What’s the Matter with Men?

What’s the Matter with Men?

Richard V. Reeves The New Yorker

They’re floundering at school and in the workplace. Some conservatives blame a crisis of masculinity, but the problems—and their solutions—are far more complex.

Gender equality, Richard V. Reeves contends, now calls for a focus on male deficits.

First, there was Adam, whose creation takes center stage on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Then, fashioned out of Adam’s spare rib, there was Eve, relegated to a smaller panel. In Michelangelo’s rendition, as in the Bible’s, the first man sleeps through the miraculous creation of his soul mate, the first woman and the eventual mother of humanity. Many of our foundational myths are, in this way, stories about men, related by men to other men. The notion of female equality is, historically, an innovation. “Woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in “The Second Sex,” published in 1949. “And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.” Nearly three-quarters of a century later, that change has continued. By a variety of metrics, men are falling behind parity. Is the second sex becoming the better half?

Many social scientists agree that contemporary American men are mired in malaise, even as they disagree about the causes. In academic performance, boys are well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where the sex ratio is approaching two female undergraduates for every one male. (It was an even split at the start of the nineteen-eighties.) Rage among self-designated “incels” and other elements of the online “manosphere” appears to be steering some impressionable teens toward misogyny. Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide. And men are powering the new brand of reactionary Republican politics, premised on a return to better times, when America was great—and, unsubtly, when men could really be men. The question is what to make of the paroxysm. For the revanchist right, the plight of American men is existential. It is an affront to biological (and perhaps Biblical) determinism, a threat to an entire social order. Yet, for all the strides that women have made since gaining the right to vote, the highest echelons of power remain lopsidedly male. The detoxification of masculinity, progressives say, is a messy and necessary process; sore losers of undeserved privilege don’t merit much sympathy.

Richard V. Reeves, a British American scholar of inequality and social mobility, and a self-described “conscientious objector in the culture wars,” would like to skip past the moralizing and analyze men in the state that he finds them: beset by bewildering changes that they cannot adapt to. His latest book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It” (Brookings), argues that the rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn have left men bereft of what the sociologist David Morgan calls “ontological security.” They now confront the prospect of “cultural redundancy,” Reeves writes. He sees telltale signs in the way that boys are floundering at school and men are leaving work and failing to perform their paternal obligations. All this, he says, has landed hardest on Black men, whose life prospects have been decimated by decades of mass incarceration, and on men without college degrees, whose wages have fallen in real terms, whose life expectancies have dropped markedly, and whose families are fracturing at astonishing rates. Things have become so bad, so quickly, that emergency social repairs are needed. “It is like the needles on a magnetic compass reversing their polarity,” Reeves writes. “Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls.”

That either-or can be disputed; the transformed social landscape that men face cannot. When Beauvoir was writing her manifesto on the plight of women, she noted that “the most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women,” and that “a man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.” Nowadays, there are many such books. Self-doubt has broken through the supposed imperviousness of masculine self-belief. Reeves’s book is only the latest; it is also one of the most cogent. That’s not just a consequence of his compelling procession of statistical findings. It’s also due to the originality of his crisply expressed thesis: that men’s struggles are not reducible to a masculinity that is too toxic or too enfeebled but, rather, reflect the workings of the same structural forces that apply to every other group.

Reeves excels in relaying uncomfortable truths to his fellow-liberals—a talent that he displayed in his previous book, “Dream Hoarders,” about how well-meaning, college-educated parents are hindering social mobility. Still, he says, when he brought up the idea for “Of Boys and Men,” many people tried to discourage him from writing it. Progressives are generally happier to discuss current social disparities that go in the expected direction (such as the Black-white gap in life expectancy) than those which don’t (the fact, say, that life expectancy among Hispanics is slightly higher than among non-Hispanic whites). Besides, if our model of gender politics is zero-sum, the educational and economic decline of men may even be welcome. Women had to endure centuries of subjugation and discrimination; should we really be alarmed that they are just now managing to overshoot gender parity in a few domains?

“Of Boys and Men” argues for a speedy response because the decline in the fortunes of present-day men—not only in comparison with women but in absolute terms—augurs so poorly for men several decades on. “As far as I can tell, nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly, so comprehensively, or so consistently around the world,” Reeves writes. He notes that schoolgirls outperform schoolboys both in advanced countries that still struggle with considerable sexism, such as South Korea, and in notably egalitarian countries like Sweden (where researchers say they are confronting a pojkkrisen, or “boy crisis”). In 2009, American high-school students in the top ten per cent of their freshman class were twice as likely to be female. Boys, meanwhile, are at least twice as likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and twice as likely to be suspended; their dropout rates, too, are considerably higher than those of their female counterparts. Young men are also four times as likely to die from suicide.

This story pushes to the side the male-favoring disparities in the world of work. The gender pay gap is usually described by noting that a woman earns eighty-four cents for every dollar earned by a man (though this is up from sixty-four cents in 1980). Barely one-tenth of the C.E.O.s in the Fortune 500 are women (and that is itself a twenty-six-fold increase since 2000, when only two women were in the club). The #MeToo movement began just five years ago; the sexual harassment that women face has hardly been extinguished. Even in the workplace, however, gender convergence may be arriving sooner than anticipated. An axiom of policymaking is that disparate educational achievement today will manifest in disparate earnings later. Reeves points out that women earn roughly three-fifths of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded. They are the majority of current medical and law students. And they’ve made extraordinary gains in subjects where they had once been highly underrepresented; they now constitute a third of current graduates in stem fields and more than forty per cent of students in business schools.

