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and we have had our share of worsts—even then, we have trusted one another to hang in and fight for what we are. I think Shirley and Stanley had that, too. Despite the terrible things they did, the ways they hurt each other, they needed one another at the core. Without her, he was nothing. Without him, she could not go on.
    â€œWhat are you thinking about?” she said to me suddenly.
    I had not drifted off into the future, as it must seem, but was afloat somewhere equally hazy, pillowed in my own embryonic seas. I lowered my head, embarrassed.
    â€œDo you ever wonder, what if I had turned left instead of right? Just then, when I was heading to the door? If I had chosen right, not left, and walked up the street, or up the stairs, what different fates awaited?”
    I nodded. Now I think we had been pondering a nearly identical idea.
    She leaned in, her pale fleshy cheeks aglow. There were coffee grounds on the table, but she put her hands right there, in the pocked puddles. She said, “I dream about it all the time. I get in the car, I have to drive Stanley here or there, and he says to go right and I am certain it should be left. I am certain left is the direction. Left, left, left, but I go right. I listen and go right.”
    I nodded. She told me to wait, to stay where I was, and she moved quickly down the hall, graceful despite her size. She returned with a small moss-colored book: “You must read this.”
    â€œI will,” I said, nearly breathless with the importance of it. It was an old book, worn along the binding, its pages foxed by damp. I could smell the sweet mold, anticipate the crackling of the pages, and I held it up so I could read the title.
An Adventure
tooled in gold leaf, its authors
Two Ladies
. An adventure. “I’ll start it now.”
    â€œGirls without mothers, you and me. We have to help one another.” How did she know? I put a hand on my belly. “You’ll be good to her,” Shirley said then, and, as she turned to leave the room, added, “My mother thinks I failed her. I’m not thin or dressed properly, not ladylike enough, don’t meet her standards. But she has no idea, not really. At least yours has an accurate grasp on the realities.”
    â€œMy mother? How could you know about my mother?”
    â€œTime,” she answered matter-of-factly. “It slips.”
    I stared at her, speechless.
    â€œOr we do, rather. We slip in time, some of us. We do. Or I wonder if that’s what it is.” Her laugh, moderate as it sounded, rippled visibly beneath the surface of her skin. Whatever she was, she was more than just eccentric; this was, to me, an exceedingly exciting notion. I asked her what she meant.
    â€œRead the book and then we’ll talk. Now I’m off to write a little thing for the devil.” She laughed again. I wondered if Stanley was equally strange, if all academics, all brilliant people, were like this. She stopped in the doorway, tilted her head slightly. “And then this afternoon, if I finish my work, perhaps we’ll go grocery shopping, and I’ll walk you up to campus. Show you around. You can see where Fred will have his office, get a look at the harem.”
    â€œHarem?”
    â€œThe students,” she said, and I could not tell if her tone was mocking me or mocking herself. “Such pretty, bright young things. Just like you, Rose Nemser. Young and pretty, and ever-so-enlightened. So admiring of the great minds that deign to educate them. Those girls love their professors.”
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    A FTER SHE LEFT , I opened the book and turned the first dried pages but could not settle in, the print scrambling under my overwhelmed gaze.
    I want to try to reconstruct the way I felt the first time I read
An Adventure
, but it’s difficult, like trying to separate out the first time Fred and I made love from all the rest, or to recall the specific weight