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Norman gave the class a brief lecture on the goals of the course, on his training, on the requirements to pass; then he discussed
the manikins, their proper care, and their sanitary guidelines. "After each use," he told them, "wipe the face down with rubbing
alcohol. And if anyone is sick right now, or has an infectious disease, or cuts around the mouth, well, they should make themselves
known to me." No hands raised. "I should stress," Norman continued, "that the risk of any kind of disease transmission during
CPR training is extremely low. Okay, we'll break up into teams of two, and we'll begin with the infants and work our way up.
Now let's get going."

"Hey," the woman next to Kate said. "You healthy?"

"As far as I know."

"Well, you don't have to worry about me." The woman moved her chair closer. "I'm training to be a nurse's aide. This is almost
old hat to me, but you need to be certified."

"So you're a pro," Kate said.

"Not yet," she answered. "But soon. I'm Shauna, by the way."

"I'm Kate."

They stretched for a soft handshake.

After seeing a brief film and observing Norman's demonstrations, each team was given an infant manikin and a foam mattress.
The teams spread out on the floor and Norman waddled his rounds, making sure everyone's rescue breathing was correct.

"Jesus, this baby is filthy," Shauna said. She sprayed rubbing alcohol all over the face and wiped the rubbery skin in circular
swaths. She joked, "You've got neglectful dummy parents, deadbeat dads."

"That's funny," Kate told her.

"Yeah. Okay, here I go." And Shauna started.

Watching her, Kate was glad that as babies Jeannie and Sarah had never been in such a predicament, though she panicked at
those extended silences where injuries lived. Fears of crib death had floated over their naps. Jeannie always slept soundly.
Sarah was colicky, her fists clenched, her toes curled, a rictus of displeasure that made Kate call the pediatrician on more
than one occasion. The doctor was a patient man; Paul was not. He stayed at work till the last possible hour and often spent
nights at business dinners, settling into the behavior of his own distant father. At beach parties on Long Island, children
running around everywhere, babies nestled and rocked, Paul was awkward with the girls, holding them stiffly until they would
invariably cry. "I'm not much good at this," he'd say, handing them off to Kate or the nurse.

Norman swayed over, his odor arriving a few seconds before his mass. Kate imagined that he was a lonely man—with some people
you can simply tell that life doesn't offer the promise of companionship. She pictured him watching television with his mother,
checking her pulse during the commercial breaks. "Good," he told Shauna, giving her a passing grade in the workbook.

Now it was Kate's turn. She did all of the things asked of her, and she did them well. And while there was no real drama involved,
a genuine panic lit her nerves. She was being judged. Any slipups would be remembered—Shauna shaking her head, Norman slashing
a red F. The whole class might notice. What neglect! How could she not know how to do this when Jeannie and Sarah were babies?
If something awful had happened—God forbid—she would've been totally helpless. Even in hindsight, such ignorance is intolerable,
that you can childproof outlets and stretch a fence across stairs but still not take into account the internal workings of
the body, the mechanics of the heart. When Sarah was going through her drug problems, in and out of rehab for years, Paul
posed an awful question to a group of friends. "Okay, here's something," he said. "Suppose your child were to die—I mean,
say it's inevitable, and not from disease or illness, just an accident, a fluke—would you rather have that child die at the
age of one or at the age of twenty?" Hearing this, Kate cringed and tried to change the subject, but Paul persisted. "No,
I'm curious," he said.

Of course everyone knew about Sarah's difficulties.

"Well, I'll tell you," he continued. "I'd rather have the former. Saves you the anguish, the bigger loss, much more manageable
that way. I know that's probably cold, but I think it's true."

Kate was outraged, not only at his bad taste, but at his ridiculous answer. Regardless of the emotional investment, she wanted
to defend the joys of giving that child as much life as possible, instead of being cheap with your pain. But she remained
silent.

"Yep." Paul lowered his head. "It's a pretty shitty question." Seeing him, dispirited yet proud in the candlelight, was like
seeing one of those tricky perspective drawings—the vase that's also two silhouetted profiles, the young woman that's also
an old woman—and while many friends stared at Paul with contempt, Kate couldn't help but glimpse the other man poking at the
margins, the man she knew so well, the man who revealed himself less and less often, but no doubt was still there.