Much of the gender gap in pay, as Claudia Goldin, a labor economist at Harvard, notes, is driven not by direct discrimination—our conventional understanding of a sexist boss paying a female employee less than an identically situated male one—but by differences in occupational choice. A more elusive target has been indirect forms of discrimination, including those sustained by social conditioning (which helps explain the gender skew of certain occupations) and domestic arrangements that favor men. Within occupations, there’s often no wage gap until women have children and reduce their work hours. “For most women, having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite,” Reeves observes. “For most men, it barely makes a dent.” Goldin’s analysis is blunt: “The gender gap in hourly compensation would vanish if long, inflexible work days and weeks weren’t profitable to employers.” Yet there may be reason for optimism. The years-long pandemic and the subsequent labor shortage have forced employers to be more flexible in scheduling—particularly within the most highly remunerated white-collar professions. If that situation endures, the gender pay gap could continue its decline, and boardrooms may become more balanced by attrition.

Good things can also come about for bad reasons, though. Even if, as the French economist Thomas Piketty has suggested, global wars have helped reduce inequality between the rich and the poor, egalitarians should hesitate to become warmongers. And so it’s chastening to realize that the substantial decline in the gender earnings gap is partly the result of stagnating wages for working men (which have not grown appreciably in the past half century, adjusting for inflation), and partly of the steady creep in the number of men who drop out of the labor force entirely.

We have some idea of why blue-collar wages have stagnated: a macroeconomic shift that greatly raised the value of a college degree, owing in part to the decimation of manual labor by automation and globalization. White men experienced a specific blow that Black men had felt earlier and even more acutely. In a classic study, “The Truly Disadvantaged,” the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued that early waves of deindustrialization after the Second World War devastated the lives of working-class African Americans, who were buffeted both by economic forces, in the form of greater rates of joblessness, and by social ones, including worsened prospects for marriage. Later came the effects of the so-called China shock—the contraction of American manufacturing, a male-skewing sector, as a result of increased trade. David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., estimates that normalizing trade relations with China in 2001 cost as many as two million American jobs, often in places that had not recovered even a decade later. A shelf of popular books about the white working class—Arlie Hochschild’s “Strangers in Their Own Land,” Amy Goldstein’s “Janesville,” even the newly minted senator J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy”—have sought to reckon with the social consequences of these economic transformations. None of them conveys much optimism.

The Garbage Man: Turning Trash Into Family Treasures

What should we make of the growing tendency of men to drop out of the workforce? In the past half century, fewer and fewer men have returned to work after each recession—like a ball that can never match its previous height as it rebounds. In 1960, ninety-seven per cent of men of “prime age,” between twenty-five and fifty-four, were working. Today, close to one in nine prime-age men is neither working nor seeking work. In the recently reissued “Men Without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition” (Templeton), the conservative demographer and economist Nicholas Eberstadt points out that men are now employed at roughly the same rate as in 1940, back when America was still recovering from the Great Depression. Citing time-use surveys—the detailed diaries that the Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles on how Americans spend their days—Eberstadt reports that most of these hours of free time are spent watching screens rather than doing household labor or caring for family members. Instead of socializing more, men without work are even less involved in their communities than those with jobs. The available data suggest that their lot is not a happy one.

It would help if we had a firm grasp on why men are withdrawing from work. Many economists have theories. Eberstadt believes that “something like infantilization besets some un-working men.” He notes the availability of disability-insurance programs (roughly a third of nonworking men reported some kind of disability in 2016) and the over-all expansion of the social safety net after the nineteen-sixties. In 2017, the late Alan Krueger, who chaired President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, calculated that nearly half of all nonworking men were taking pain medication on a daily basis, and argued that the increased prescribing of opioids could explain a lot of the decline in the male labor force. Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, thinks that the rapid improvement in video-game quality could account for much of the especially deep drop in work among younger men. Anyone who has recently played (or momentarily lost a loved one to) Elden Ring or God of War Ragnarök can grasp the immersive spell that video games cast. But, in the end, most economists admit that they cannot settle on an exact etiology for the problem of nonworking men. The former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers, who is not known for his intellectual humility, recently surmised that “the answers here lie more in the realm of sociology than they do in economics.” Reeves, too, thinks that we can’t explain the economic decline of men without looking at non-economic factors: “It is not that men have fewer opportunities. It is that they are not taking them.”

An intersectional approach may prove useful here. Consider a recent landmark study of income-tax returns, in which it was definitively established that Black Americans go on to earn substantially less than whites even if their parents were similarly wealthy. Remarkably, the gap is due entirely to the differing prospects for Black men relative to white men. In fact, Black women earn slightly more than white women who came from economically matched households. Sex-specific variables—like the extraordinarily high rate of incarceration among Black men—are evidently holding back progress. Although boys are as likely as girls to grow up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty or in fractured families (sex at birth being almost a pure coin toss), an emerging body of evidence suggests that boys may be less resilient to such adversity. In a paper titled “The Trouble with Boys,” the economists Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan found that “boys raised outside of a traditional family (with two biological parents present) fare especially poorly,” with substantially worse behavior in school and considerably lower skills in “noncognitive” areas, such as emotional sensitivity and persistence, that increasingly matter in the workplace. The gender gap in school suspensions, already large, more than doubles among children with single mothers.

Reeves offers a wide menu of policies designed to foster a “prosocial masculinity for a postfeminist world.” He would encourage more men to become nurses and teachers, expand paid leave, and create a thousand more vocational high schools. His signature idea, though, is to “redshirt” boys and give them all, by default, an extra year of kindergarten. The aim is to compensate for their slower rates of adolescent brain development, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, which controls decision-making. Reeves, who places great stock in this biological difference, also places great stock in his proposed remedy: “A raft of studies of redshirted boys have shown dramatic reductions in hyperactivity and inattention through the elementary school years, higher levels of life satisfaction, lower chances of being held back a grade later, and higher test scores.”

If that sounds too good to be true, it may well be. One of the studies he cites concludes that “there is little evidence that being older than one’s classmates has any long-term, positive effect on adult outcomes such as IQ , earnings, or educational attainment”; on the contrary, it finds “substantial evidence” that the practice is linked to higher high-school-dropout rates and lower over-all earnings. Reeves insists that he’d be vindicated if the protocol were applied more widely, but his case isn’t very strong. We might hesitate before prescribing half the population an unusually strong and uncertain medicine. Still, he is at least proposing serious solutions. Many of his fellow-liberals remain undecided about whether below-par outcomes for males even merit attention, let alone efforts to remedy them.

