Even here, in this lazy college town, I am uneasy.

The plastic cup is thrust drain-ward again and again by the water thundering out of the faucet. It struggles and knocks against the bottom of the bathtub. I turn off the water and yell to Eva that it's time for her bath, all the while my shoulders tensed as if awaiting some blow.

Later, outside, Eva stops and smiles. "What is it?" I say. "Don't drag your sweater."

"It smells good out here."

And it does. Her small chest rises, pauses, falls in bliss. It is almost spring, the day a shiny penny in a jar of grey money. As I pull the child restraint taut across her little fat belly, I almost forget that, bent and vulnerable as I am, someone could push the snout of a gun in my ribs or to my temple and take our lives for nothing, for the keys to the tinny Nova, for the three dollars in my pocket and my grandmother's amethyst ring, for access to my daughter who is a pale shoot, a seedling, that most palpable of springs.

I'm not that woman at the curtains, the sliver of face at the door with the chain.

When Angie's car broke down and I didn't want to bother her roommate, I waited for thirty minutes on the BART platform in Oakland alone long after dark. I have taken the Lake Street El in the middle of the night, the only white face, very, very white. And after that homeless man on Haight Street bruised my left thigh with his bottle when I had only fifty cents to give him, I changed my walk: arms swinging, eyes swiveling, all the while silently ranting don't come near me you fucking asshole I'll knock your fucking head off I mean it I'd just as soon kick you in the fucking balls...

What I mean to say is, I have acted in spite of my fears.

I bought a crib with the abortion money. I sneaked my child into being, just as I once rescued the doll with the broken neck from the driveway discards. My father had decided there was no room in his basement for the broken, the defective, never understanding that for me such a wound only increased its value. When I unwound my mother's old orange headscarf and saw the wooden stalk beneath the flaking rubber, I felt a stab of nearly erotic regret.

My daughter's father, he paid not to have to think about it, about her, and I allowed him that. Let it go, I said to myself. Smuggle this new life across the border. I had my first prenatal exam, and then sat in the waiting room for two hours, reading Joyce Carol Oates. By the time he picked me up in his yellow Civic, I was in another world altogether.

"Do you feel okay?" he asked, not once looking at me. He threw the car in reverse and choked the stickshift as if it required every bit of his post-graduate attention.

"I'm fine," I said. I let him connect his own dots.

"Good, that's good." He paused. "So, you feel like Chinese?"

I felt, truth be known, a little sorry for him. He thought it was over and, for him, it was. While I took the best part of him and moved on.

So, you see, I am not that woman. Not that woman at all.

Ever since the rape across the alley, I stopped taking the paper. After the twelve-year-old in Evanston, I quit watching the news. That was right before we left Chicago.

Sometimes, the picture above my desk of Eva--pale toddler arms around my neck, posing outrageously--grains to newsprint, shatters to the tiny dots of color that make up five o'clock images: A west suburban mother and her three-year-old daughter found dead...

Can you tell me why the shock of love exacts a shudder, after?

On our last day of nursery school, one of the other mothers told me that they had captured the man and that he had confessed. He said she didn't even try to run away or fight back when he invited, then pulled, her into his van, the twelve-year-old in Evanston. "She was very nice," he said.

The woman's pupils were dilated, her lips wet with the juice of it. I shook my head along with the others, but turned away as soon as I could.

Already the twelve-year-old had been turned into a story.

I allow myself what I can. A memory of nature.

Once, standing waist-deep in metallic water at the coupling of Lakes Huron and Michigan, I saw the summer passing. The birds rose like the iron waves of Mackinaw Bridge, falling up. At that moment, I felt utterly cold and alive.

Much earlier, there was the square wooden playpen in the square green yard, the swing set with its stubble of rust, the hedge with its taut red berries spilling over in a labyrinth of twisted wood and thorns. I reached my fat hand through the bars and clutched a shock of grass; the moist blades snapped. To my mouth, then, I brought the sweet grass to my mouth, thrust it in, and chewed, happily enough.

I am trying to be a mother.

The strip of common area separating the next row of attached townhouses from ours is alive with children. Five African-American, three Indian, two Bosnian, two Korean, and one more, a hybrid with dark hair and eyes, my daughter. They run in and out of a flapping line of sun-drying saris. They jump over the twelve-inch high white picket fence with which the Bosnian woman has edged the fiery geraniums she put in to border her concrete patio. On this patio, there is a barbecue grill, a watering can, a basket of toy gardening tools, and many yards of green garden hose wound around a plastic something. What do you call it, a hose caddy?

I was never taught the names of things.

Only last week, I learned that the little decorative metal cap that screws on the top of a lampshade is called a finial. A twenty-eight year old woman should know these things, shouldn't she?

