Ordinary Love and Good Will Read Free

thing, like stepping off a high diving board, is to roll right past it and discover myself ten minutes later at another mall, melting ice cream and acidophilus milk notwithstanding.
    The mirrors behind window displays reveal me, and for a while I stand staring at myself without realizing what I am looking at. In fact, an anniversary is passing thisweekend—it is twenty years since Pat and I parted. If my children notice, they will undoubtedly not mention it. I won’t mention it, either, though this time of year often makes me think of that life.
    I loved having twins, even though there were three children under five years old already running around the place. We lived in a huge old house on five acres of ground. My favorite moment of the day was in the morning, when I would be lying in bed, nursing the twins, one on each side, and then the other children would come and climb under the covers, and the dogs, too. I would be buried in flesh and noise, all thoughts scattered. We were twenty-seven, and drunk with the immensity of the world we had already made.
    Pat’s pediatric-allergy research was celebrated. Work he did led to the discovery that the newborn’s stomach wall is a semipermeable membrane, and that nonhuman milk can cross undigested into the child’s body and set up an allergic reaction. But his great hero was Piaget. He loved the idea that a child’s brain development was orderly, a natural perpetual-motion machine that only had to be set going once. If anyone objected to this image as too mechanistic, he would say, “The mind is a palpable thing, as physical as anything else. It doesn’t create order, it is order. It also FEELS order. Order feels good. Thinking feels good. Mmmm.” (He’d rub his hands over his head, the children would laugh.) “Brains are in no danger of getting mechanical, but someday machines are going to be fleshy.” He also loved the idea of researching his own children, but he recognized that even Piaget’s sample would be considered laughably small these days. In the
Guinness Book of World Records
, there was a Russian woman who had sixty-nine children. This didn’t seem impossible to Pat.
    No matter how busy he was, Pat insisted on a nightly family dinner, and he was sparkling at the table. No matterhow young the children were, he addressed them with arresting hypotheses, pointed questions, opinions about their opinions. He was wooing them. He wooed me the same way. And, really, it was hard to take your eyes from his face, whether you were his child or his wife.
    Well, in the midst of all of this, I fell in love with a man in our neighborhood. Pat sold the house and took the children to England, and my life was utterly formless, nothing, so close to nonbeing that I was surprised to find my clothes in the closet every morning. When I remember that time, twenty years ago now, the light around me seems to have been blinding. Shades could not be drawn against it. I seem to be walking down a city sidewalk and lost in the glare. I seem always to be waking up in the middle of the night, terrified to find all the lights on in my extraordinary new apartment. There is no known cause that speaks to what that time seemed like to me. It cannot be understood, really, only re-experienced unexpectedly. That sometimes happens to me.
    Pat stopped doing allergy research twelve years ago, after the axle on his van broke near Winter Park, Colorado, and the van rolled over the side of the road and down into the valley. No fire, thank God. Annie, Michael, Tatty (Pat’s second wife), their two children (Sara, Kenny), and Daniel were sprayed over the mountainside like a handful of gravel. Michael, Tatty, and Daniel got up and walked away. Annie broke her leg, Sara broke some ribs and her pelvis, Kenny and Pat were knocked unconscious. The little boy came to about three days later, but Pat was out for three and a half weeks, and when he came to, thinking didn’t feel so good anymore—neither as