The political right has eagerly filled the void. At the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, the Republican senator Josh Hawley gave a keynote speech on the crisis of masculinity, in which he blamed “an effort the left has been at for years now,” guided by the premise that “the deconstruction of America begins with and depends on the deconstruction of American men.” Hawley, who is planning to expound upon his thoughts in a forthcoming book titled “Manhood,” argued that the solution must begin with “repudiating the lie that America is systemically oppressive and men are systematically responsible,” and with rebuilding “those manufacturing and production sectors that so much of the chattering class has written off as relics of the past.”

Meanwhile, the mass-market appeal of the contentious cultural commentator Jordan Peterson suggests an appetite for quasi-spiritual self-help (“Stand up straight with your shoulders back”) in a secular age—Goop for young men. The vintage machismo that Donald Trump so prizes may explain why the gender gap in the popular opinion of him was so large. And the swing among Hispanic voters toward Republicans is being driven, in no small part, by Hispanic men. How men are faring in school and at work may not arouse everyone’s concern, but how men choose to pursue politics inevitably affects us all.

Gender theorists have described a perennial struggle among multiple masculinities. In this scenario, nobody who values the prospect of eliminating gender hierarchies can afford to be a bystander. Masculinity is fragile; it’s also malleable. The shapes it will assume in the future have consequences. ♦

This will turn out to be the week that was for Ukraine

This will turn out to be the week that was for Ukraine

High level U.S. officials met with their counterparts in Ukraine in full public view. The targets were Republicans in Congress and Vladimir Putin, which tells you a lot, doesn't it?

LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV

Read carefully, this is the best explanation of what is happening. (DAF)

The thing you’ve got to understand about chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA directors is that they don’t just wake up in the morning and decide to do the kind of stuff they did this week. Last Friday, CIA Director William Burns met secretly with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. On Monday, Gen. Mark Milley was in Germany to observe the training of a new Ukrainian mechanized infantry battalion that is destined for the front lines in the conflict with Russia. On Tuesday, Milley traveled to a secret location in eastern Poland to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhny, the highest-ranking officer in Ukraine’s armed forces. On Monday, John Finer, the deputy national security adviser, Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, and Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, met with President Zelenskyy and his top advisers in Ukraine to discuss the status of the war and U.S. support for Ukraine.

The whole week was a full-court press by the U.S. defense establishment on Ukraine’s behalf. Under normal circumstances, weeks of preparation go into arranging these kinds of meetings and the travel involved. In this case, the planning probably took days, rather than weeks. The meetings that took place over the last week had three targets, the first of these being the war itself. Contacts between high-level officials last week involved war-planning and intelligence sharing, crucial to gains on the battlefield. The second target was Vladimir Putin. No attempt was made to conceal these very high-level contacts, so the whole week can be understood as a message to Putin and the Russian military that the U.S. government and its military and intelligence and diplomatic leaders stand foursquare behind Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression. The third target of the meetings was the U.S. Congress. It will be much more difficult for Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his unruly right wing to continue their threats to reduce support in the Congress with such high-level meetings between American and Ukrainian officials taking place.

The most important signals were sent by Milley and Burns. General officers like Milley don’t make personal visits and put their imprimatur on events they expect to end in loss and disaster, and thereby have negative impacts on their careers and legacy. Milley doesn’t have boots on the ground in Ukraine, but he’s got everything else invested in a Ukrainian victory over Russia. As the war closes in on its first anniversary, I think Milley and Burns and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have concluded that Ukraine can win its war against Russia and win it in this calendar year. Austin was at Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Friday for a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which consists of NATO defense leaders and meets monthly.

This month’s meeting was primarily about pressuring Germany to allow the shipment of its Leopard II tanks from Poland to Ukraine for use against the Russian military. Several NATO nations have the German Leopards in their militaries, but Germany won’t allow the export of its key weapons system to other nations without its consent. Zelenskyy made an impassioned plea for the Leopard II tanks by video to the gathering of defense officials at Ramstein. German officials have not yet agreed to shipping these tanks to Ukraine, although in statements to the press after the meeting, Austin seemed to indicate the decision was imminent. Britain has already agreed to send its Challenger II tanks to Ukraine, but there are no plans for the U.S. to send M1 Abrams tanks, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment. But Austin reminded reporters in Germany that American Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Stryker Combat Vehicles are already scheduled for shipment to Ukraine in support of the war. Gen. Milley was in Germany to observe the training of a Ukrainian mechanized battalion that will be equipped with Bradleys.

U.S. reluctance to send Abrams tanks to Ukraine stems from a number of reasons. These are the most highly advanced armored vehicles in the world. They are basically an armored interface with the electronic battlefield mounted on tracks: Everything on board is connected to satellite guidance and intelligence systems with computerized targeting, all defended by complicated high-tech armor and attack-avoidance devices. Training in the combat use of the Abrams takes months, but that’s not the only issue. Everything on the Abrams is in danger of breaking down and the whole apparatus needs constant maintenance, much of which can only be done by specialized civilian technicians. In places like Kuwait, where stockpiles of Abrams tanks stand ready for use against possible aggression by Iran, there are warehouses of spare parts and civilian technicians on constant standby. None of that can be readily established in the Ukraine combat zone.

During his visit to the training site in Grafenwoehr, Germany, Milley pointed out that the Ukrainian battalion was being trained in using its Bradleys in combined operations, a tactic that integrates armored and infantry units with artillery and air defenses in attacks on the enemy. Combined operations are baked into U.S. tactics and are basic to the training of all soldiers, from privates in the foxholes to colonels and generals who command thousands of combat troops.

