Alice & the Second Wife

Alice and her father’s second wife are going to the museum. When the second wife stoops to kiss Alice’s little brothers goodbye, Alice can see all the way up her skirt.

They are going to the museum so that Alice’s dad can get some quiet time. All morning, he’s made hushed phone calls in the next room, where he thinks she cannot hear. He’s inquiring after Alice’s mother, who has gone away.

“Have you been before?” the second wife asks as they wait at a street corner. Snow wreathes her hair without melting. She’s beautiful and always looks clean. Alice has met her only a few times, but this is her impression. Also, that she’s afraid of Alice.

“No,” Alice says. “I read a book about two kids who run away to live in the museum. I want to see the fountain and the bed.”

“Oh, but you know . . .” The second wife hesitates. “That’s not a real story. That’s fiction. Fiction means—” She stops and laughs at the face Alice gives her. “Sorry. I forget how much I knew at ten. I wish you were six. If you were six, we’d go to a doll café. They give the dolls their own chairs and tea, just their size. You’d like that.”

“I never liked dolls,” Alice says. The light changes and they can cross Madison Avenue. The second wife laughs again.

“You know, I asked your dad what kinds of things you like. He said you were a cool customer.”

This is pleasing. Alice stops on the curb to put on her winter gloves. From the sidewalk newsstand, a bearded man stares. The bearded man is always on the cover of the Times. Beneath him, three women, long-haired. PROSECUTION TO ASK DEATH.

The second wife sees Alice looking and flips the newspaper over to hide the man so only the tiny print shows. The newsstand vendor looks to object, and then doesn’t, because the second wife is beautiful. She smiles at him. She thrusts her hands into her pockets.

“Fortified?” she asks.

“Fortified,” Alice agrees.

The second wife is recently pregnant. She knows and the doctor knows and no one else. Bad luck to talk about a pregnancy too early, her mother taught her. Her mother and aunts would speak of such things at a whisper, intone mysteriously, “The rabbit died.”

Used to be, doctors would pump a woman’s urine into a sedated rabbit. If the rabbit’s ovaries swelled, that meant pregnancy. When the doctor told the second wife she was pregnant, she made a noise of surprise.

Catching herself, she explained: “I’m only sorry for the rabbit.”

She was softhearted, the doctor said. The rabbit died either way—that was how they got at its ovaries. Anyway, they didn’t do it that way anymore.

“This is 1971,” he said. “It’s all chemicals now.”

Still, she thinks of the rabbit’s curled form when she thinks of the baby. Through the pocket of her winter coat, she cups the little pouch of her belly and imagines a second heartbeat, leporine, frantic. She tells Alice to be careful as they ascend the big steps. “They ice easily in the winter.”

The girl looks back in scorn. Too old for dolls, she’s dressed like one, in a navy wool coat with Paddington toggles. The second wife imagines dropping to one knee in genuflection, beginning with the bottom fastener, doing her up. A motherly thing to do. Alice’s mother might have done the same, only three days ago, before she went away—though Alice seems unlikely to submit to such fussy ministrations.

A cool customer, Mark called her.

He specified: “A cold bitch in the making. Like her mother.”

They argued over this. The second wife doesn’t like the word bitch. Arguing with Mark is still thrilling, like stamping a foot on an icy pond to see if it holds.

“I’m sorry, Alice,” she says. “If I’m hovering, tell me to buzz off, all right?”

Alice removes her woolen cap in the lobby of the museum. Her hair crackles with static, yellow strands sticking out like a child’s drawing of the sun. She thrusts the cap at the second wife, who tucks it into her coat. She can do these things. Button buttons, collect discarded things. Hold a tissue and say “Blow,” gratefully receive the hot, wet slurry.

As they move through the atrium, Alice uses her library voice to tell the second wife about the kids living in the museum, how they stood on toilet seats to avoid detection, bathed in the coin fountain, slept nightly in a dead queen’s bed.

“You’re a good storyteller,” the second wife says. The snow has turned her hair to frizzy, hectic curls. When Alice looks at her too long, she gets nervous, asks, “What?”

The second wife reminds Alice of a dog who used to walk through the neighborhood, lean and skittish, retired from a racetrack. More afraid of you than you are of it, said Alice’s father, when he still lived there. It pleased Alice, who didn’t often strike fear, to feel the dog’s frail rib cage quake. She imagines that’s how the second wife looks under her coat.

