Free Sweet Talk by Stephanie Vaughn

word
happy
surprises me. All summer I have regarded us as miserable. My mother stops under a halo of light. The fog hangs among the trees like veils of trailing lace. She smiles. “Well, if it’s going to be this cold in the summer, I just wish for your sake we could be cold someplace fun, like Bavaria.” She pulls the sweater together in front of her breasts and hugs herself. It is late and she is tired. We have walked too far. I reach out to touch her, to offer the support of my arm around her shoulders, and she leans easily against my body, as if I were the mother, strong, cheerful, controlling a small bubble of space in which there is no time,only light and warmth. I recall the German woman doctor on television, earnest and importunate, making the plea for faith: We never die alone. A car skids on rain-slick pavement, an airplane dives into the sea, a hospital bed defines at last the perimeter of a mortal life—yet we are never alone. Embracing my mother, I embrace belief itself. Suddenly, I want us to be back at the house, rooting through the refrigerator for leftover chicken and sweet tomatoes—a midwestern feast.
    “It’s all right,” I say to my mother, holding her close in the fog. “Everything will be all right.”

Other Women

    S uddenly the world is composed of infinitely divisible parts, and things, it seems, grow bigger as they grow smaller. An atom, once a tiny creature, is now a giant compared to a quark. And inside the quark, who knows? Maybe a whole universe of colliding specks, some of them red-haired, some blond, some sleek and dusky skinned, some of them with silicone implants, and some of the plainer ones, like me, still going to the shopping center in thrift-shop shoes.
    Harvey has a former wife named Susu, and who am I? A single woman and not getting any younger: I can settle for a compromise.
    Harvey’s former wife has given us both lice, serially, of course, first to Harvey, who passed them right along to me. For the two years since the divorce she’s been living in Italy, where she uses the money from the saleof their house to finance the reinvention of her face and figure—a thinner nose and bigger breasts. Also thicker eyelashes—three hundred dollars per transplant from an unspecified part of her body. For two weeks now, she has been sleeping on Harvey’s sofa, but, you know, as my friend Lila likes to say, people who did it once can do it again, and anyway with husbands and wives there’s always the long good-bye. “Smile,” Lila says. “Keep your sense of humor. Everything will be all right.”
    “She was my wife,” Harvey says, as we drive around the shopping center looking for a space near the self-serve drugstore. “I was married to her,” he says, enunciating the word
married
as if it were part of a foreign language I have not yet mastered.
    “It’s certainly a comfort to know these are just post-connubial crabs,” I say, and Harvey laughs.
    He stops the car in a loading zone and hunches over the wheel like a getaway driver. When I push through the plate-glass door I look back and see him glancing over his shoulder for signs of people who will recognize us and, with their extrasensory perception, discern immediately that we are on a shady errand. At the rear of the store I find what I am looking for, a selection of colorful boxes advertising a cure for certain skin conditions and, in smaller print, for three different kinds of lice infestation. These boxes are prominently displayed next to an arrangement of condoms and spermicidaljellies, and free pamphlets describing sexually transmitted diseases. Next to them is a line of eight people, most of them well-groomed older women waiting for their prescriptions. I decide to linger near cough remedies and hemorrhoid preparations, but now here come two more people to the prescription line.
    “Take me to the Women’s Health Collective,” I tell Harvey back in the car. “We need the privacy of a prescription.”
    “You