U.S. officers go to schools throughout their careers to learn combined operations in each of the Army’s combat branches – infantry, artillery, armor, signal and engineers. As lieutenants, officers first attend basic training in their branch, then they attend branch advance schools as captains who will command infantry, armored, artillery or air defense companies. As majors, they are sent to the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to learn battalion and brigade combined operations. As colonels, they attend the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, to learn division and army-size operations. (An “army” is designation for a combination of divisions for operational combat purposes.) In all these schools, officers are taught how to serve on battalion, brigade, division, and army staffs, doing jobs like operations, intelligence, personnel and logistics.

That kind of across-the-board training is basic to the U.S. military, and the challenge with Ukraine is transferring all this tactical knowledge to another army at warp speed. The Russian army, on the other hand, seems to do little training in combined operations. Military experts have said that’s the major reason why so many Russian generals have been killed in Ukraine. Their command structure is strictly top-down. Russia doesn’t have the layers of well-trained staff officers and commanders of lower units that the U.S. Army has as a matter of course. Generals have had to take battlefield front-line positions because they are the only ones in the chain of command authorized to make key decisions.

Ukrainian soldiers are currently at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, learning to use the Patriot air defense missile system that will soon be deployed in Ukraine. Now hundreds of them are undergoing American military training at U.S. Army facilities in Germany, learning to deploy multiple combat units and equipment all at once against the Russians.

The U.S. does not literally have boots on the ground in Ukraine, but it’s got pretty much everything else on the ground there, from MRAP mine-resistant armored personnel carriers to 155mm howitzers to Avenger radar-controlled air defense systems to Javelin anti-tank weapons to Stinger shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to HIMARS rocket systems to Humvees and personal-protection equipment such as helmets,bulletproof vests, boots and winter uniforms. And now there are reports that U.S. officials are contemplating giving Ukraine weapons capable of striking deep into Crimea, the peninsula seized byRussia in 2014. That can only mean longer-range American truck-mounted precision rockets, which can strike targets between 250 and 350 miles away.

And then there was the meeting between CIA Director Burns and Zelenskyy last week, which may have been as important as all the military hardware combined. The CIA and NSA can see everything Russia does in Ukraine from satellites. They know where every Russian battalion group is located, what its unit designation is and most likely the name of the Russian battalion commander. They can see every movement of every Russian tank, armored personnel carrier, and resupply truck, and see what is loaded on every flatbed railroad car headed from Russia into eastern Ukraine. It was probably CIA intelligence that led to the recent Ukrainian rocket strike on the Russian weapons stockpile and barracks in Makiivka, a suburb of Donetsk, which killed more than 60 Russian soldiers.

All of this — the training of Ukrainian troops, the shipments of heavy weapons, the visits by Milley and Burns — is being done in an in-your-face manner, in full view of Putin and his military commanders. That’s just as important as the weapons and training and intelligence. The U.S. and NATO are sending a specific message to Putin: We’re in this fight with Ukraine in a serious way. Milley told reporters traveling with him in Germany that the goal of training and equipping the Ukrainian combined-forces mechanized battalion was so it could be used “sometime before the spring rains show up. That would be ideal.”

That could be a statement of fact, or it could be a feint, intended to get Putin to prepare for an offensive that might come before the spring, as Milley said, or in the summer or even next fall, like last year’s offensive that recaptured the entire Kharkiv region. You don’t get to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because you’re a kiss-ass or a game-player, and Putin knows this. Milley and Zelenskyy are going to keep Putin guessing until he wakes up one morning and finds his troops once again on the run toward the Russian border. That’s what this week was about. Putin just doesn’t know when Zelenskyy will pull the trigger that Milley and Burns and the U.S. trainers in Germany are giving him.

Wednesday’s Child

By Yiyun Li The New Yorker

The difficulty with waiting, Rosalie thought, is that one can rarely wait in absolute stillness. Absolute stillness?—that part of herself, which was in the habit of questioning her own thoughts as they occurred, raised a mental eyebrow. No one waits in absolute stillness; absolute stillness is death; and when you’re dead you no longer wait for anything. No, not death, Rosalie clarified, but stillness, like hibernation or estivation, waiting for . . . Before she could embellish the thought with some garden-variety clichés, the monitor nearby rolled out a schedule change: the 11:35 train to Brussels Midi was cancelled.

All morning, Rosalie had been migrating between platforms in Amsterdam Centraal, from Track 4 to Track 10 then to Track 7 to Track 11 and back to 4. The trains to Brussels, both express and local, had been cancelled one after another. A family—tourists, judging by their appearance, as Rosalie herself was—materialized at every platform along with Rosalie, but now, finally, gave up and left, pulling their suitcases behind them. A group of young people, with tall, overfilled backpacks propped beside them like self-important sidekicks, gathered in front of a monitor, planning their next move. Rosalie tried to catch a word or two—German? Dutch? It was 2021, and there were not as many English-speaking tourists in Amsterdam that June as there had been on Rosalie’s previous visit, twenty years before.

She wondered what to do next. Moving from track to track would not deliver her to the hotel in Brussels. Would cancelled trains only lead to more cancelled trains, or would this strandedness, like ceaseless rain during a rainy season or a seemingly unfinishable novel, suddenly come to an end, on a Sunday afternoon in late May or on a snowy morning in January? Years ago, an older writer Rosalie had befriended inquired in a letter about the book she was working on: “How is the novel? One asks that as one does about an ill person, and a novel that’s not yet finished is rather like that. You reach the end and the thing is either dead or in much better shape. The dead should be left in peace.”

A novel would not get better if the characters spent all their time wandering between platforms. What Rosalie needed was not a plot twist or a dramatic scene but reliable information. She found a uniformed railway worker and asked about the cancelled trains.

The man, speaking almost perfect English, acknowledged her dilemma with an apology. “There was an incident near Rotterdam this morning,” he said.

“An incident,” Rosalie repeated, though she already knew the nature of such an ambiguous term. “Was it an accident?”

“Ah, yes, the kind of sad accident that happens sometimes. A man walked in front of a train.”

