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whirled, she cocked her head, she clicked her fingers off the beat as Babette did.
    Babette got a round of applause at the end of the class. She turned and applauded Jill, and so did the rest. Jill blushed, but her smile was radiant.
    At eleven, there was a break in the schedule, and everyone gathered outside at the pool. Trays of raw vegetables and fruit had been brought, and cups of hot, spicy, vegetable broth that was said to be rich in potassium, whatever good that was. Carter found Amy and Jill at a shaded table eating carrot sticks.
    “May I join you?”
    “Please.”
    “Where have you been this hour?” she asked them.
    “I took another Dance,” said Jill.
    “I’ve been at Body Shaping,” said Amy. “Can’t you tell?”
    “I did think there was something about you,” said Carter.
    “I want to hear about T’ai Chi,” Amy said to Jill.
    “Laurie and I were wave and kelp.”
    “The lady from the hot tub?”
    Jill nodded. “You choose a partner, and one of you is kelp, and the other moves around you sort of bumping or pushing against your shoulder, or your hip, or behind your knee. Like the action of water, making the kelp bend and sway. Then you trade.”
    Five Fortunes / 31
    “Is this one of those horrible New Age things where you have to fall backward into someone’s arms?” Carter asked.
    “No, wait. When you’re kelp, you keep your eyes closed, because kelp can’t see, and you have to wait for the water to move you. What Laurie said is, you realize that the current can move you but after it moves on, you go back to standing. You bend with it, but you never break. You’re never defeated. Want me to show you?” Neither Carter nor Amy made any move to get up.
    “And who was it, who was your partner?”
    “You know—the one from the Japanese bath. The one from Idaho.”
    “Do you know her?” Amy asked Carter. “The tall woman, with the eyes?”
    “She’s down at the end of the pool, under the clock,” said Jill, and Carter looked and saw that it was the woman who had interested her, last night and this morning.
    “I’ve been thinking she looked familiar.”
    “We met her in the hot tub. There was a Governor Knox in Idaho when I was growing up. Hunt Knox. I think she must be a daughter.”
    Carter slapped the table lightly and leaned back in her chair.
    “You do know her?” Amy asked.
    “Now I do. She’s Laura Lopez. She was married to Roberto Lopez.”
    Amy said, “Oh god. Poor woman—no wonder she looks so sad.”
    She looked down the long pool toward Laurie, who was, as a matter of fact, smiling at something Rusty Haines was saying to her.
    “Who’s Roberto Lopez?” asked Jill.
    “Oh, honey—you know. He was that famous tennis star, he’s Mexican. I think he went into politics. He used to be on television, he had that fabulous smile? He advertised some soft drink. He was killed in a plane crash.”
    “About six months ago,” Carter said.
    Jill, saddened, turned to look at Laurie.
    “And they had a lot of children…”
    “Five,” said Carter. She remembered all about it now.
    C arter Bond and Rae Strouse found seats together at Monday lunch. The ladies were served outside at big shaded tables, in a walled garden bright with annuals. Only The Movie Star and her sidekick stayed behind in their chaise longues by the pool and had their lunch brought to them on trays.
    The flower beds in the walled garden were perfectly clean of weeds, tidy and well watered, and yet, as Rae remarked, you never saw anyone working in them, as if the sight of actual manual labor being performed outside the window might compromise your pleasure in hopping and sweating. But when did they do the work?
    At night?
    Rusty Haines joined Carter and Rae, along with her daughter Carol. Carter had liked Rusty enormously from the moment she began turning the wrong way more than Carter in dance class. They had spent an hour learning the weight machines in the gym together, and Carter now knew that Rusty