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no-fault divorce! (What Wal ingford cal ed his favorite oxymoron.)
    In fact, Dr. Zajac agonized over his beloved child’s eating disorder and sought both medical and practical solutions to his son’s condition. (Hildred would barely acknowledge that her starved-looking son had a problem.) The boy’s name was Rudy; and on the weekends when he visited his father, he was often treated to the spectacle of Dr. Zajac force-feeding himself copious amounts of food, which Zajac would later vomit up in private, disciplined silence. But with or without his father’s example, Rudy hardly ate at al .
    One pediatric gastroenterologist cal ed for exploratory surgery to rule out any possible diseases of the colon.
    Another prescribed a syrup, an indigestible sugar that worked as a diuretic. A third suggested Rudy would outgrow the problem; it was the only gastroenterological advice that both Dr. Zajac and his ex-wife could accept.
    Meanwhile, Zajac’s former live-in housekeeper had quit—
    she could not bear to see the quantity of food that was thrown away every third Monday. Because Irma, the new live-in
    housekeeper,
    took
    offense
    at
    the
    word
    “housekeeper,” Zajac had been careful to cal her his

    “assistant,” although the young woman’s principal responsibilities were cleaning the house and doing the laundry. Maybe it was her obligatory daily retrieval of the dog turds from the yard that broke her spirit—the ignominy of the brown paper bag, her clumsiness with the child’s lacrosse stick, the menial nature of the task.
    Irma was a homely, sturdily built girl in her late twenties, and she’d not anticipated that working for a “medical doctor,” as Irma cal ed Zajac, would include such demeaning labor as combating the shitting habits of the Brattle Street dogs.
    It further hurt her feelings that Dr. Zajac thought she was a new immigrant for whom English was a second language.
    English was Irma’s first and only language, but the confusion came from what little Zajac could understand from overhearing her unhappy voice on the telephone.
    Irma had her own phone in her bedroom off the kitchen, and she was often talking at length to her mother or to one of her sisters late at night when Zajac was raiding the refrigerator. (The scalpel-thin surgeon limited his snacks to raw carrots, which he kept in a bowl of melting ice in the fridge.)
    To Zajac, it seemed that Irma was speaking a foreign language. Doubtless some interference to his hearing was caused by his constant chomping on raw carrots and the maddening tril of the caged songbirds throughout the house, but the primary reason for Zajac’s mistaken assumption was that Irma was always hysterical y crying when she spoke to her mother or sisters. She was recounting to them how humiliating it was to be consistently undervalued by Dr. Zajac. Irma could cook, but the doctor rarely ate regular meals. She could sew, but Zajac assigned the repair of his office and hospital clothing to his dry-cleaning service; what chiefly remained of his other laundry were the besweated clothes he ran in. Zajac ran in the morning (sometimes in the dark) before breakfast, and he ran again (often in the dark) at the end of the day.
    He was one of those thin men in their advancing forties who run along the banks of the Charles, as if they are eternal y engaged in a fitness competition with al the students who also run and walk in the vicinity of Memorial Drive. In snow, in sleet, in slush, in summer heat—even in thunderstorms—
    the wispy hand surgeon ran and ran. At five-eleven, Dr.
    Zajac weighed only 135 pounds. Irma, who was five-six and weighed about 150, was convinced that she hated him. It was the litany of how Zajac had offended her that Irma sang, sobbing into the phone at night, but the hand surgeon, overhearing her, thought: Czech? Polish?
    Lithuanian?
    When Dr. Zajac asked her where she was from, Irma indignantly answered,
    “Boston!” Good for her! Zajac concluded. There is