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of her with me—that mingled odor of loose powder and Shalimar and wool.
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    It is impossible to divine a story while you are living it; it is shapeless; an inchoate procession of words and things, and let us be frank: We never recover what was. Most of it vanishes. And yet, as I sit here at my desk and try to bring it back, that summer not so long ago, I know turns were made that affected what followed. Some of them stand out like bumps on a relief map, but then I was unable to perceive them because my view of things was lost in the undifferentiated flatness of living one moment after another. Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia. Consciousness is the product of delay. Sometime in early June, during the second week of my stay, I made a small turn without being aware of it, and I think it began with the secret amusements.
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    Abigail had arranged for me to see her handicrafts. Her apartment was smaller than my mother’s and, at first glance, I felt inundated by the shelves of tiny glass figurines, the embroidered pillows and wall signs (“Home Sweet Home”), and the multicolored quilts folded over furniture. Various artworks covered most of the walls and Abigail herself, who was decked out in a long loose dress embellished with what appeared to be an alligator and other creatures. Despite the dense arrangements, the room had that neat, newly dusted, proud feeling I had come to expect from the swans of Rolling Meadows. Because she could no longer stand upright, Abigail used a walker to deftly propel herself around in the doubled-over position. She opened the door, shifted her head sideways to eye me, and, fingering her hearing aid with her free hand, looked intently in my direction. The auditory devices were not like the ones my mother wore; they were much larger and protruded from her ears like great dark flowers. Thick cords dangled from them, and I wondered whether these were extra technology for her extreme deafness or a throwback to an earlier era. Although not nearly so big, the contraptions reminded me of ear trumpets in the nineteenth century. She settled me into a chair, offered me cookies and a glass of milk, as if I were seven, and then, without any preliminaries, she brought forth the two works she had selected for me to examine and placed one on top of the other on my lap. Then she slowly made her way to the green sofa and carefully deposited herself in a position that was painful to look at, but her cheerful, direct expression mitigated my discomfort, and I picked up the top piece.
    “That’s an old one,” she said. “Doesn’t bother me. That’s the best I can say. At least that one doesn’t bother me. After I put them up, some of them get to bothering me, and then I have to put them away, go right in the closet. Well, what do you think?”
    After taking out my reading glasses, I looked down at an elaborate scene of what appeared to be a cliché: In the foreground a cherubic blond boy made of felt cutouts danced with a bear against a background of riotous flower patterns. Over him was a yellow sun with a smiling face. Happy-wappy, I thought. The derisive expression was Bea’s. But then as I continued to look, I noticed that behind the dull boy, nearly hidden by leaf patterns, was a tiny girl embroidered into fabric, her form rendered in threads of muted colors. Wielding an oversized open pair of scissors as a weapon, she grinned malevolently at a sleeping cat. Then I noticed a set of pale pink winged dentures above her that, without scrutiny, could have been mistaken for petals, and a gray-green skeleton key. As I continued to investigate the shapes in the foliage, I saw what appeared to be a pair of naked breasts in a little window and soon after some words, the letters of which were so small