Fiction

They were leaving the harbor on power, against the flow of vessels putting in for the night. Across the water they could hear sharp bleats of compressed-air horns as people signaled from yachts to be brought ashore by the club launch. It was six o'clock on a calm Friday evening in August, the last weekend…

The farm market, earlier all leaf lettuce and sugar peas, has gone to parsnip, potatoes, winter squash. And apples, dropping on the roadway, mixing with days of rain into thick slush as V. approaches the green market kiosk. FARM-FRESH EGGS PIE APPLES POTATOS The soft-spoken farmer follows where she points, bags beets, eggplant. He hands…

It is spring, and flamingoes return to the Coggios' lawn, along with the virgin in her sky-blue robe. Inside the miniature picket fence, daisy pinwheels are spinning; a pair of young deer graze and listen. I listen too, imagining the voices of the Coggios calling to me from out behind the house where they take…

Here came Nathalie: forty-one, agile of body, angular of face, with large blue eyes under a flap of greying bangs, dressed at the moment in a woolen bathrobe with threadbare piping, she was carrying her firstborn baby, a daughter, down the upstairs hallway for an early morning nursing. There were paint buckets to be skirted,…

Made a fool of. She rose to that. She would not be made a fool of. She looked down at the tennis court. She couldn't hear any of their noises through the window. The girl was good, played like a man, concentrating, sweating. Coiled for her backhand. Whipped it across with top spin. He had…

In the memory, he was six. Maybe five, maybe seven. But it wasn't a memory he'd invited; it had stepped up to him as unexpectedly and indifferently as – as what? The thought faltered. Here was the memory in any event, so clear because it was unsolicited; it hung before him as detached as the…

(Chapter Seven begins with the return of a white sixth grade girl named Mary to her school on the edge of Harlem, after a Christmas marred by fighting between her father and stepmother. During her first months at the school Mary's own withdrawnness, her race, and an episode in which she "ratted" on other children,…

About four that afternoon the thunder and lightning began again. The five women seated about Mrs. Boone's one-room apartment grew still and spoke with lowered voices and in whispers, when they spoke at all: they were no longer young, and they had all been raised to believe that such weather was the closest thing to…

Because of the shabby character of the boy's mother, and also that of the man she had married the very day she found herself legally divorced and able to marry again, and because the two had determined to live far away from New Hampshire without even bothering to send him their address until several years…