Rosalie noted the verb he used: not “jumped” or “ran” or “leaped,” but “walked,” as though the death had been an act both leisurely and purposeful. Contrary to present circumstances—it was summer; this was the twenty-first century—she imagined a man in a neatly pressed suit and wearing a hat, like Robert Walser in one of those photos from his asylum years. Walser’s hat had been found next to his body in the Swiss snow, on Christmas Day, 1956. But, even if the man near Rotterdam had worn a hat, it was unlikely to be resting in peace near him.

The railway worker opened an app on his phone and indicated some red and yellow and green squares to Rosalie, reassuring her that the service would return to normal soon.

There are two types of mothers: those who have not taught their children to be kind to themselves, and those who have not learned to be kind to their children.

Really? Rosalie thought. Are you sure there are only those two types? Surely some mothers, having done a better job, fall into neither category? Rosalie did not remember writing those lines in her notebook, but they were on the same page as a couple of other notes that she had a vague memory of having written. One of them read, You can’t declutter an untimely death away; the other consisted of two lines from a nursery rhyme: Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go. She must have written those lines on a Wednesday. Marcie had been born on a Wednesday, and had died on a Thursday, fifteen years and eleven months later. For a while after her death, every Thursday had felt like a milestone, and every Thursday Rosalie and Dan had left flowers at the mouth of the railway tunnel where Marcie had laid herself down to die. One week gone, two weeks gone, then three, four, five. It occurred to Rosalie that the only other time when parents count the days and weeks is when a child is newborn.

After some time, however, the counting stopped. No parent would describe a child as being seventy-nine weeks old or a hundred and three weeks old. The math for the dead must be similar. Air oxidizes, water rusts. Time, like air and water, erodes. And there are very few things in life that are impervious to time’s erosion. Thursday again became just another day in the week.

Rosalie carried three notebooks in her purse, but she no longer knew her original intention for each. They had become three depositories of scribbled words in the same category, “Notes to self.” It was a most lopsided epistolary relationship: whoever that self was, she was an unresponsive and irresponsible correspondent. Had Rosalie decided to address the notes to Marcie, there would have been some room for fantasy; nobody could say with certainty that the dead were not reading our minds or our letters to them. Rosalie, however, had not written to Marcie. She had written to herself, notes that she had not read until that Wednesday in June, while waiting for the disrupted Nederlandse Spoorwegen to resume.

The three notebooks read like a record of a chronic disease—not cancer but some condition so slow-building that it could hardly be distinguished from the natural progression of aging. Rosalie remembered reading a novel in which a character seeks advice from an old woman on how best to poison her husband. The most effective poison, which would go absolutely undetected, she is told, is a pear a day, sweet and juicy. A pear a day? What kind of poison is that? the woman asks. Every husband has a finite number of pears allotted to his life, the old woman says. What’s wrong if he doesn’t die on a specific day? There will be that final pear, which will finish him off one day.

What was the title of the novel? Rosalie tried to recollect it, and then laughed, remembering. This was an exchange she had once sketched out, thinking that she could use it in a novel if the opportunity arose. Are you sure you made it up? her questioning self immediately asked. No, Rosalie could not be sure. The longer one lives, the more porous one’s mind becomes, the less reliable. Perhaps Alice Munro had written a story about pears and poisons? Or, more likely, Iris Murdoch?

And you, my dear—the old woman in Rosalie’s imagination says now to the woman with the mariticidal aspiration—you, too, should take a pear a day; it’s a tonic that’ll do you good, and it’ll keep you living longer than your husband. Let that sweet and slow poison do its job properly, won’t you?

Indeed, why the hurry to get in front of a moving train? Why not let a death be timely, rather than disrupting the schedule of a national rail system? Rosalie considered writing these questions down in her notebook, but they would make it sound as though she were having an argument with Marcie, or with the stranger who had died that morning. “Never argue” was Rosalie’s motto; especially, never argue with the dead.

The last book—books, in fact, three novels in a single volume—that Marcie and Rosalie had discussed was Ágota Kristóf’s “The Notebook Trilogy.” It was not the last book Marcie had read—what that had been Rosalie would never know. The stack on Marcie’s desk, at the time of her death, included a story collection by Kelly Link, the collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop, a François Mauriac novel, and a book of La Fontaine’s fables. The books, like others before, had been taken from Rosalie’s shelves, with or without her recommendation.

Rosalie had read the Kristóf trilogy during a cultural-exchange trip to Moscow. The narrative labyrinth of the novels had baffled her. Corridors built of metaphorical mirrors, real and fake doubles, reflections of reflections—all those devices which might fascinate or frustrate a reader, though Rosalie had felt neither fascination nor frustration. What she had wanted was to talk with someone about the novels, and so she had asked Marcie to read them.

“I can’t believe you asked me to read these books,” Marcie said when she had finished.

“Are they confusing?” Rosalie asked. “I was confused, too.”

“Confusing? No. But they’re rather, what do you call it, graphic.”

“They’re not pornography.”

“They’re worse than pornography.” Marcie, who by middle school had become a better cook and baker than Rosalie, was carving out balls of cantaloupe with an ice-cream scoop. “I think they may have permanently destroyed my appetite.”

There was plenty of violence in the trilogy: rapes, mutilations, executions. Before Marcie’s remark, it had not occurred to Rosalie that the books might not be age-appropriate. In eighth grade, Marcie had quoted C. S. Lewis in her application to a highly selective prep school—“I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years”—and then gone on to catalogue all the thinking she had done. Might not this come across as a bit . . . arrogant? Rosalie had asked, and Marcie had replied that, if any of the adults dared to judge her so, it was they who were arrogant. They, Marcie had said, instead of you, thus, to Rosalie’s relief, excluding her from the indictment. If those adults judged her, it meant that they had not done their share of thinking when they were young; older now, they felt they had a right to treat children like miniature poodles. “Miniature poodles, I’m telling you!” Marcie had said with a vehement shudder. “Not even standard poodles!”