Recently, Alice has started imagining people naked. She goes to a progressive school in Westchester where a woman visits to discuss sex via abstract diagram, a more complex architecture than the stick-figure shorthand of gender. Alice thinks of last year in third grade when they learned cursive, how the ordinary lines of print came alive, tucking in and flaring out again, touching at unexpected points.

She points. “Can we go that way? I want to find the bed.”

They come into a hallway of statues, cool and pale like chalk. Last year on a dare Alice took a bite from a stick of chalk, the texture like a Necco Wafer, the taste so concentrate and mineral that she coughed. Her breath was an explosion of white, a dragon’s plume. She expects these are not the kind of thoughts she’s meant to have when looking at art, but art doesn’t inspire much emotion in Alice. She is unmoved by her baby brothers’ morning cartoons, by the newsreels of crime and disaster that make her mother weep raptly.

Recently, all Alice’s mother does is cry.

These are Renaissance women, abundant and creased. The upper stomach is a roll, pressing against its lower half, coasting into the pubic mound. The breasts slope apart, and the buttocks dimple with ancient thumbprint. The plump wrist collides against the plump hand, the pudge creasing there, the hand round and benign as a baby’s. Babies again! She can’t stop. The second wife is a modern woman, but motherhood has taken her like a parasite, like the thing that compels a rat to run between a cat’s paws.

She had cats as a girl; they’d bring bloody parcels to the doorstep. Once, they brought her a mole, its hands and nose so perfectly pink that she mistook the creature for a rubber toy, picked it up, and screamed at the dying falter of its little heart. She dropped it; a cataclysmic fall.

“What do you think?” she asks.

“She’s tubby,” Alice says, nose wrinkled. “They’re all tubby.”

“Beauty standards were different. A full figure meant you could afford to eat.”

“Couldn’t afford clothes.” She surveys the splayed fingers, the lunar buttocks.

Perhaps this isn’t appropriate viewing for a child, even a chilly little child-thing like Alice. The second wife longs for the doll café. She imagines herself seated, Alice beside her and a doll beside Alice, each with their own proportionate table setting, a disassembled matryoshka. Her own mother used to make her milky tea so sweet it crunched.

“I didn’t think about it,” she admits. “Are you uncomfortable? We can go find some women with their clothes on.”

“I’m not uncomfortable,” Alice says.

She drifts. The second wife drifts after her, not wanting to hover, not wanting to lose her in the crowd. She imagines the horror of confessing to Mark. It’s strange enough to be here day-tripping, leaving him with the little boys, who are too young for the museum, too young to eavesdrop on his worried phone calls.

Busywork, she accused him. Mark was giving her busywork as if she were another child to keep occupied. He assured her of her helpfulness. Helping Alice take her mind off things. Hard to know how much she understands—cold bitch, he called her.

“This one is magnificent,” Alice says, standing before a huge woman with one breast exposed. She says the word magnificent like she’s trying it out. The second wife finds this sweet. She lifts her face to survey the statue, just as Alice does, and so they are matryoshka after all, goddess and woman and girl.

“I bet her arms got tired, posing like that,” the second wife says.

She demonstrates. Alice mimics. They stand with their arms above their heads, still as statues. Just when Alice’s arms begin to ache so badly that she must surrender, the second wife says, “Whoo!” and drops. Alice suspects she’s being allowed to win, but this is winning all the same. Blood tingles in her fingers.

“Did they really pose?” she asks. “It must have taken ages.”

The second wife shakes her head. She folds her coat through the crook of her elbow. She has a tall straight frame, hardly any hips or bosom. Her face is long, a little horsey.

“Usually they posed while the sculptor made sketches, just pencil on paper, to make sure he had the pose he wanted. Then the sculptor could take as long as he liked on the sculpting. It’s slow work, you know.”

“I know,” Alice says, though she didn’t. The logical explanation is not as pleasing as the imagined one. Often this is the case.

“I did some nude modeling in college,” the second wife says, “when I needed a little extra money. We girls would fight over who needed the cash most. You know, who had to buy a dress for their sorority formal, who had to take the train upstate every weekend to keep their boyfriend from cheating.”

Her smile is so cheery that Alice almost smiles back. She stops herself.

“You shouldn’t have told me that,” she says.

“Damn, really?” The second wife’s shoulders slump.

“I mean, my mother won’t like you telling me.”

She smiles chummily. “Well, who says you’ve got to tell her?”

