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the room whooping with joy. "Daddy, guess what?" Derek shouted. "We found the Yankees' web page!"
    "It's so cool!" his little brother, Bernie, exclaimed. "It tells you everything about Bernie Williams. Everything!”
    Three months ago we bought the kids a fancy new computer, and now that machine gave both of them their reason for living. We limited them to an hour apiece of computer time per day, but that hour was the absolute high point of their existence. The hard drive went on the fritz for two days last month, and Bernie was still having nightmares about it.
    We bought the computer because we felt guilty that All the Other Kids Had Them, and maybe we weren't preparing our own children sufficiently for the computer age. In retrospect, I have doubts about our purchase. Okay, it wasn't nearly as foolish as the Stairmaster that's rusting away in our basement. But Derek and Bernie were just as happy—and more creative—doing the stuff they used to do before the computer came, like reading, playing catch, and drawing pictures of baseball players.
    Even worse, now I was stuck listening to endless anecdotes about their computer experiences. Myself, I find computers incredibly uninteresting.
    Although in truth, maybe my real problem was jealousy. How could my seven-year-old—heck, even my five-year-old—understand computers better than I did? Every time I try to get information from the Internet, I end up with a headache.
    Eager to change the subject from computers, I asked, "So how was school today, guys?"
    "Fine," they answered in unison. Then they hurried back to their beloved machine, which had completely taken over Andrea's study—or as it was now called, "the computer room."
    "Fine." School was only two days old, and already they were totally blasé about it.
    Ah well, at least school wasn't traumatizing them, I comforted myself as I picked up the phone book and looked for Rosalyn's number. I doubted she'd be at home, though. She was probably at her boyfriend Sam's house, locked into som e heavy discussion about Commitment and Children and "Are We Ready?" Sometimes it seemed like half of Andrea's unmarried friends were having that exact same discussion with their boyfriends, which Andrea and I privately called the "Marry me, asshole" conversation. After marriage, of course, it's replaced by the ever popular "You never tell me I'm pretty anymore."
    But I guess Rosalyn and Sam were taking a break from the deep stuff, because she was home when I called. "Sure, I had Susan Tamarack," Rosalyn said. "She was in my Comp 102 class this summer. Why?"
    "What was she like?"
    "Don't know. She was pretty quiet, one of those students that always sit in the back. So you must feel pretty bad about your friend killing Susan's husband."
    "I'm not so sure he di d it. Listen, why was Susan Tamarack taking a community college course? Seems like an odd thing to do, when your husband is in the middle of a huge political campaign."
    "Doesn't seem odd to me. Maybe she wanted to try a new thing, you know, s omething just for herself. I remember on the first day of class, when I had the students interview each other, she said she hadn't been working or going to school for ten years."
    And now she wanted to get elected to Congress. Not a bad entry-level position. "She ever say anything about her marriage?"
    "Like what?"
    "I don't know. Anything."
    There was a brief silence, then Rosalyn said, "I think she felt pretty fried, trying to take care of her kid and get her schoolwork done at the same time she was doing the whole politician's wife routine. But nothing really sticks out."
    "How about in her writing? Anything stick out there?"
    "Hey, I had thirty students in that dumb course, just about ruined my summer. I was in such a hurry to grade those papers, I could've had J. D. Salinger himself in my class and I wouldn't have noticed it."
    She was exaggerating, I knew; Rosalyn was actually a painfully committ ed teacher who marked every misplaced