Rosalie watched Marcie arrange balls of cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon in a glass bowl, then squeeze half a lime over them before sprinkling some salt flakes on top. The bowl of melon was Marcie’s afternoon snack. Rosalie had no idea where Marcie had acquired such a demanding standard for everyday living; she herself would have eaten a slice of melon over the sink.

“I think your appetite is going to be all right,” Rosalie said.

Marcie pointed a two-pronged fork at Rosalie. “Sometimes things are all right, until they turn all wrong.”

“Where did that fork come from?” Rosalie said. The fork, slender, with a pinkish metallic hue, was unfamiliar.

“I bought it. The color is called rose gold. I liked how ‘rose gold’ sounded.”

That conversation had taken place the week before Marcie started at the prep school she had applied to with her youthful confidence. Three weeks later, during second period, she walked off the campus to a nearby railway. For some time afterward, Rosalie had replayed their conversation over the tricolored melon balls. She wondered if she had missed something that Marcie had been trying to tell her. Would rereading “The Notebook Trilogy” help her? It occurred to her that at least Marcie had known, just shy of sixteen, that the world had the potential to be as violent and bleak as something written by Ágota Kristóf. The world was not as bland and harmless as it was in those novels with long-haired girls on the covers, which had been devoured by Marcie’s classmates in middle school. “omg, i cannot stand them. stupid. stupid. stupid,” Marcie had said a few times, with such passion that Rosalie could see every word in capital letters. But a girl who read those novels might not so resolutely give up all hope. There were more books with long-haired girls on the covers than had been written by Kristóf.

“Someday you should reflect on the mistakes you made. I’m not saying now, of course. Now may be too soon,” Rosalie’s mother had said on the phone a few months after Marcie’s death.

“What do you mean?” Rosalie asked. Like many people, she asked that question only when she knew perfectly well what the other person meant. It was more about earning a moment for herself, like a tennis player flexing her legs, bouncing, readying herself to return a serve.

“Any time a child chooses that way out, you have to wonder what the parents did,” Rosalie’s mother, who refused to use the words “died” or “suicide” but was O.K. with “passed away” or “took her own life,” elaborated.

It was cruel, what her mother had said to Rosalie, but it was far from the cruellest thing she had ever said. Besides, Rosalie knew that her mother was only expressing what other people tried not to, some less successfully than others. The week after Marcie’s death, the mother of one of her middle-school friends texted Rosalie, conveying her condolences and ending the exchange with “I’ve read that there are ways to cure adolescent depression. Didn’t you guys know?”

Parenting was a trial. The lucky ones were still making a case for themselves, with cautious or blind optimism. Rosalie and Dan had received their verdict.

Rosalie had decided to take a trip by herself just as the Delta variant of covid started to gain notoriety. She often travelled alone for work, but, in the past, holiday trips had belonged to the family. Dan had not questioned her decision. He was going to tear down the sunroom, which had been in a dilapidated state for some years, and his plan was to build a new sunroom during his vacation time—well, as much of it as he could; he could spend subsequent weekends on the final touches. To toil in the North Carolina heat—just thinking about it made Rosalie feel exhausted, but, since Marcie’s death, Rosalie and Dan had learned that a shared pain was simply that, a permanent presence of a permanent absence in both their lives. There was no shared cure, not even a shared alleviation. There was no point in comparing the risk of her travelling during a still rampant pandemic to the risk of his injuring his back with heavy lifting under the hot sun.

One specialty of the Netherlands, for a visitor, is its picturesqueness. “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?” Alice asks, sensibly, before going down the rabbit hole. She might as well have asked, What is the use of a life without pictures or conversations? For a week, Rosalie took photographs of canals and windmills, of wheels of cheese and parades of blue-and-white figurines in shopwindows, of museum gardens and market stalls. Amsterdam, Delft, Utrecht, Haarlem—all were picture-perfect, just as she knew Brussels and Ghent and Bruges would be, on the next leg of her trip. Marcie would have jeered at Rosalie’s behavior as a tourist; she would have quizzed Rosalie on the Benelux countries in order to demonstrate to Rosalie her ignorance of the region she so avidly photographed; Marcie would have said, “What’s the use of this skimming on life’s surface as though that would do the trick?”

How do you know it won’t work? Rosalie would have replied; is it not the same as your baking those cookies with the perfect jam decoration? She then realized that, once again, she was back at the same argument, the one that Marcie had already and definitively won. What’s the use of an argument without the promise of further arguments?

Rosalie sent the best of her travel pictures to Dan. In return, he sent photographic documentation of his progress: piles of rotten wood, pristine planks first stacked and then nailed into the right places, new windows with cardboard wrapped around the corners, paint-sample strips and cans, empty beer bottles in the garage, arranged in groups of ten, like bowling pins. Skimming was preferable to dredging a bottomless pain. Every parent who has lost a child will one day die of that chronic affliction. Why not let the sweet pears do their work?

The train to Brussels arrived. All waiting has an end point, Rosalie thought, and instantly her other self said, All waiting? Surely some waiting will always remain that: waiting.

Like what? Rosalie felt obliged to ask.

Like waiting to be contacted by an E.T., waiting to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, waiting to believe in an afterlife.

Oh, you unbending soul. Life is held together by imprecise words and inexact thoughts. What’s the point of picking at every single statement persistently until the seam comes undone?

Rosalie used not to have so many quibbles with herself. Had she developed this tiresome habit because of Marcie’s death? Marcie would have said right away, Don’t you dare blame anything on me. That Rosalie had never, while Marcie was alive, given her an opportunity to speak that line—was that a comfort for either of them? Rosalie wished she had spoken a variation of the line to her own mother, though it was too late. Her mother had died two months earlier. Were there an afterlife, she would have conveyed a message to Rosalie by now, pointing out that her death and her afterlife, both being disagreeable, were Rosalie’s fault, just as her life before death had been full of disappointments caused by having to be a mother to Rosalie, for whom she had abandoned her training in architecture. She had never stopped believing that she had been destined for fame and accolades, all sacrificed for Rosalie.

