And yet, on that October night, as she knelt on the bathroom floor, Enid had the heretical thought that it might after all have been wiser, in her maternal homilies, to have laid less stress on marriage. It occurred to her that Denise’s rash act might even have been prompted, in some tiny part, by her wish to do the moral thing and please her mother. Like a toothbrush in the toilet bowl, like a dead cricket in a salad, like a diaper on the dinner table, this sickening conundrum confronted Enid: that it might actually have been preferable for Denise to go ahead and commit adultery, better to sully herself with a momentary selfish pleasure, better to waste a purity that every decent young man had the right to expect from a prospective bride, than to marry Emile. Except that Denise should never have been attracted to Emile in the first place! It was the same problem Enid had with Chip and even Gary: her children didn’t match. They didn’t want the things that she and all her friends and all her friends’ children wanted. Her children wanted radically, shamefully other things.

While observing peripherally that the bathroom carpet was more spotted than she’d realized and ought to be replaced before the holidays, Enid listened to Alfred offering to send Denise a pair of plane tickets. She was struck by the seeming calm with which Alfred took the news that his only daughter had made the biggest decision of her life without consulting him. But after he’d hung up the phone and she’d come out of the bathroom and he’d commented, simply, that life was full of surprises, she noticed how strangely his hands were shaking. The tremor was at once looser and more intense than the one he sometimes got from drinking coffee. And during the week that followed, while Enid made the best of the mortifying position in which Denise had placed her by (1) calling her best friends and sounding thrilled to announce that Denise was getting married soon! to a very nice Canadian man, yes, but she wanted immediate family only at the ceremony, so, and she was introducing her new husband at a simple, informal open house at Christmastime (none of Enid’s friends believed that she was thrilled, but they gave her full credit for trying to hide her suffering; some were even sensitive enough not to ask where Denise had registered for gifts) and (2) ordering, without Denise’s permission, two hundred engraved announcements, not only to make the wedding appear more conventional but also to shake the gift tree a little in hopes of receiving compensation for the dozens and dozens of teakwood salad sets that she and Alfred had given in the last twenty years: during this long week, Enid was so continually aware of Alfred’s strange new tremor that when, by and by, he agreed to see his doctor and was referred to Dr. Hedgpeth and diagnosed with Parkinson’s, an underground branch of her intelligence persisted in connecting his disease with Denise’s announcement and so in blaming her daughter for the subsequent plummeting of her own quality of life, even though Dr. Hedgpeth had stressed that Parkinson’s was somatic in origin and gradual in its onset. By the time the holidays rolled around, and Dr. Hedgpeth had provided her and Alfred with pamphlets and booklets whose drab doctor’s-office color schemes, dismal line drawings, and frightening medical photos presaged a drab and dismal and frightening future, Enid was pretty well convinced that Denise and Emile had ruined her life. She was under strict orders from Alfred, however, to make Emile feel welcome in the family. So at the open house for the newlyweds she painted a smile on her face and accepted, over and over, the sincere congratulations of old family friends who loved Denise and thought she was darling (because Enid in raising her had emphasized the importance of being kind to her elders) (although what was her marriage if not an instance of excessive kindness to an elder?) where she would have much preferred condolences. The effort she made to be a good sport and cheerleader, to obey Alfred and receive her middle-aged son-in-law cordially and not say one single word about his religion, only added to the shame and anger she felt five years later when Denise and Emile were divorced and Enid had to give this news, too, to all her friends. Having attached so much meaning to the marriage, having struggled so hard to accept it, she felt that the least Denise could have done was stay married.

“Do you ever hear from Emile anymore?” Enid asked.

Denise was drying dishes in Chip’s kitchen. “Occasionally.”

Enid had parked herself at the dining table to clip coupons from magazines she’d taken from her Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bag. Rain was coming down erratically in gusts that slapped and fogged the windows. Alfred was sitting on Chip’s chaise with his eyes closed.

“I was just thinking,” Enid said, “that even if things had worked out, and you’d stayed married, you know, Denise, Emile’s going to be an old man in not too many years. And that’s so much work. You can’t imagine what a huge responsibility.”

“In twenty-five years he’ll be younger than Dad is now,” Denise said.

“I don’t know if I ever told you,” Enid said, “about my high-school friend Norma Greene.”

“You tell me about Norma Greene literally every time I see you.”

“Well, you know the story, then. Norma met this man, Floyd Voinovich, who was a perfect gentleman, quite a number of years older, with a high-paying job, and he swept her off her feet! He was always taking her to Morelli’s, and the Steamer, and the Bazelon Room, and the only problem—”

“Mother.”

“The only problem,” Enid insisted, “was that he was married. But Norma wasn’t supposed to worry about that. Floyd said the whole arrangement was temporary. He said he’d made a bad mistake, he had a terrible marriage, he’d never loved his wife—”

“Mother.”

“And he was going to divorce her.” Enid let her eyes fall shut in raconteurial pleasure. She was aware that Denise didn’t like this story, but there were plenty of things about Denise’s life that were disagreeable to Enid, too, so. “Well, this went on for years. Floyd was very smooth and charming, and he could afford to do things for Norma that a man closer to her own age couldn’t have. Norma developed a real taste for luxuries, and then, too, she’d met Floyd at an age when a girl falls head over heels in love, and Floyd had sworn up and down that he was going to divorce his wife and marry Norma. Well, by then Dad and I were married and had Gary. I remember Norma came over once when Gary was a baby, and she just wanted to hold him and hold him. She loved little children, oh, she just loved holding Gary, and I felt terrible for her, because by then she’d been seeing Floyd for years, and he was still not divorced. I said, Norma, you can’t wait forever. She said she’d tried to stop seeing Floyd. She’d gone on dates with other men, but they were younger and they didn’t seem matoor to her—Floyd was fifteen years older and very matoor, and I do understand how an older man has a matoority that can make him attractive to a younger woman—”

“Mother.”

“And, of course, these younger men couldn’t always afford to be taking Norma to fancy places or buying her flowers and gifts like Floyd did (because, see, he could really turn on the charm when she got impatient with him), and then, too, a lot of those younger men were interested in starting families, and Norma—”

“Wasn’t so young anymore,” Denise said. “I brought some dessert. Are you ready for dessert?”

“Well, you know what happened.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a heartbreaking story, because Norma—”

“Yes. I know the story.”

“Norma found herself—”

“Mother: I know the story. You seem to think it has some bearing on my own situation.”

“Denise, I don’t. You’ve never even told me what your ‘situation’ is.” “Then why do you keep telling me the story of Norma Greene?”