After a few minutes of mouth-to-mouth, Norman said, "That's good." He signed his name in the workbook and moved toward the
next twosome.

Shauna cheered, "Well done."

"I hate pressure."

"You were pretty cool." She looked down at the infant manikin and said, "You lucky you got mothers to take care of you."

After completing Unit One, the class had a ten-minute break before tackling Unit Two: the children. Some people put on their
jackets and shuffled toward the hall, their hands patting packs of cigarettes and loose change for coffee and snacks. Others
retired to the safety of their belongings. Norman sat at his desk and took out a doughnut from a glaze-stained bag. Wind played
the windows, and snow wisped the street below.

"No way I'm going out there," Shauna said. "I tell you, this weather turns smokers into the fools they are."

Kate told her, "My husband smokes."

"Of course he does. Hell, every man I ever been with smokes." She laughed a bit too loudly, and then said, "Been bad for my
health, that's for sure."

Kate smiled.

"Sometimes, you know what, I can't believe I don't see some Surgeon General's warning stamped on their bodies, right there."
She pointed to her own thigh. "The least they could do," she said.

And Kate wondered if she was on the verge of making a new friend: if the two of them would keep in touch after this class;
if they would call each other on the phone and exchange daily adventures; if they would meet for lunch every week; if Shauna
would come out to Long Island for weekends of tennis and golf, the members of those clubs shocked at their closeness; and
if Kate would visit Shauna's apartment and worship at her church and walk around her neighborhood in a fine Sunday hat. Such
a fantasy outlined itself in the ease of the conversation, as if this were the beginning of a history, the first hours of
lifelong exploration. It was thrilling to Kate, like her first homosexual friend had been thrilling, an exotic shore in the
distance and she was a cast-off from a land of ladies' lunches.

Soon everyone was back in the classroom, and the next section of the workbook was started, the child manikins passed out to
each team. After learning what to do when a child stops breathing, they learned what to do when a child is choking. Norman
demonstrated the universal distress signal, his hands grasping his throat, his mouth wide open. "When you see anyone do this,"
he said, "then you got to act right away with the Heimlich maneuver."

And for the next half hour the class practiced on their partners as if they were children. Kate asked Shauna, "Are you choking?"
Shauna nodded. Kate told an imaginary witness to phone EMS. Shauna's eyes pleaded for help. Kate wrapped her arms around Shauna's
stomach; she made a fist; she placed the fist just above the navel and well below the lower tip of the breastbone; she covered
the fist with her free hand.

"Not too hard," Shauna whispered. "I had a big breakfast."

Kate answered back, "Okay," and pantomimed four abdominal thrusts.

Shauna pretended to spit out a lodged piece of candy, her tongue thwooping the phantom projectile into the middle of the room.
"There it goes," she said.

"What was it?" Kate asked.

"A nasty gob-stopper. I swear those things should be forbidden to us kids."

"I guess you've learned your lesson."

"You know it, Mom." She laughed, and Kate's hands could feel each burst of welling air.

Norman swayed over. "Ticklish?" he asked.

"No, no," Shauna said. "Just cracking up."

"That can happen. Seen it before. Okay, ladies, show me how it's done."

They both took turns and proved themselves adequate, and after each team had done the same, Norman gathered everyone around
and said, "Okay, I'm only going to show this to you once, so pay attention." He slid a chair in front of his stomach. "Now
if you ever find yourself choking without anyone to help you, what you've got to do is find a straight-back chair and throw
yourself on it so that air is forced from your abdomen. Okay. Watch carefully." Norman stepped back, his face grim. This must
be the plight of the lonely, eating a meal without company, just watching TV and chewing down functional food. To Kate, it
was a frightening thought, that you could die simply because nobody was left in your world to save you. Norman hurled himself
onto the chair, belly-flopping on the backrest, then fell off to the side and rolled to the floor, possibly injured.

The class was shocked, and though being trained to provide emergency care, they stood there frozen.

