“They taper off,” he said vaguely. “I think I read that in Spock. He'll be using two forks again by the time he's seven.”

They had stopped on the top step.

“He's pushing awfully hard on those readers, too,” she said. “I know he wants to learn how, to please us… to please you,” she added reluctantly.

“To please himself most of all,” Jack said. “I haven't been pushing him on that at all. In fact, I do wish he wouldn't go quite so hard.”

“Would you think I was foolish if I made an appointment for him to have a physical? There's a G. P. in Sidewinder, a young man from what the checker in the market said-”

“You're a little nervous about the snow coming, aren't you?”

She shrugged. “I suppose. If you think it's foolish-”

“I don't. In fact, you can make appointments for all three of us. We'll get our clean bills of health and then we can sleep easy at night.”

“I'll make the appointments this afternoon,” she said.

“Mom! Look, Mommy!”

He came running to her with a large gray thing in his hands, and for one comic-horrible moment Wendy thought it was a brain. She saw what it really was and recoiled instinctively.

Jack put an arm around her. “It's all right. The tenants who didn't fly away have been shaken out. I used the bug bomb.”

She looked at the large wasps' nest her son was holding but would not touch it. “Are you sure it's safe?”

“Positive. I had one in my room when I was a kid. My dad gave it to me. Want to put it in your room, Danny?”

“Yeah! Right now!”

He turned around and raced through the double doors. They could hear his muffled, running feet on the main stairs.

“There were wasps up there,” she said. “Did you get stung?”

“Where's my purple heart?” he asked, and displayed his finger. The swelling had already begun to go down, but she ooohed over it satisfyingly and gave it a small, gentle kiss.

“Did you pull the stinger out?”

“Wasps don't leave them in. That's bees. They have barbed stingers. Wasp stingers are smooth. That's what makes them so dangerous. They can sting again and again.”

“Jack, are you sure that's safe for him to have?”

“I followed the directions on the bomb. The stuff is guaranteed to kill every single bug in two hours' time and then dissipate with no residue.”

“I hate them,” she said.

“What… wasps?”

“Anything that stings,” she said. Her hands went to her elbows and cupped them, her arms crossed over her breasts.

“I do too,” he said, and hugged her.

16. Danny

Down the hall, in the bedroom, Wendy could hear the typewriter Jack had carried up from downstairs burst into life for thirty seconds, fall silent for a minute or two, and then rattle briefly again. It was like listening to machinegun fire from an isolated pillbox. The sound was music to her ears; Jack had not been writing so steadily since the second year of their marriage, when he wrote the story that Esquire had purchased. He said he thought the play would be done by the end of the year, for better or worse, and he would be moving on to something new. He said he didn't care if The Little School stirred any excitement when Phyllis showed it around, didn't care if it sank without a trace, and Wendy believed that, too. The actual act of his writing made her immensely hopeful, not because she expected great things from the play but because her husband seemed to be slowly closing a huge door on a roomful of monsters. He had had his shoulder to that door for a long time now, but at last it was swinging shut.

Every key typed closed it a little more.

“Look, Dick, look.”

Danny was hunched over the first of the five battered primers Jack had dug up by culling mercilessly through Boulder's myriad secondhand bookshops. They would take Danny right up to the second-grade reading level, a program she had told Jack she thought was much too ambitious. Their son was intelligent, they knew that, but it would be a mistake to push him too far too fast. Jack had agreed. There would be no pushing involved. But if the kid caught on fast, they would be prepared. And now she wondered if Jack hadn't been right about that, too.

Danny, prepared by four years of “Sesame Street” and three years of “Electric Company,” seemed to be catching on with almost scary speed. It bothered her. He hunched over the innocuous little books, his crystal radio and balsa glider on the shelf above him, as though his life depended on learning to read. His small face was more tense and paler than she liked in the close and cozy glow of the goosenecked lamp they had put in his room. He was taking it very seriously, both the reading and the workbook pages his father made up for him every afternoon. Picture of an apple and a peach. The word apple written beneath in Jack's large, neatly made printing. Circle the right picture, the one that went with the word. And their son would stare from the word to the pictures, his lips moving, sounding out, actually sweating it out, And with his double-sized red pencil curled into his pudgy right fist, he could now write about three dozen words on his own.

His finger traced slowly under the words in the reader. Above them was a picture Wendy half-remembered from her own grammar school days, nineteen years before. A laughing boy with brown curly hair. A girl in a short dress, her hair in blond ringlets one hand holding a jump rope. A prancing dog running after a large red rubber ball. The first-grade trinity. Dick, Jane, and Jip.

“See Jip run,” Danny read slowly. “Run, Jip, run. Run, run, run.” He paused, dropping his finger down a line. “See the…” He bent closer, his nose almost touching the page now. “See the…”

“Not so close, doc,” Wendy said quietly. “You'll hurt your eyes. It's-”

“Don't tell me!” he said, sitting up with a jerk. His voice was alarmed. “Don't tell me, Mommy, I can get it!”

“All right, honey,” she said. “But it's not a big thing. Really it's not.”

Unheeding, Danny bent forward again. On his face was an expression that might be more commonly seen hovering over a graduate record exam in a college gym somewhere. She liked it less and less.

“See the… buh. Aw. El. El. See the buhaw-el-el? See the buhawl. Ball!” Suddenly triumphant. Fierce. The fierceness in his voice scared her. “See the ball!”

“That's right,” she said. “Honey, I think that's enough for tonight.”

“A couple more pages, Mommy? Please?”

“No, doc.” She closed the red-bound book firmly. “It's bedtime.”

“Please?”

“Don't tease me about it, Danny. Mommy's tired.”

“Okay.” But he looked longingly at the primer.

“Go kiss your father and then wash up. Don't forget to brush.”

“Yeah.”

He slouched out, a small boy in pajama bottoms with feet and a large flannel top with a football on the front and NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS written on the back.

Jack's typewriter stopped, and she heard Danny's hearty smack. “Night, Daddy.”

“Goodnight, doc. How'd you do?”

“Okay, I guess. Mommy made me stop.”

“Mommy was right. It's past eight-thirty. Going to the bathroom?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. There's potatoes growing out of your ears. And onions and carrots and chives and-”

Danny's giggle, fading, then cut off by the firm click of the bathroom door. He was private about his bathroom functions, while both she and Jack were pretty much catch-as-catch-can. Another sign-and they were multiplying all the time- that there was another human being in the place, not just a carbon copy of one of them or a combination of both. It made her a little sad. Someday her child would be a stranger to her, and she would be strange to him… but not as strange as her own mother had become to her. Please don't let it be that way, God. Let him grow up and still love his mother.

Jack's typewriter began its irregular bursts again.