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said. “Talk to me some more.” But Ben didn’t say much more.
    —
    Yvette arrived. She had fine features and large eyes, but she looked anxious, and her hair was always damp “from visions and insomnia” she told Constance. She entertained Charlotte and Jill by telling them the entire plot line from
General Hospital
. She read the palms of their grubby hands.
    “Constitutionally, I am more or less doomed to suffer,” Yvette said, pointing to deep lines running down from the ball of her own thumb. But she assured the girls that they would be happy, that they would each have three husbands and be happy with them all. The girls made another list. Jill had William, Daniel and Jean-Paul. Charlotte had Eric, Franklin and Duke.
    Constance regarded the lists. She did not want to think of her little girls as wives in love.
    “Do you think Yvette is beautiful,” Constance asked Ben.
    “I don’t understand what she’s talking about,” Ben said.
    “You don’t have to understand what she’s talking about to think she’s beautiful,” Constance said.
    “I don’t think she’s beautiful,” Ben said.
    “She told me that Steven said that the meanings of her words were telepathic and cumulative.”
    “Let’s go downtown and get some gum,” Ben said.
    The two of them walked down to Main Street. Hundreds of people thronged the small town. “Jerry!” a woman screamed from the doorway of a shop. “I need money!” There was slanted parking on the one-way street, the spaces filled with cars that were either extremely rusted or highly waxed and occupied by young men and women playing loud radios.
    “What a lot of people,” Constance said.
    “There’s a sphere of radio transmissions about thirty light-years thick expanding outward at the speed of light, informing every star it touches that the world is full of people,” Ben said.
    Constance stared at him. “I’ll be glad when the summer’s over,” she said.
    “I can’t remember very many Augusts,” Ben said. “I’m really going to remember my Augusts from now on.”
    Constance started to cry.
    “I can’t talk to you,” Ben said. They were walking back home. A group of girls wearing monogrammed knapsacks pedaled past on bicycles.
    “That’s not talking,” Constance said. “That’s shorthand, just a miserable shorthand.”
    In the kitchen, Yvette was making the girls popcorn as she waited for Steven. She chattered away. The girls gazed at her raptly. Yvette said, “I love talking to strangers. As you grow older, you’ll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.”
    Late that night, Constance woke to hear music from Steven’s tape deck in the next room. The night was very hot. Beyond the thin curtains was a fat bluish moon.
    “That’s the saddest piece of music I’ve ever heard,” Constance said. “What is that music?”
    Ben said, “It’s pretty sad all right.”
    The children came into the room and shook Constance’s shoulder. “Mummy,” Jill said, “we can’t sleep. Yvette told us that last year she tried to kill herself with a pair of scissors.”
    “Oh!” cried Constance, disgusted. She took the girls back to their room. They all sat on a bed and looked out the window at the moon.
    “Yvette said that if the astronaut Gus Grissom hadn’t died on the ground in the Apollo fire, he would probably have died on the moon of a heart attack,” Charlotte told Constance. “Yvette said that Gus Grissom’s arteries were clogged with fatty deposits, and that he carried within himself all the prerequisites for tragedy. Yvette said that if Gus Grissom had had a heart attack on the moon, nobody in the whole world would be able to look up into the sky with the same awe and wonder as before.”
    Jill said, “Yvette said all things happen because they must happen.”
    “I’d like to sock Yvette in the teeth,” Constance said.
    —
    Constance had not seen Steven for days. She had only heard the sound of his