"I'm all right," Norman groaned. "I'm all right. This always happens." He recovered his breath on all fours, a supplicant
to self-preservation, and after a minute rose to his feet. He said, "My wife thinks I should quit doing this particular demonstration,
that I should just explain it, but I think it's important to actually show it." He retucked his shirt, his hands disappearing
into the netherworld of his pants, and Kate felt foolish at having assumed that he wasn't married and loved and happy. Norman
probably came home from work and folded into the meaty arms of his wife. "Hard day," he might say, and she might answer, "Please,
please, just stop with the chair, please."

After Norman had fully recovered, the class learned what to do when confronted with an unconscious child with complete airway
obstruction—how you thrust the abdomen with the heel of your hand in hopes of freeing the lodged object. Kate knelt over the
manikin, her arms extended, her palms wet. Every time she pushed down on the gut, a leak of air came from the molded lips,
a leak that defied complete airway obstruction. This mere appearance of truth would've been difficult for her daughter to
handle. Complete honesty was Sarah's vanishing point, and anything false skewed the proportions. As a result, she saw the
crooked world around her as a world without depth, only surface, and with every step forward she knocked into a phony backdrop.
Drugs, it seems to Kate, turned her perspective into a wonderful blanket, and this blanket was warm for a while, but then
it became colder outside and she needed more blankets, so she dug into the closet and pulled everything out and snuggled under
a greater bulk. Once again she was warm, but she could no longer sleep or eat, she could no longer move, and that awful coldness
still ate through the wool like piranha moths, and they were getting closer, ready to converge into that sad distance she
had become.

This, of course, is only an assumption. Kate has never done drugs, barely even seen them except for marijuana at a few parties
years ago—the joints passed around in an illicit version of afternoon tea, pinkies up with every drag and goofy talk about
absolutely nothing. But that was a lower form of desperation, not her daughter's highly evolved form. For a while Kate was
obsessed with why it transfixed Sarah in such a way, and she wanted to be able to understand its pull, its charm, instead
of blindly denouncing it as evil. She had daydreams about knowing the lingo beyond the words, of enduring the answer in order
to determine the question.

Paul, on the other hand, filed away the problems in a folder marked "Genetic Flaws," a folder that also contained his alcoholic
father, his alcoholic brother, his socialist sister. "It's the crapshoot of DNA," he'd say with cold sadness. And Jeannie
turned scornful. "Don't worry about me," she'd tell her mother over the phone, "wouldn't want to start a precedent, God forbid."

Kate put her finger within the manikin's mouth, sliding it along the inside of the cheek to the base of the tongue. She pretended
to find something dislodged.

After Unit Two, the class had another ten-minute break before finishing up with Unit Three: the adults. Once again, some people
left for a brief journey outside, while others settled into their private space. Norman ate sweets pulled from a clear plastic
Baggie, his fingers picking out red gummy fish and holding them aloft by their tails as if amazed by the creatures of this
candy world. Shauna and Kate went down the hall toward a glowing soda machine.

"This is tiring," Kate said. "I need caffeine."

"I hear you."

Kate slipped coins into the slot, the quarters falling with clicks, and pushed the Diet Coke window—thunk!—and bent down to
remove the can.

"Use the finger-sweep technique," Shauna told her.

"That's funny," Kate said.

Then Shauna asked, "Do you ever laugh, or do you just say 'That's funny' all the time?"

"Oh, I laugh. Definitely."

"Because I tell you, 'That's funny' can get on your nerves."

Kate's stomach bundled into a tight package of third-grade doubt. Maybe Shauna didn't like her, maybe she hated her, maybe
she couldn't wait to
get
back to her friends and tell them about this humorless woman. "I'm sorry," Kate said.

Shauna reached down and grabbed her Mountain Dew. "I don't mean nothing by it. I'm just used to people actually laughing at
my jokes."

"Well, you're very funny," Kate said.

"There you go again. Nothing more unfunny than to be told you're funny. Damn annoying, really." She opened the can and took
a long loud sip. "Don't be upset," she said, "I'm just telling you."