“I say.”

Her mother likes to know. Alice likes to tell. Dad’s smoking again, she’ll report, and her mother will be incensed, and she’ll double-wash Alice’s clothes to remove the stink of smoke, and she’ll pour hot water from the kettle into a bowl and drape a towel over Alice’s head like a tent, and she’ll put her ear to Alice’s back to make sure she hasn’t gone asthmatic. She will coo and sing and cluck with love.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” the second wife says stiffly, like her feelings are hurt.

More afraid of you, Alice thinks, than you are of it.

Alice’s father makes phone calls. He makes a list and ticks off the names. He makes polite assurances. Probably nothing to worry about! Probably a miscommunication over which weekend the children are meant to visit. They’re still adjusting to this new way of living. He jokes—the modern family! No, he hasn’t spoken to the police just yet.

She’s gone three days now. He doesn’t want to overdramatize.

“I mean, you know what she’s like,” he says.

He doesn’t have to elaborate; his first wife’s friends are quick to agree. The most devoted mother they know. She adores those little children. She would never leave them. A mother leaving its child—not natural. Not ever.

These assurances are pointed. After all, it was he who up and left his family. But then, it’s not really the same. Even the first wife’s friends would admit as much. They wish him well. He promises to keep them updated, to pass their greetings along to his new wife. Each woman loyally pretends to forget her name.

At his feet, the little boys, Danny and Oliver, crawl and play. It’s a doctor game, holding an empty can of orange juice to each other’s lips, feeding each other poison so they die, then the remedy that makes them vomit and revive. They do this tirelessly. They take most joy in the vomiting. The can skitters across the room; Alice’s father kicks it away.

He’s been avoiding calling the first wife’s mother, his ex-mother-in-law. There’s no sense in this. He hasn’t done anything wrong. He armors himself with this: The first wife was tired of him. She hardly looked his way. She fed him on leftover children’s food, absently halving each grape before she put it on his plate, as though he’d choke.

“You better call the police,” the first wife’s mother advises, when he finally calls. “The hospitals too, I suppose.”

“Do you really think so?” the husband asks. He’s embarrassed. “Do you really think she’d do something drastic as that?”

“No,” she admits. “No, I don’t. I’m only being practical.”

He admires practicality. He amends his list: police, hospital.

“You might try the church too.”

“I’ve never known her to be religious,” he objects.

Always, he would find himself engaged in competition with his mother-in-law. Stupidly, he sought to prove he knew his wife best. The first wife did not eat cilantro, he’d explain to her mother, and his wife would insist that she did, would fill her plate twice over, would scold on the drive home that he’d hurt her mother’s feelings. He always lost these contests of love.

“She’s taken up with religion,” the mother-in-law says. “She’s been going regular.”

He hesitates with the receiver at his ear. On the rug, Danny has discovered a new facet to the game of pretend. He refuses to wake, no matter how insistently Oliver prods his slack mouth with the antidote. He goes on being dead.

“Do you think she’ll come back?” he asks.

“Oh yes,” the mother-in-law says. She sounds unafraid. “Oh yes, she wouldn’t leave the little ones. They need her very badly, you know.”

The second wife trails through paintings of the Annunciation, the angel and the mother and sometimes the baby, although surely the baby wasn’t there yet, having only just been announced.

She resents the painted baby, come early. She focuses on the Madonna instead—the mild, bovine eyes, that limp Sharon Tate middle-part that’s back in fashion. She misses her own mother, a kind of woman who no longer seems to exist, a woman who wore cuff links, carried a coin purse, tucked dried lavender into bureau drawers. She inspired a dazzling cruelty in the second wife, a violence exclusive to mothers and daughters.

“I haven’t done anything wrong, you know,” she says.

Alice looks up. Her woolly gloves, tucked into the second wife’s coat pocket, are small, damp. The gloves provoke some tenderness. She softens her tone.

“I understand you think I had something to do with your parents’ split, but I didn’t.”

“I know that,” Alice says. She rolls her eyes expressively. “That was so long ago.”

It’s hardly been a year, in fact, since the wedding. The second wife wouldn’t kiss Mark until he was divorced, wouldn’t sleep with him until the wedding night. She endeavored to do things right, to proceed unimpeachably. She was twenty-four when they met, twenty-five when they married. Mark is forty-four.

But then, a year is long when you only have ten to your name. Soon—she realizes, keeps realizing—she will parcel time into trimesters, months, weeks. No sooner heralded than here it is: a baby. A baby again and again.

