Loud stomping noises sent her running to the kitchen. Justin had scarfed down most of the Teddy Grahams, then dumped the rest of them on the floor and spritzed them with milk from the three little holes in the Tommee Tippee cup. Now he was having a high old time smashing them up. “Mud!” he told Nicole, delighted.

“No, not mud,” she barely managed not to scream at him. “Mess. Naughty. No-no!” Her hand itched to give him a good solid spanking.

No. She wouldn’t do it. She didn’t believe in it. A good parent had no need to strike a child to make it behave.

Not that she was a perfect parent, either. She’d smacked Justin and Kimberley once or twice, more because she was at the end of her rope than because they had done anything extraordinarily hideous. Each time she’d felt horrible, and each time she’d thanked heaven she hadn’t seemed to do them any lasting harm.

She pried Justin’s Reeboks off him and carried them over to the sink. Their soles, though formed in miniature, had as many gripping cups and ridges and grooves as those on the shoes she wore on weekends. Milk-smeared chocolate crackers had got into all of them, and refused stubbornly to be scrubbed out. Finally, she found an old toothbrush that did the job – bristle by bristle, crumb by crumb, and ridge by ridge.

The floor was just as delightful. Paper towels and Formula 409 disposed of most of the mess, but, sure as hell, some of the sodden Teddy Graham crumbs had slithered down between the tiles. She had to rout them out with the toothbrush, too. She couldn’t just let them go. Teddy Grahams were worse than mud. A lot worse, all things considered. If she didn’t scour out every speck, by morning the kitchen would be swarming with ants.

By the time she was through cleaning, the chicken nuggets and French fries and her own Lean Cuisine shrimp-and-boring-vegetables were ready. She carefully cut the chicken and potatoes into bite-sized bits for her son and let him practice impaling them with a fork. After four or five bites, he was picking, not eating: the Teddy Grahams had taken their toll on him along with his shoes and the floor.

She’d managed two bites from the tray in front of her (too much sodium, and low-fat only by comparison to some of the other frozen food out there) when the telephone rang. She got up so fast, she almost overturned her bottle of Evian. Maybe Frank would come through after all. Stranger things had happened.

“Hello?” she panted, breathless from the dash to the bedroom.

“Hello, is this Nicole?” asked a friendly and completely unfamiliar male voice.

“Yes,” Nicole said warily. “Who is this, please?”

“My name’s Bob Broadman, Nicole.” Too friendly. “Now, I know that a busy homemaker like yourself doesn’t have a lot of time, so I’ll make this quick for you, all right, Nicole?” Way too friendly. “Would you be interested in trying in your own home – ”

Nicole slammed the receiver into its cradle. She hated telemarketers. She particularly hated telemarketers who, hearing a female voice, assumed the person who owned it was a housewife. She most particularly hated telemarketers who did all that and – insult on top of injury – called at dinnertime.

Her gaze fell again on Liber and Libera. She could have sworn they looked back at her with sympathy in their stony eyes. The thought wasn’t so absurd as it might have seemed before she went through this day from hell. Nobody in their time could have had to put up with what she’d just put up with. Just look at them, god and goddess side by side, equal and anything but separate. No repressive patriarchy. No fat plaid-jacketed lawyers leering up an employee’s skirt. “And, by God,” she said, “no telemarketers.”

Times were simpler then. They had to have been better. How could they possibly have been worse?

She trudged back to the kitchen. Justin, gymnast extraordinaire, had succeeded in standing up on the seat of his high chair. Just as she caught sight of him, he set himself up for a swan dive to the floor. Nicole caught him with a grab that would have made a big-league center fielder jealous.

“I think you’re done,” she said. Amazing how calm she sounded – she had to be numb. “Go play quietly in your room and let me finish eating my dinner.” Maybe that would buy her the five minutes’ peace she’d prayed for in the morning. She hadn’t got it then. She didn’t honestly expect to get it now.

No more than a minute and a half later, Justin was in the front room pestering Kimberley. Most of the time, Kimberley could take care of herself, but not when she was laid flat with a virus. Nicole charged to the rescue, to find her daughter halfway toward falling asleep, and Justin trying to wake her up by shoving a toy truck in her face. Nicole laid down the law to him, which wasn’t easy when she was trying to be quiet and not disturb Kimberley. She doubted it was sinking in. Two-year-olds paid even less attention to the laying down of the law than some juries did.

By the time the credits rolled on the Toy Story tape, Kimberley had dozed off. She hardly stirred when Nicole picked her up and carried her to bed. It was well before her usual bedtime, but Nicole didn’t worry about that. If her daughter got a long night’s sleep, she might be close to her old self in the morning. Kids got sick in a hurry, but sometimes they got well in a hurry, too.

Justin wasn’t used to being up when his big sister was asleep. He took one of Kimberley’s Barbies and tried to fracture its skull on the coffee table. Nicole looked on with benign approval. She would never have given Barbies to Kimberley: they sent all the wrong messages. The damn dolls were Frank’s fault. What was worse, and what worried Nicole most, was that Kimberley liked them far too much to make it worth her mother’s while to confiscate them.

“The minute they’re born, they’re trapped in gender roles,” Nicole muttered.

Justin looked up from his mayhem, distracted by the sound of her voice but not curious to know what she meant. Nicole smiled at him. Justin whacked happily away at the coffee table. “Wham! Wham!” he shouted.

“Beat her brains out, kid,” Nicole said. The doll, she thought with malicious glee, looked a little like Dawn.

After he’d worked out all of his hostility and some of Nicole’s, too, Justin went to bed with no more than a token protest. Nicole took a shower, pulled on a clean pair of designer sweats – Neiman-Marcus this time, with blocks of pure strong color, blue and hot pink and acid yellow, as if she could brighten her mood forcibly by livening up her color scheme – and scowled at the telephone. She didn’t think Frank had classes on Wednesdays this quarter. If he didn’t, he could take the kids, and she wouldn’t have to burn a vacation day riding herd on them.

When the hour crawled past nine o’clock and he still hadn’t called, she called him again. Again, she got Dawn on the answering machine. This time, she tried to be more civil. She didn’t know how well she succeeded.

Ten o’clock rolled by. The telephone stayed obstinately silent. Shaking her head, Nicole went into the study and turned on the computer. She used America Online just often enough to keep from quitting the service. One reason she hadn’t quit was times like this. Frank might take too long to answer telephone messages, but he was religious about replying to e-mail the minute he saw it.

As soon as she logged on to AOL, a bright electronic voice announced, “You’ve got mail!” Nicole blinked. People didn’t send her e-mail all that often; the ones who knew she was on line also knew the mail might sit in her box for a couple of weeks before she saw it.

What the hell, she’d read it before she sent her own.

There was only one letter. It was from Frank, from his UCLA Internet address, and sent that afternoon. In the way of e-mail, it was short and to the point: The reason I can’t take the kids tomorrow is that Dawn and I are leaving for three weeks in Cancun tonight, so you might as well stop bugging me for a while, all right? I won’t be around to listen to it.