My sister went to the M Clinic today. Since she rarely goes to see anyone except Dr. Nikaido, she was nervous about the appointment. She had put it off, worrying about what she should wear and how she should speak to the doctor, until it was the last day they'd be seeing patients this year. This morning, she was still fussing.

"I wonder how many months of temperature charts I should show them?" She looked up distractedly from the breakfast table but made no move to get up.

"Why not take all of them?" I answered.

"But that's two years' worth," she said, her voice rising as she churned her spoon in the yogurt. "Twenty-four charts, and only a few days that have anything to do with the pregnancy. I think I'll just show them this month's."

"Then what was the point of taking your temperature every day for two years?"

"I can't stand the thought of some doctor pawing through them right there in front of me, as if he were trying to find out every detail of how I got pregnant." She studied the yogurt clinging to her spoon. It shimmered, viscous and white, as it dripped back into the container.

"You're making too big a deal out of it," I said, covering the yogurt and putting it back in the refrigerator. "They're just charts."

In the end, she decided to take all the charts, but it took her some time to find them.

I'm not sure why, when she was meticulous about taking her temperature, she was so careless with the charts themselves. The sheets of graph paper, which should have been kept in her bedroom, would stray to the magazine rack or the telephone stand, and I'd suddenly come across them as I was flipping through the newspaper or making a phone call. I realize now that there was something odd about my finding these scraps of paper with their jagged lines and telling myself, She must have ovulated then, or Her basal temperature stayed low this month.

My sister had chosen the M Clinic for sentimental reasons. I'd tried to get her to go somewhere bigger and better equipped, but she had made up her mind. "When we were kids, I decided that if I ever had a baby, I'd have it there," she said.

The M Clinic was a small, private maternity hospital that had been around since our grandfather's day. When my sister and I were girls, we had often sneaked into the garden to play. From the front, the three-story wooden building was gloomy, with moss-covered walls, a half-faded sign, and frosted windows. But if you made your way to the garden around the back, it was bright and sunny. For some reason, this contrast thrilled us.

There was a carefully tended lawn behind the building, and we loved to roll down it. As I rolled, glimpses of green grass and dazzling sky alternated in my vision, blurring to a pale turquoise. Then the sky and the wind and the earth would recede for a moment and I felt as if I were floating in space. I loved that moment.

But our favorite pastime was spying on what was happening inside the clinic. Climbing on stacks of empty boxes that had once held gauze or cotton balls, we'd stare through the window into the examination room.

"We'll get in trouble if they catch us," I said. I was always more timid than my sister.

"Don't worry, they won't do anything. We're just kids," she'd say, calmly rubbing the glass with her sleeve to wipe away the condensation from our breath. As we pressed our faces up against the window, we could smell the white paint inside. That odor, like an ache deep in my head, still reminds me of the clinic after all these years.

The room was always empty at midday, before the afternoon appointments began, and we could study it to our hearts' content. A collection of bottles arranged on an oval tray seemed particularly mysterious. They had no caps or seals, just glass stoppers, which I felt an irresistible urge to pull out. The bottles had been stained brown or purple or deep red by the fluids they held, and when the sunlight shone through them, the liquid seemed to glisten.

A stethoscope and some tongs and a blood-pressure cuff lay on the doctor's desk. The thin, twisting tube, dull silver fittings, and pear-shaped rubber bulb of the cuff made it look like a strange insect nestled among the other instruments. There was an odd beauty in the unintelligible letters printed on the medical charts. Next to the desk was a simple bed made up with faded sheets. A square pillow lay in the middle. It looked quite hard, and I wondered what it would be like to sleep on. A poster on the wall read "Position for use in treating breech presentation." In the picture, a woman in a leotard was curled up in a ball on the floor. She lay there in the yellowed poster, staring vacantly into the distance. Then the chimes from a school somewhere in the neighborhood would start ringing, telling us that it was time for the afternoon examinations. We knew that we had to leave when we heard the nurses coming back from lunch.

"Do you know what they do on the second and third floors?" I asked my sister one day.

"That's where they have the cafeteria and the rooms for the mothers and babies," she answered, as if she'd just been up to have a look.

Sometimes we could see women at the windows on the third floor. They had probably just given birth. They had on thick bathrobes, and their hair was pulled back in ponytails. None of them wore makeup. Wisps of hair floated around their temples, and their faces were expressionless. I wondered why they didn't seem happier at the prospect of sleeping above an examination room full of such fascinating objects.

My sister came back before noon, and I found her in the front hall just as I was getting ready to leave for work.

"What did they say?"

"I'm in the second month-exactly six weeks."

"Can they really tell that precisely?"

"They can when they have all the charts," she said, pulling off her coat and hurrying past me. She didn't seem particularly excited by the news. "What's for dinner?"

"Bouillabaisse," I said. "The clams and squid were cheap."

She had changed the subject so quickly that I completely forgot to congratulate her. But, then again, I wasn't quite sure congratulations were appropriate for a baby who would be born to my sister and her husband. I looked up "congratulate" in the dictionary: it said, "to wish someone joy."

"That doesn't mean much," I muttered, tracing my finger over a line of characters that held no promise of joy themselves.

Since I was a little girl, I've disliked the thirtieth of December. I could always get through the thirty-first by telling myself that the year was finally over, but the thirtieth was confusing somehow, neither here nor there. Cooking the traditional New Year's dinner, cleaning the house, shopping-none of my tasks were completely finished.

When my father and mother got sick and died, one right after the other, my ties to the New Year's season became even more tenuous. Nor did things change when my brother-in-law came to live with us. Still, breakfast this morning was a bit more relaxed than usual, since I didn't have classes and my brother-in-law's office was closed for the holiday.

"When you haven't had enough sleep, even the winter sun seems too bright," he said, squinting behind his glasses as he lowered himself into a chair. The light shining in from the garden fell on the table, and our three pairs of slippers cast long shadows across the floor.

"Were you out late?" I asked. He'd gone to the year-end party for the dental office where he works, and I must have been asleep by the time he got home.

"I caught the last train," he said. As he picked up his cup, a sweet smell wafted across the table. He puts so much cream and sugar into his coffee that the kitchen smells like a bakery at breakfast. I've often wondered how someone who makes bridges and dentures for a living can drink such sweet coffee without worrying about cavities. "The last train is worse than the rush-hour ones," he added. "It's always packed, and everyone's drunk." My sister scraped her butter knife over her toast.