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was exhilarating, being married. A married woman. Not an Old Maid. She had her own home, her own husband.
    Their tiny first apartment was close enough to the shipyard so she could hear the noontime whistle. Now he’s opening his lunch bucket, she’d say to herself when she heard the whistle’s wail, now he’s biting into the bologna sandwich she put in the icebox last night, now he’s swigging coffee still hot from his thermos. Somehow that knowledge made her proud. She was a wife.
    She became pregnant before their first anniversary. Not surprising, considering the time they spent in bed—every night and all weekend. But she liked that. She liked the feel of his muscular bulk rising above her, the way his black curls tightened up with sweat, the knowing that it was her lips, her breasts, her thighs, that brought him to this, this ecstatic falling away, this loss of control. It was sweet, the power she had.
    As she swelled with baby, the days took on meaning, the waiting gave substance to her life. She was busy now growing a life, and that gave her own life focus. Dusting, baking, feeding bed-sheets through the wringer of the washing machine—the motions of housekeeping became golden rituals, homage to hearth and home, the coming of new life.
    “Your belly button’s popped out,” Pete noted one day as she stood at the sink brushing her teeth.
    She looked down. There it was, her belly button, inside out. It looked like a dwarf’s thumb, hitchhiking.
    “Will it go back?” he asked. He seemed worried.
    She mashed it in. It collapsed softly but sprang back. “I guess,” she said. “After the baby’s out.”
    “It better,” he said.
    After that, it was hard to feel pretty. The belly-button bump showed through the thin cotton of her maternity tops. She grew bigger and bigger and began to waddle, could never get comfortable at night, thrashed wildly, half-awake, dreaming of triplets.
    “Ow! Stop flopping,” he complained after she bopped him on the nose during a particularly frenzied night. “You’re such a whale.”
    Well, she
was
a whale, she thought, lying on her back, herstomach rising pale and immense above the rest of her, crowned by that popped-out navel. She stared up at it in self-pity until her view fuzzed over with tears that trickled into her ears. “I’m
fat,”
she bawled. He didn’t disagree.
    WHEN LORENA WAS in her ninth month the circus came to town. The Little Top Traveling Circus wasn’t big, but it was big enough to have two tightrope walkers, a gorilla that rode a bicycle, and a bunch of either midgets or dwarfs, she never could remember which was which.
    And it had a freak show.
    She stood outside the freak-show tent and stared at the poster of the Half Lady and the Penguin Girl and the Alligator Man. “Come on,” Pete said. “Let’s look.”
    “I don’t want to,” Lorena said. She could smell sawdust, candy cotton, and the pork-rind breath of the man behind her who was pushing her in line. She felt her belly stretch and shift until it seemed to inflate and surround her like a life preserver. She felt very far away, as if she were floating above the shoving crowd. No, she didn’t want to look at the freaks.
    “Come on,” Pete insisted, and propelled her inside, flipping a couple of quarters to the sideshow barker, who snapped off two red tickets from the big roll. Inside, the tent was murky and dank. When she became accustomed to the dimness, she realized she was standing right in front of the half lady, whose shiny satin dress ended at the hips and so did she. Even though she was perched on a stool, she came up to Lorena’s chin.
    Lorena planted her feet in the sawdust and gawked. The half lady’s hair was rigid with ringlets, rather stylish for a freak. She lifted her face to Lorena’s, a face that could have been anyone’s face, nothing special, nothing strange. Wide flat cheeks flamed with dots of rouge. Small pointed chin, its dent a shadow in the weak spotlight. Her