Free Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet Page B

her as it passed, lodged in her body—the live feed of a humble taxpayer somewhere, erudite but alive. Maybe some unseen field around my infant simply filtered particles from the immense cloud of content carried by those millions of waves that pass through us all the time.
    THE SISTERS FROM Vermont, it turns out, aren’t sisters from Vermont: I’m bad at pegging guests’ identities. Their teeth aren’t even protruding, just large and blocky, and they’re cousins from somewhere on the mid-Atlantic coast near Baltimore. Both of them are named Linda, a name that’s common in their extended family; they’re in their early fifties, friendly, good-natured and hearty. One is an administrator at a university while the other is retired from her career at a famous aquarium in Florida where marine animals do tricks for crowds.
    When the Lindas went to town for groceries today we hitched a ride with them. They dropped us off at the library so Lena could exchange her picture books—one of which is too young for her, about a bear who’s a splendid friend, the other of which turned out to feature cows rising in armed revolt. (They hold roughly drawn Uzis in their hooves; this puzzled Lena’s literal mind due to the cows’ lack of opposable thumbs.) To answer the question of the guests who don’t leave I have to be more outgoing than I have been until now, so I’m trying.
    The Lindas, being friendly, are helpful in this chore. Big Linda, as Lena calls her, told us about someone she knew who was bitten by a bull sea lion. “Right on the keester, kiddo. And let me tell you it made a mighty broad target,” she chortled. She told Lena that performing seals at zoos and aquariums are not seals at all but sea lions; that some sea lions work for the U.S. Navy, finding things in the ocean; and that male sea lions can be four times the size of the females—weighing, put in the other Linda, up to one thousand pounds . That’s half a ton.
    Lena calls the other one Main Linda because she met her first. Main Linda goes swimming in very cold water, Lena said to me, once every year to help raise money for the Special Olympics. Lena’s resolved to join her in one of these polar bear plunges, as she calls them. I have to restrain her from practicing.
    The Lindas have embraced their nicknames.
    When the two of us finished at the library we walked over to the local diner to have lunch. A beefy middle-aged man sat down beside us at the counter—beside Lena, I should say, with me on her other side. He ordered a Reuben, introduced himself as John and proceeded to engage her in a conversation about her gold and silver metallic markers. He was inoffensive, on the face of it, a neighborly fellow patron, yet I thought I detected something off-color in his expression as he glanced over the top of her head at me, a hint of a leer, some glint of beady self-interest.
    So I hurried Lena at her lunch a bit. We shared a piece of sickly-sweet cherry pie for dessert, leaving bright jelly smears on the plate. Then we left, with the beefy man smiling after us as the door swung to.
    Big Linda was waiting for us in her bulky car; Main Linda, who was buying birdseed in the hardware store down the block, remained to be picked up.
    â€œBig Linda?” said Lena hesitantly, as we pulled away from the curb. “Do sea lions have really sharp teeth?”
    While we waited in the car again, this time outside the hardware store, the two of them discussed sea lion dentition, a subject that was, to me, of limited interest. I sank into the warm seat in a half-dream, full of the sickly-sweet pie, grown even more sickly in retrospect, and mused on my attraction to the town’s librarian, who seems out of place here. He’s good-looking; his skin is a coffee shade but the geometry of his face seems less African than Eastern, maybe Malaysian or Indian, I don’t know. It’s noteworthy mostly because