Family Dancing by David Leavitt

being pregnant meant. In the third month, sure enough, the woman started to scream and wouldn’t be calmed. Something was moving inside her, something she was afraid would try to kill her. The lover was no help. Just as easily as he’d begun with her, he’d forgotten her, and taken up with a Down syndrome dwarf who got transferred from Sonoma.
    The woman agreed to the third abortion. Because it was so late in the pregnancy, the procedure was painful and complicated. Nora shook her head and said, “What’s the world coming to?” Then she returned to her work.
    I admire women who shake their heads and say, “What’s the world coming to?” Because of them, I hope, it will always stop just short of getting there.
    Lately, in my own little ways, I, too, have been keeping the earth in orbit. Today, for instance, I take Alden out to the car and let him sit in the driver’s seat, which he enjoys. The hot vinyl burns his thighs. I calm him. I sit in the passenger seat, strapped in, while he slowly turns the wheel. He stares through the windshield at the other cars in the parking lot, imagining, perhaps, an endless landscape unfolding before him as he drives.
     
    Visiting hours end. I take Alden in from the parking lot, kiss him goodbye. He shares a room these days with a young man named Joe, a Vietnam veteran prone to motorcycle accidents. Because of skin-grafting, Joe’s face is six or seven different colors—beiges and taupes, mostly—but he can speak, and has recently regained the ability to smile. “Hey, pretty lady,” he says as we walk in. “It’s good to see a pretty lady around here.”
    Nina is sitting in the chair by the window, reading. She is sulky as we say goodbye to Alden, sulky as we walk out to the car. I suppose I should expect moodiness—some response to what she’s seen this last year. We go to pick up Charles, who is sixteen and spends most of his time in the Olde Computer Shoppe—a scarlet, plum-shaped building which serves as a reminder of what the fifties thought the future would look like. Charles is a computer prodigy, a certified genius, nothing special in our circuit-fed community. He has some sort of deal going with the owner of the Computer Shoppe which he doesn’t like to talk about. It involves that magical stuff called software. He uses the Shoppe’s terminal and in exchange gives the owner a cut of his profits, which are bounteous. Checks arrive for him every day—from Puerto Rico, from Texas, from New York. He puts the money in a private bank account. He says that in a year he will have enough saved to put himself through college—a fact I can’t help but appreciate.
    The other day I asked him to please explain in English what it is that he does. He was sitting in my kitchen with Stuart Beckman, a fat boy with the kind of wispy mustache that indicates a willful refusal to begin shaving. Stuart is the dungeon master in the elaborate medieval wargames Charles’s friends conduct on Tuesday nights. Charles is Galadrian, a lowly elfin-warrior with minimal experience points. “Well,” Charles said, “let’s just say it’s a step toward the great computer age when we won’t need dungeon masters. A machine will create for us a whole world into which we can be transported. We’ll live inside the machine—for a day, a year, our whole lives—and we’ll live the adventures the machine creates for us. We’re at the forefront of a major breakthrough—artificial imagination. The possibilities, needless to say, are endless.”
    “You’ve invented that?” I asked, suddenly swelling with Mother Goddess pride.
    “The project is embryonic, of course,” Charles said. “But we’re getting there. Give it fifty years. Who knows?”
    Charles is angry as we drive home. He sifts furiously through an enormous roll of green print-out paper. As it unravels, the paper flies in Nina’s hair, but she is oblivious to it. Her face is pressed against the window so hard that her nose and