Would her mother have asked Marcie to give a daughter’s account of Rosalie’s failures in motherhood?

Despite the earlier cancelled trains, the carriage Rosalie settled down in was not crowded. She counted a family of three, a young couple, and a few passengers travelling alone. A woman, tightly doubled-masked, looked back and forth several times, checking on each of the other passengers as though assessing the potential threat they posed, before putting herself into a seat across the aisle from Rosalie, her hands supporting her lower back. Thirty-seven or thirty-eight weeks pregnant? Maybe even forty, Rosalie estimated, looking at the imprint of the woman’s navel, protruding unabashedly against her thin white maternity blouse.

Rosalie remembered learning, in a college psychology course, about how pregnant women were likely to think that, statistically, more women were getting pregnant than in the past, but that it was only a trick of their attention. Were it not for the pandemic, would Rosalie have noticed on this trip more young people about the age that Marcie would have been? After her death, a grief counsellor had explained to Rosalie and Dan that all sorts of everyday things might devastate them without warning: a hairpin, a ballpoint pen, a girl Marcie’s age walking down the street, with the same hair style or in a similar dress. None of these, however, had happened to Rosalie. The whole wide world was where Marcie was not; Rosalie did not need any reminder of that fact.

Marcie would have turned nineteen on her next birthday. Immediately after her death, Rosalie had written in a notebook that her daughter would now remain fifteen forever, and she—Rosalie—would never know what Marcie would have been at sixteen, or seventeen, or twenty-six, or forty-two. What surprised Rosalie—and so few things surprised a parent after the death of a child that this realization had struck her with a blunt force; she would have called it an epiphany had she been religious, or the kind of writer who believed in epiphanies—was that, contrary to her assumption, Marcie had not stayed fifteen. Her friends had continued progressing, going through high school, and they were now about to leave for college. Marcie, too, had aged in Rosalie’s mind. Not in a physically visible manner—Rosalie would never allow herself to imagine a girl who looked any different from the one she had dropped off at the school gate on the final, fatal morning. “I want you to remember the living Marcie,” the funeral director had said gently on the phone, explaining his decision not to allow Rosalie and Dan to view Marcie’s body before the cremation. “I don’t want you to always dwell on her last moments. That’s not what her life was about.”

No, Marcie had not changed physically, but how she felt to Rosalie had altered. She was older now, less prone to extreme passions; she was still sharp, critical, and dismissive of all those people she deemed stupid. Rose gold would be the right hue for Marcie now.

The woman across the aisle gave Rosalie a look: quizzical, if not entirely unfriendly. She must have been staring at the woman’s body. Rosalie nodded in an amiable manner, as though to say she understood the travail of late pregnancy, and then turned her face to the window. She had no intention of causing any concern to the woman, who needed all her energy to focus on her discomfort.

My eyes won’t hurt a single one of your cells, Rosalie’s mother used to say when she inspected Rosalie’s body, assessing every minute change. It used to drive Rosalie into a rage, but she soon learned that the more upset she was, the more calmly and insistently her mother would examine her. What kind of mother would scrutinize a daughter’s body with a collector’s interest? Marianne Moore’s mother, it turned out—or, at least, Rosalie could not shake off that impression after reading Moore’s biography. Poor Marianne had not, it seemed, solved the problem the way Rosalie had: instead of wrapping herself in a bathrobe, Rosalie had carried every single piece of her clothing into the bathroom, where she’d buttoned and zipped and made herself as unavailable and unassailable as possible before stepping out into her mother’s gaze. And her mother, with a cool, ironic smile, would say a few words that made it clear that, no matter how well a child hid her body away, a mother’s eyes could always disrobe that child. “You came out of my birth canal, you suckled my breasts—how could you imagine there’s anything I don’t know about your body?” Had Rosalie’s mother spoken those precise words? It did not matter. Not all words have to be spoken aloud to convey their message.

The train entered a tunnel. Pale fluorescent lights flickered on in the carriage. The window returned the inside of the car like a mirror, and, between her reflection and that of the woman, Rosalie chose to rest her eyes on the woman’s. She was sitting in a manner that looked nearly unsustainable. The last days before a baby’s arrival! Even the most seemingly restful position—sitting, lying, leaning against the back of a sofa—would not bring relief, though that ordeal would soon come to an end. And then you moved on to the next stage, with newly discovered discomforts: vaginal tears from delivery; cracked nipples and inflamed breasts from nursing; worries about diaper rash and cradle cap, about the right kind of bottle to avoid colic or the right time to start solid food so as not to burden the developing digestive system; about growth percentiles, toilet training, preschool applications. And one day all of those things would come to an end, too, whether gradually or abruptly.

The saving grace, Rosalie thought, is that not all pains and worries are permanent. Some, time-sensitive, can be desensitized by time. How else could a parent, or anyone, go on living courageously? A character in a Rebecca West novel, before going to France to be immediately killed in the Great War, says to his mother, “I am sure that if you had been told when you were a child about all the things that you were going to have to do, you would have thought you had better die at once, you would not have believed you could ever have the strength to do them.” Rosalie could very well have said that to the woman across the aisle, or indeed to herself as she was twenty years ago.

A memory, long forgotten, came back to her: when she and newborn Marcie had been discharged from the hospital, Dan, carrying Marcie in a baby carrier and waiting for the elevator door to open, suddenly looked alarmed. He placed the carrier gently on the floor, knelt down next to it, and placed one ear next to the baby’s face, holding his breath, listening. Two old women, both wearing blue ribbons that said “volunteer” on their blouse fronts, stopped to appreciate the sight. “That’s what I call a brand-new dad,” one of them remarked. “Now, this is something I wouldn’t mind seeing every day,” the other woman said. She selected a giant black-and-white cookie from her basket and put it in Rosalie’s hand. “No, no need to pay, dear,” the woman said when Rosalie indicated that she did not have any money on her. “Here, another one for you. That one is for your hubby.”