Besides blowing laundry, the Indian woman has over a dozen potted plants. The graduate student next door takes his breakfast and dinner on his patio at a card table topped by a red checked tablecloth and some sort of lantern, serenaded by the classical music station. The Korean extended family across the way has windchimes and a stand, which holds a birdcage on good days. At about six each morning, I see the grandfather sweeping the concrete with steady determination, sweeping, sweeping.

In Chicago, we had a plastic slide in the yard of our duplex. Eva played on it a little in the fall, but the following spring, when I pulled it from its corner by the porch and removed the old shower curtain liner with which I had tried, in my ineffectual way, to protect it from the elements, there was a spider's web, intricate and impressive, stretching from roof to slide. I bravely dismantled it with a broom as Eva watched wide-eyed through the kitchen window, but she has since refused to have anything to do with it. Now it sits unused on our patio, a puddle of dirty rainwater in the middle of the platform, twigs and dried leaves on its stairs. Every time I look at it I feel defeated.

One day, I brought our houseplants outside for some sun and air. Just owning houseplants was a victory, of sorts, for me. I was feeling pretty good about it, almost confident. The plants were growing well; I'd repotted the crowded ones; I'd remembered often enough to give them water. So, as I carried them outside, I was feeling a pleasant mixture of virtue and pride, the way I feel on Sunday nights when I've given Eva a bath and helped her into fresh pajamas and her dresser is filled with enough clean, fragrant clothes to take her through the week ahead.

Except, when it started to rain an hour later, I had no idea what to do. Plants need water, don't they? It seemed bizarre to protect them from the elements. I thought about calling Mrs. Chakravarthy, but I was embarrassed. What would she think? And what if I couldn't understand her halting English-what would I say? I decided to keep an eye on them, but with one thing and another, by the time I remembered to check, they were waterlogged and two pots had toppled and broken, spilling dirt on the uneven concrete.

Across the courtyard, Mrs. Chakravarthy's plants had been taken in.

How had she known? Who told her, taught her what to do; who instilled in her that level of attentiveness? Or was it instinct?

It's not God, you know, but mothers who are supposed to notice every sparrow's fall.

The first time I left Chicago, I meant to change my life. Back then, I still thought you must mean life to change for it to happen. I gazed out the window on the long Amtrak ride to Oakland, my journal spread wide and waiting on my lap, as the train snaked through matte gray weeds tough as synthetic, gravel slipping into oily puddles. Dull machinery, unpeopled lots, blocks--I saw no one in that bastard spring day, not smoking, not talking, the way you never see anyone on the farms along the interstates.

I realize now I went to Chicago for its machinery, its metal snouts and bellows, its spires of industry--can you imagine? I took solace in the knowledge that somewhere men were working. A woman I used to know kept her television tuned to sports, though she never watched, because the sound of crowds and raucous beer commercials gave her the illusion of masculine company: father, husband, son. Likewise, the factory whistles, the desolate chemical smell of prosperity comforted me.

But that day, shedding Chicago like a skin, I thought I saw--twice, three times--a body, wrapped in white and blown by some force against the chain link fence separating the tracks from the forest preserve.

I knew then what they'd done to me.

Because, for me, there can be no more forests. The forest has become the place where they find the bodies, wrapped in plastic and buried under loose cover of leaf meal and soda cans. Morning hikers find them, silver-haired power walkers who haven't caught up with the truth about forests, their contemporary function; who still think they are entitled to gulp their o.j. and vitamins, don their crayon-colored sweats, and put in a half hour of hard breathing amid trees and birdsong.

They are women and girls, mostly, or were. The bodies. Found whole, or in parts, like the picked-clean bones spilling out of an overturned KFC bucket. A picnic gone wrong.

Now nature is the root ball cupped gently in my palm, the clean dirt I buy by the bagful. Nature is the severed, bi-colored leaf Eva presents me, the grass stains I presoak and mean to eradicate. Nature is the bit of common grass beyond the concrete patio at the back of the flimsy townhouse where I think of how my life has come, somehow, to this.

I've set up an interview at Discovery Preschool, which occupies an old Victorian house in the brick-paved area of town where many of the faculty live. I've seen the minivans, the Jeeps, the Volvos come and go.

I want the best. Of course I want the best.

A lovely young woman gave me a tour, and then instructed me to call the director to set up an interview. The man I spoke to on the telephone asked me questions about Eva's development and her "enrichment" experiences. He seemed unimpressed with her previous school in Chicago.

"Our orientation is a bit different," he said delicately. "We don't believe it is developmentally appropriate to subject children your daughter's age to so many hours of what sounds essentially like child care."