“Your mother didn’t say anything before she put you on the train, Alice?” she asks. “Anything about where she was going?”

Alice shakes her head, drifting again. Painted men gather like sports spectators to watch an Apostle thrust his finger into Christ’s wounded side.

“Maybe she said something unkind that you don’t want to repeat?” she tries, not believing her own efforts. Alice would take pleasure in relaying unkindness. “I won’t mind. You can say.”

“I told Daddy. She only said about paying for a cab if we needed one. I want to see the bed. The bed from the story. Can we find a map?”

The second wife imagined this museum trip as a trial motherhood. Proof that she could keep a child alive for an afternoon, keep her happy, show her something worth seeing. All afternoon she’s been turning away, hoping that when she turns back, she’ll believe this girl is hers. If she were a mother herself or could pretend at being one, she might begin to feel something beyond bewilderment for the little beating thing in her belly—something beyond pity for the first wife, who has gone away and left her children behind.

After midday prayer, a postulant makes the first wife a cup of tea. They sit in the kitchen of the convent together. The kitchen is more industrial than the first wife expected, rather like a restaurant kitchen, with long counters and cans and informational posters about seasonal fruit. January is the best time for citrus: lemons, grapefruit, oranges.

The young postulant watches her look around.

The first wife will be forty next month. She was a young woman in the postwar years, the last good time to be a child. Now, things are bad and only getting worse. The first wife searches for proof, and every day there is fresh confirmation: Planes crashed. Ships sunk. The Manson fanfare. A baby in Brooklyn dead of malnutrition. A new trial for the Crimmins woman who killed her own children.

She followed the first Crimmins trial with grinding, dry-mouthed diligence. Ollie was a newborn then, and the veins in the first wife’s legs were painful and heavy. She did nothing but watch television, fascinated by the pretty woman who’d strangled her children to death.

Three days ago, the first wife bundled her children into their winter coats and tucked Kleenex into their pockets. She left a message with Mark’s secretary to say the children were coming. She wrote the name and address of Mark’s building on a sheet of paper and pinned it to Alice’s coat. She gave Alice money for cab fare in case Mark couldn’t meet them at the station. She secured the money, too, with a safety pin inside Alice’s pocket. The first wife wasn’t worried; she thought it would come out all right. It was a kind of predetermination.

The first wife came to religion late. Her devotional energy had always been directed at the children. Were they warm enough? Were they liked? Were they secretly wounded in all the ways the grocery-store psychology tracts warned of?

“They’ll learn they can push to get their way,” Mark would lament, “if you don’t stand up to them. Show a little spine.”

But she had no spine; she was warped through stooping, drooping, bending to heft a child to hip, to curl fingers into a wet mouth in pursuit of something not meant to be swallowed. She worshipped and despaired of them, their ability to whine, to cry tirelessly, to fall and hurt themselves, to recite lines from television. They thrust skinned knees and bumped elbows at her for kissing. They deposited half-chewed food into her palm when they didn’t wish to swallow. They wiped their noses on her, hovered a half step behind so she tripped on them, and then there were elbows to kiss again.

She recorded on index cards the sweet, cunning things they said, and tucked them in the recipe box. Their need for her was terrifying. She cried herself to sleep, thinking one day they wouldn’t need her. Then she recalled her need for her own mother, even now, the shaky, pathetic phone messages she left.

She was unhappy. She told her mother so. Mark was leaving her for a younger woman. Her mother suggested church. The first wife was resistant until she learned about the parish daycare where parents could deposit children each Sunday. An hour to yourself—longer, if you got the priest with dementia. An hour of nothing but standing and sitting and muttering in unison. The first wife became a regular.

Months later, she puts her children on the train to Grand Central, and she goes away.

“It’s not what I thought it’d be,” the first wife says.

“No,” the postulant agrees. She says little else. It’s been three days of quiet, though the sisters aren’t forbidden from speaking. The convent isn’t cloistered; the first wife did her research. She wants quiet, but not too much. She wants the children to visit once she’s settled.

She’s imagined it—the children trooping in shyly, dressed in their church clothes, and the first wife in her habit. Will Mark know to dress them in church clothes? She can’t trust the new wife to know what’s suitable. The first wife will mention it, maybe, when she writes home. She meant to call home on her first night, to avoid alarm, but she couldn’t bring herself.

