm here for the CPR course."

"Name?"

"Kate Gerard."

The woman consulted a list, and then said, "Third floor, room 308."

"Thank you."

"You're very welcome." Kate couldn't tell if this woman was being polite or rude, an unsure feeling she has with minorities,
an unfortunate feeling of being a fool, of not understanding the obvious, an unwelcome feeling that also lingers when she's
with her husband and daughters—it's as if she's to blame for something basic and undeniable and forever ensnared in history.
But these are the people you love.

Kate walked over to the bank of elevators.

Room 308 was at the end of the hall, the last room on the left, behind a heavy door with a small window reinforced with wire.
Kate peeked in before entering. Under her winter coat were jeans and a white sweatshirt, a pair of Treetorn sneakers in her
shoulder bag. This is an outfit she usually wears while gardening, but it seemed appropriate for the matter at hand, pliant
for bending and loose enough to allow easy movement of the arms, the stretching and extending of hard work. To be honest,
she's happiest in these clothes, though Paul would've asked, "Why so dumpy?" if he had seen her leave this morning. But he
was already at work, probably on his fifth cup of coffee and third Danish, unaware of her plans today.

Kate pushed through the door, and nine faces glanced up from five tables. They were mostly women, mostly women of color, from
very black to almost white, mostly younger by thirty years; the lone man, more of a boy in his late teens, sat in the corner
and played a handheld computer game, his torso swaying with pursuit. Standing there, Kate felt like the new student from a
different country. She slipped toward the back, to a table where a brown woman hunched over a book of crossword puzzles. Kate
smiled and pulled out a seat and draped her coat on the backrest and changed into sneakers and arranged her boots and checked
her wristwatch and wished that she had other distractions to shrink the distance of waiting. This study-hall atmosphere almost
put her in the mood to hunker down and scrawl a mash note to the boy in the second row—
I think you're
cute
—and ball it up and toss it toward him. Early on in their courtship, when Paul was in the army and Kate was at school in Switzerland,
she did little but ski and plump up on an accent-perfect pronunciation of "pain au chocolate" and write sappy letters to Sergeant
Gerard. They always began with "Darling" and ended with "Forever Kate," the paragraphs in between scripted with hope for a
future life together. When Jeannie found them stashed in a manila envelope—she was tripping around the attic a couple of months
ago on her Christmas visit from California—she brought them down to her mother and said, "Guess what I've found?" like a bratty
girl who knows your embarrassing secret.

"What?" Kate asked.

She rode out the tease, "Love letters," then emptied them on the kitchen table, the thin blue paper at once recognizable.
Jeannie said, "I feel like I'm a character in that stupid
Bridges of Madison
County,
but instead of studboy, whatever his name, I've uncovered a secret affair you had with Dad."

"I didn't read the book," Kate told her with a certain amount of pride.

"Mom, these letters, these letters are, well, they're so . . ." Jeannie smiled with postgraduate attitude. "The definition
of the banality of love," she said.

"I was nineteen years old." Kate picked up a random letter. She hadn't seen them in decades, long forgotten in storage. The
handwriting looked more youthful, and this surprised her, that even handwriting aged.

"Oh, I don't mean to be harsh," claimed Jeannie. "It's just, well, it's cute, that's all. But hey, did Dad ever write back?"

"Sure he wrote back," Kate answered, spreading the sheets in Go Fish fashion. "They should be in here as well."

"Trust me, they're not."

Up front, on the floor of the classroom, the practice manikins were laid out like the victims of a Greek tragedy: the fathers,
identical in red jogging suits, beside their sons, identical in shorts and American Red Cross T-shirts, beside their baby
brothers, identical in duct-taped diapers. Kate imagined that somewhere, probably hidden in a basement closet, the rubber
Medeas were stacked.

Baseboard heaters clicked with fresh helpings of heat, and fluorescent lights droned above, and bass-loaded music leaked from
headphones, and a few coughs ripped through unwell lungs. "Jesus," the woman next to Kate said, her quick pigeon eyes searching
out the person. "I've been warned about that."

Kate took this as an invitation to talk. "About what?" she asked.

The woman studied Kate as if she were a clue in the puzzle book. "Easy to catch something here. Everyone putting their tongues
on the dummies."

"They must clean them," Kate said.

"I'm sure they'll tell you that they scrub them down and disinfect them, but who's got time and who's going to know and all
that while I'm sick in bed and missing work because I sucked face with a nasty dummy." This woman's wide face displayed a
fondness for conspiracy—her forehead sloped, her lips a purse of intrigue—but it also held the broad attributes of a sense
of humor. "I'm serious," she said, half laughing.

"Kind of like cooties."

"Cooties?"

"Boy germs."

"That's right," she said. "This is cooties central."

The door opened, and the two of them quickly hushed, and ten faces glanced up for the impending entrance. A man walked in
carrying the bulky briefcase of a traveling salesman. "Sorry I'm late," he said. He put the briefcase down on the desk and
freed the latches and began pulling things out with a certain discipline—making piles, arranging papers. Kate saw him as a
poor relative from the gourd family, tapered from head to toe, a squash of ugly flesh recently snatched from the dirt. This
unfortunate physique was made even worse by a bald scalp dented with hollows and a pair of black-rimmed glasses and an adenoidal
voice flecked with the odor of loam and sharp hair sprouting from his ears and nostrils, a tuft of it poking from the collar
of his shirt, which held the half-moon watering of underarm perspiration.

"My name is Norman Churlick, and I'm your instructor today." He hitched up his pants—the first of many hitches; and picked
at his groin—the first of many picks; and wiped at the milky corners of his lips—the first of many wipes. "Now let's take
roll and pay fees and get on with it."

Kate thumbed through the American Red Cross Community CPR Workbook. Its cover had a photograph of a man executing picture-perfect
chest compressions on a waitress in a diner. Other customers watched with the appropriate expressions of panic. Decorations
alluded to the Christmas season. This entire tableau seemed to intimate the salvaged middle of a story, a still photo from
a medical Movie of the Week. And inside the book, at each chapter heading, other photographs illustrated the lessons to be
learned: an infant not breathing, an infant choking, an infant having a heart attack; a child not breathing, a child choking,
a child having a heart attack; an adult not breathing, an adult choking, an adult having a heart attack. But again, there
were stories here. The man not breathing was at a summer pool party. The boy in all three of the child chapters wore an Indian
outfit—dress-up gone horribly wrong. The baby girl happily eating grapes didn't know that once the page was turned a grape
would be lodged in her windpipe. All these brief scenes, and when Kate began to look closer, she started to recognize the
people from picture to picture. The businessman choking was a father having a heart attack was a Good Samaritan giving mouth-to-mouth.
The waitress near dead was the super-mom to the troublesome boy was a wife to the drowned man. There was an interconnectedness
in this small town on the edge of death, where everyone was a part of everyone else and together they saved each other in
what were almost daily exchanges of breath. And the dying infant would grow into the dying child who would grow into the dying
adult.