"She only attended four hours a day." When he didn't respond, I added, "I have to work, you know. I'm a single mother."

"Yes, of course," he said, and sighed. "But I'm not sure our program would meet your daughter's needs. Of course, you're welcome to bring her in to be tested."

Tested? Anyone could see just by looking at this funny, quirky child that she was terribly, wonderfully bright. What kind of test, exactly? I asked the lovely young woman when I stopped by the next day. Oh, it's nothing, she assured me. She and the director would administer it, and it would take only twenty minutes.

But on the appointed Saturday, when he lets us into the school, he is quite alone. My overall impression is of beigeness. He has longish sandy hair, a flaccid face smooth as a girl's, narrow shoulders, a sloping stomach. I put my hand out to shake, but he doesn't take it.

At first, Eva clutches my denim skirt. Then, as we wait for him to finish some sort of paperwork, she ventures forth to poke around in the various corners of the large, cheerful room (sensory pan, blocks, imaginative play, gross motor).

I wonder when the other woman, the nice one with the braid down her back and the Birkenstocks, is coming.

Apparently she isn't. "Alright then," he says, wiping his hands on the front of his tan trousers. "Come along, Eva. We're going to play a game." He smiles. It is an oily, artificial smile, the kind I imagine might accompany an offer of candy or a plea for help in finding a lost puppy.

Eva looks up at me expectantly.

A knife, a hand clamped over a mouth, a mouth, a mouth... "Don't watch," I say to Eva. It comes out a bark.

"Junk, Mom?" Her eyes slide over to me.

"Yes, Eva. Yes, it's junk." A commercial during what passes for some wholesome show. They want very badly to sell us this suffering, this terror.

"But why is that man hurting that woman?" she says, and I have no answers. Because he's a psycho. Because she likes it. Because we like it. We like to watch.

"It's not real. That didn't really happen." I'm not answering her question, but I hope she's still too young to notice. Besides, it did happen. Only not like that. There was no orchestra, just the sound of crickets, innocent enough, the same as thousands of nights before. Probably she could hear traffic, maybe someone's car radio playing something innocuous, something that will be stuck in her brain forever. Or maybe the news that she herself will be part of the next morning.

Meanwhile, a woman is disappearing--her mouth stopped, her flailing hands stilled--in a trench deepening in Eva's brain.

I glance at him furtively. He is harmless, surely? What does a pedophile look like? What would I look like if I said no, sorry, you can't take my three year-old back to your office alone.

"I'd like to come, too," I say.

"That's not the way it works. We find that parents tend to distract their children. I can get a much more accurate assessment by myself."

Either I go too or we're out of here. Come on, say it.

But then he'd never let Eva in. Maybe this is how they do it, these enrichment programs. I've seen the fathers in their corduroy slacks and beards, the mothers in their skirted suits or academic peasant wear--smart people carrying satchels stuffed with graded essays and professional journals; I've seen them hand their children over with the faith of those whom fortune has favored-that is, no faith at all to speak of, and no need of it.

Maybe this is how it's done. Besides, if I object, he might think I'm crazy or inappropriate or simply not nice.

He can see I don't know what to do, but he says nothing that might ease my distress. He tilts his chin up slightly as if amused. His nostrils are dark holes, like another pair of eyes looking me over.

And this is what I do: I smile falsely at Eva, Eva with her straight black bangs and perfectly arched eyebrows and Oshkosh overalls. I smile and in a voice I don't recognize, I let her go. Tell her to. And she turns and takes his hand and they disappear through a door with a mirrored window: when I try to peer through it, all I can see is my own blanched face.

Now nature is a room with a window. A sky that could be anywhere. The breeze that drifts in, the bit of milkweed threshed in the screen. No, not even that. I take a deep breath, inhaling the scent of cut grass and a thin, disconsolate rain and my hands twitch, a vestige, like the sweet grass, the earth: calamitous, and hungry, and dead to us.

I pace nervously around the room, trying to convince myself that each empty paper towel roll, each piece of fluorescent Mylar and bin of tiny scissors is proof that he is okay, really, a professional. Everything is okay! But her absence feels eerie, as if a crack in the earth opened under her feet and swallowed her while I was clearing my throat and preparing to speak.

My body is electric with worry.

And then I spot her in the corner, large and furry and encased in glass, quite still behind the glass walls of her terrarium. The little sign says Mary Beth in crisp red marker. If I picked it up and sniffed it, it would smell of chemicals, the indelible kind. Mary Beth. I think she is laughing at me.

I wonder how it feels to be Mary Beth. They feed her, observe her, attempt to domesticate her with that name, but it's all superficial, a trick they play on themselves.

She is a tarantula, after all. She is not nice.