She’s waiting for the assured, beatific feeling, and it hasn’t come.

Something deflated at first sight of the brick convent, the interchangeable uniformity of these women dressed the same. She can’t fix their names in memory. The postulant slips away. An older, matronly nun takes her place, and the first wife hardly notices. She begins to cry.

“Oh, none of that,” the nun says kindly. “It happens more than you think. Don’t worry too much. Drink your tea. Then we’ll talk about what to do.”

The first wife drinks her tea. Two young nuns climb the stairs from the cellar with a jar of pickled tomatoes. The fruits resemble squashy Valentine hearts, tenderly withered.

“It’s our first try preserving,” the young sister confesses, ruddy with pleasure. “They’re from our garden. We weren’t sure how they’d come out.”

“They’re beautiful,” the first wife says. She puts out her hand to touch the glass, and the nun draws away like a possessive child. Then she laughs, embarrassed.

“Try one,” she says. “We’ve got more in the cellar.”

“We’ll send a jar home with you,” the older nun says.

The first wife nods. She knows they won’t have her. The sisters skirt her as though she carries some worldly stain, as though her unhappiness is catching.

“Couldn’t I stay a few more days?” she asks. She is too well trained to ask for what she wants, but she asks all the same. “If you’ve got the room? I only want a little time.”

The matronly nun smiles firmly and shakes her head. “That’s just not possible.”

She knows, of course, what the first wife wants. The first wife imagines women arrive all the time, wanting to stay, wanting to get away from something, bruised or otherwise molested, caught in the melancholy that follows birth. The sister sends them all home again, by and by. Probably she’s glad to see them go—these poor, foolish women who find the world so difficult.

She pleads, “How can I go back? What am I meant to say?”

“You haven’t done anything irreversible,” the nun says. “Not yet. It will be like you never left. You’ll see.”

Sometimes Alice’s mother confides in her. Watching the news, she said aloud, “That man ought to be lynched, and the little sluts too.”

Then, hurriedly, “Don’t repeat that, Alice.”

There is nobody to tell, except the baby brothers. Sometimes Alice says filthy words to see if they’ll react. Some nights, she imagines terrible things befalling them and cries so hard that she’s hoarse come morning. She wakes vowing to be kinder, though mostly she fails.

Three days ago Alice’s mother stood on the train platform waving until they couldn’t see her anymore. The baby brothers didn’t cry as she disappeared.

“Don’t worry,” Alice said, and saw they were not worried.

“She’ll come back,” she tells the second wife. They’re searching the museum map for the bed from the story, where the brother and sister tucked themselves away each night, hidden from the nocturnal prowl of museum guards.

“Of course she will, honey,” the second wife says distractedly, frowning at the directory. Then she drops her frown and turns and says again, “Of course she will.”

Sometimes Alice likes to be humored. She pretended to believe in the tooth fairy for years just to watch her father sneak into the room on exaggerated tiptoe. She liked his false show of disapproval when she displayed her earnings: “Well, that’s far too much for one baby tooth!” After a while, she felt herself too dignified. She listened to her parents whisper outside her bedroom. She sat up in bed, waiting for them to open the door and see they were caught.

Waiting, she felt sorry. She would ruin their fun.

“You don’t know anything,” she tells the second wife. “I know it, that’s all. She needs us. She likes to take care of us.”

“Do you think so?” the second wife asks. She presses her lips together. “Of course she does. Can we stop for a bathroom break, Alice? Then we’ll find the bed you’re after.”

Alice imagines saying no. Would the second wife mind her? Would she go on holding her bladder until Alice gave her royal say-so? She imagines fleeing while the second wife is in the restroom, hiding herself among the exhibits, shutting herself into a sarcophagus, standing still among the statues so nobody sees her.

There’s a telephone carrel by the restroom. The second wife fishes quarters from the coin purse that was her mother’s. She calls the apartment; it rings only once, then Mark’s voice inquires, polite but urgent: “Yes, hello?”

Out of childish instinct, she hangs up.

The receiver clatters guiltily. Alice is standing a little apart, head cocked, watching. The pay phone begins to ring.

“I didn’t know they went both ways,” Alice says.

“Nor me,” the second wife agrees. She picks up the phone, and there is Mark’s voice again, clipped and direct now. He is saying the first wife’s name.

“No, I’m sorry,” she says stupidly. “I’m sorry, darling, it’s me. I tried to call, but the connection dropped.”

