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red.”
    “It’s not the money.”
    “It is. We can’t afford for you to work.”
    “I need something.”
    “And Billy needs a stable home. Shit, Joanna, a few years more, that’s all. You want him to get all screwed up?”
    In other respects, Ted was as flexible as any of the other husbands in their sphere, even more so. He took Billy to the park, he prepared some of the meals, short-order cooking from his bachelor days. He had moved to a point of domestic participation beyond that of his father in the old neighborhood and the men of that generation. But in the one fundamental area of Joanna’s working, he was, in Billy’s terms, somewhere to the right of Fred Flintstone.
    She brought up the subject at random times—his position never changed.
    “Look, why don’t we settle it and make another baby?”
    “I’m going to sleep. You can start without me.”
    She passed her time in logistics, shopping, cooking, buying clothes, bringing Billy here, taking him there. She played tennis. And the time passed—slowly, but it passed. She was thirty-two years old. She had a little boy who was going to be four. She was happiest with him when he went to sleep peacefully and she would not have to fight with him any more on such issues as how she fucked up with the peanut butter.
    She found magazine articles to validate her situation. She was not a freak. Other mothers, a few of them anyway, felt as she did. This being a mother, staying at home was not easy. It was boring, she had a right to be angry, she was not alone in this. Living in New York City, they were the provincial ones, she and Thelma and Amy sitting around playgrounds waiting for their children to grow up before five o’clock and the lamb chops.
    Ted knew she was restive. He believed he was helping by assisting around the house. He talked to other men, to Marv, the Newsweek salesman who told him his own marriage was shaky, he did not know of anyone’s that wasn’t. They were moving to the suburbs to start over. Jim O’Connor, his advertising manager, married for twenty-five years, revealed The Answer at the water cooler, “Women are women,” he said, a guru with midday scotch on his breath. Ted did not have many arguments with Joanna—it was more of a frost that lingered. She was cross at times, too tired for sex, then so was he. Nobody seemed to be doing better. He met dentist Charlie for lunch, the first time they had ever talked alone and not about children. “Joanna and I—it’s so-so …” Charlie nodded knowingly. Dentists—solid citizens. He told Ted his Answer. He had been sleeping with his dental hygienist for two years, making it right in the dentist chair—temporary fillings.
    Against all this, Ted was convinced they had as good a marriage as anybody. Perhaps it was his fault she had been remote. He had been preoccupied with work, been distant himself. She was still so beautiful. They should have another baby, which would bring them closer, as they were that one moment when Billy was born. And they should not wait. Ted and Joanna and Billy and another little beautiful person. They would be a real family, touring the city on their bikes, looking like an ad. The first years were difficult, but it gets easier and they had been through it once, which would help. And if they could get this over with soon, in a few years they would be out of infancy and they would have this beautiful family, his beautiful wife, his beautiful children. And so, to be complete in some way, to create a perfect universe with himself at the center, husband, father, his domain—for all the old, buried feelings of not being attractive, for all the times his parents were disapproving, for all the years he struggled to place himself—he would have something special, his beautiful little empire, which he, in his self-delusion, was going to build out of sand from a sandbox.
    “I WANT A CHARLIE Brown tablecloth.”
    “Yes, Billy.”
    “I want hats like Kim had. Everybody