Her eyes flit to Alice, who meets her gaze and looks away, feigning innocence.

“Is everything all right? You’re having fun?” Mark asks.

She hears his impatience. How idiotic of her to call, to tie up the phone line when he’s trying to locate the children’s mother. How needy and foolish and unlike herself to make a claim for his attention like this.

“A real good time.” She smiles so her voice will sound smiley. “Isn’t that right, Alice?”

Alice doesn’t answer. She waits until the second wife hangs up.

“Has he found my mother?”

“He didn’t say,” the second wife says. She feels stupid anew. “I didn’t ask. I suppose not yet, Alice, or he would’ve said. You mustn’t worry.”

“I’m not worried.”

Stepping into the ladies’ room, the second wife goes foolish and superstitious. All week, her body has behaved this way, plunging suddenly into fear and heat and flutter. She prepares for the moment she’ll sit and find something in the lining of her panties—what, she hardly knows. She will feel sedate sorrow, easily named. She will plug herself with toilet tissue. She will take Alice’s hand and lead her through the museum. Anyone who looks will see a mother and her daughter.

She is clean when she sits. Her urine is free of blood.

When she steps out of the stall, Alice is looking at herself in the mirror. She’s a beautiful little girl, round-faced, sunny-haired. In the mirror, her eyes lift to meet the second wife’s. If Alice were a baby, she’d smile automatically. The second wife waits, but nothing happens—no gush of blood, no sudden love.

She says, “You should use the toilet.”

Alice shakes her head. “Don’t have to.”

“But you might,” she reasons, “in a little while, and I don’t want to stop somewhere on the walk home.”

“I won’t have to,” Alice says. “Are we leaving?”

“Yes, I think so,” the second wife says. “I think you’re tired.”

“I’m not. I want to find the bed,” Alice objects. “You said we could find it. You said.”

“It isn’t a real bed,” the second wife says. She turns the tap. “It’s only a story, Alice, for children. Fictional means—”

“I know what fictional means,” Alice says crossly, raising her voice over the sound of running water. “You’re being unfair. You’re being idiotic. You’re not in charge of me, you’re not anyone, you’re only some stupid slut.”

The second wife slaps her.

Belatedly, the rush of feeling. Within it, a shock of relief. The worst thing. There it is.

The second wife starts to cry. Alice watches in the mirror. She cries beautifully. Her face goes dewy and flushed.

Alice’s face is flushed too. She wears the slap like a spot of rouge.

“I’m sorry,” the second wife says. “I shouldn’t have done that, Alice.”

Alice gets her a paper towel. The second wife dabs her eyes. Despite the beautiful crying, Alice doesn’t like looking at her. Something inside her gets shrinking and ashamed. She steps into a toilet cubicle and shuts the door.

“You aren’t being very kind to me,” the second wife says. “That’s not an excuse, but you shouldn’t say that word, Alice. It’s not a nice thing for women to call each other.”

Alice doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to pee.

“I know that you’re worried about your mother,” the second wife says. Her feet plant outside the stall. “I know that’s why you’re acting this way. Will you come out?”

She taps at the door.

Alice tucks her skirt under her legs so her skin won’t touch the cold porcelain. Her mother taught her never to sit directly on a public toilet, showed her how to fashion a seat from toilet tissue, to flush with an elbow. From her mother, Alice knows there is a secret to everything—a clean and unflustered way of moving through the world.

“I’m not angry,” the second wife says. “I’m sorry. I thought I’d be better. Please come out, Alice.”

She knocks again. Alice pulls her knees to her chin so that her heels rest on the edge of the toilet seat, so no part of her touches the ground. This is how the children in the story sat while the museum closed around them. They ran away to live in the museum, and then they went home again.

“She’ll come back,” the second wife says. Briefly, her voice is ugly. “She won’t be able to help herself.”

She starts to say something else, but then the bathroom door opens. Through the crack of the stall, Alice sees the second wife straighten, turn. In the mirror, her reflected face changes. The newcomer makes a noise of charmed dismay at the sight of the second wife, the beautiful tears and the brave, womanly set of her shoulders.

“Oh, dear, what’s the matter? Can I help?”

“No, I’m sorry,” the second wife says. Her shoes turn to face the stall where Alice is hiding, and they turn away again. Her voice is rueful, choked—just right. “No. It’s nothing, only. I’ve lost my little girl.”

Read more from Issue 22.2.