The train passed villages with steepled churches, flower farms, and rivers and canals alongside which cyclists rode as though in a movie. Sometimes a passenger or two got off the train, pausing on the platform. Framed by the window, they looked as though they were extras on a film set. All those soldiers, carrying their kits on their backs and riding the trains to their untimely deaths—a hundred years later they existed no more than characters in books and films exist. Sometimes Rosalie allowed herself to imagine a passenger on the train that had cleaved her and Dan’s life into before and after, but that never went far. “Imagination” might be one of the most overrated—or at least overused—words. Imagined scenarios are no more than a litmus test of the imaginer’s life.

The woman across the aisle made a muffled sound behind her double masks. Her position in the seat seemed to have changed from discomfort to agony. “Are you all right?” Rosalie asked. “Tout va bien?”

The woman shook her head, and looked back and forth again, with greater difficulty, at the other passengers in the train car. Rosalie knew what had happened before she stepped across the aisle to the woman. Her pants, made of lightweight, oatmeal-colored fabric, revealed a darker patch. The woman’s eyes, looking at Rosalie from above the mask, appeared astonishingly large.

None of the other passengers was yet aware of the emergency. Aside from the mother in the family of three—her child was no older than three or four—none of their fellow-travellers seemed qualified to deal with an imminent birth.

How do you know that? That man sitting there might be a doctor.

Oh, shut up, Rosalie ordered the voice.

And how do you know it’s imminent? Her water broke, yes, but it might still take an hour or two, or even half a day, before the baby is born.

Marcie had been born on a Wednesday morning, at a quarter past eleven, but Rosalie’s water had broken almost eight hours earlier. So there was still time, there was no reason to panic. She told the woman not to worry, then walked to the end of the car and pulled the emergency cord.

The passengers were roused out of their inertia, and now they were like actors moving into their assigned roles. The mother of the young child joined Rosalie, while the father carried the child to the far end of the train car despite the boy’s loud protest. Rosalie opened her suitcase and fished out her rain jacket, which she spread out on the aisle floor. Another passenger—she did not see who it was—handed Rosalie a travel pillow in the shape of a plump piglet. The young mother and Rosalie helped the woman out of her seat and onto the jacket. Two young men hovered over Rosalie’s shoulder, one of them making a call on his mobile phone, and she could tell he was speaking Dutch, but the seriousness in his voice grated on her nerves. What did he know about such an emergency? The next moment, a railway employee rushed in, joined by a colleague from the other end of the car. Already it was promising to be an exciting day, which would be recounted at dinner parties or in phone calls to friends and family.

Later, in Belgium, Rosalie would document the country’s picturesqueness and send the photos to Dan, but her primary motive for going to Belgium was to visit Ypres, which had seen hundreds of thousands of deaths during the First World War. Even as she was thinking of those deaths, she could hear her arguing self—or was it Marcie this time?—laughing at her illogic. Any place in the world has seen hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths, if you go back into history, >no?

Hundreds of thousands of untimely deaths, Rosalie corrected the statement in her mind.

You can’t be so stupid as to think that people’s deaths were timely because those people did not die on a battlefield.

No, but I know all those deaths on the battlefield were untimely.

So?

There is no so. Not every argument has to have a so in it. I simply want to go to a place where many people lie buried.

Why not Normandy?

No, I just want to go to Ypres.

Do you remember how I used to call Ypres “Wipers” ?

Rosalie paused. That question, she now knew clearly, was spoken by Marcie. In middle school, Marcie had read some history books about the two World Wars, and one day confessed that she thought Ypres was pronounced “Wipers.” They had both laughed, but later Rosalie read that “Wipers” was exactly what the English-speaking soldiers had called Ypres.

You know, that was what they had called Ypres—“Wipers.” I read it in a story, or maybe in a novel.

By whom?

Elizabeth Jane Howard? Rebecca West? Mavis Gallant? Pat Barker? Rosalie could not say for sure. But what did it matter? The young men in those books went to war. Some returned intact or maimed, some were killed in action, and others went missing forever. They would be where Marcie was now, and yet Marcie would know none of their stories. Sometimes I wish . . . Rosalie thought, as slowly as if she were writing out each word.

I know. Don’t wish.

That’s right, Rosalie agreed, and yet she insisted on spelling out this one wish of hers, for Marcie, or for whatever phantom had remained in this conversation with her all these years. She wished that nature had installed a different system for people to choose their genealogy—not by their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents but by the books they read, a genealogy that could be deliberately, purposefully, and revocably created and maintained.

Don’t you mean irrevocably?

No, revocably.

But that’s impossible. You can’t unread a book.

No, but you can edit out that book, just as in genetics a segment of DNA can be edited out.

What’s the point?

The point was that Rosalie wished that she had not given Marcie “The Notebook Trilogy” to read. She wished that Marcie had taken a longer route to arrive—or, even better, had never arrived—at that bleakness. She wished there had been more time for Marcie to skim on the surface of her life. What’s wrong with being superficial? With depth always comes pain.

The train had pulled into a tiny station. A one-story building, its yellow façade streaked with gray, looked as though it came right out of an old picture book. A gurney was waiting on the platform; an ambulance, its blue light silently flashing, was parked on the road that ran parallel to the tracks. Three E.M.T.s entered the train car, lifted the woman onto a stretcher, and carried her off; they were now securing her on the gurney, where she lay back in total surrender. From every train window facing the platform there were staring eyes, passengers who watched the drama with good will or indifference.

The young mother gathered Rosalie’s rain jacket and returned it to her. They both raised their hands to the ambulance as it sped away, a gesture more for themselves than for the woman, who would now go on to her own battlefield, and give birth to a Wednesday’s child. Was it illogical of Rosalie to think that she should have refrained from gazing at the woman’s body for so long? Perhaps her mother had been wrong to claim that her scrutinizing would not harm a single cell of Rosalie’s body. Perhaps Rosalie, with her surreptitious study of the woman’s body, had caused some shift and changed the course of events—a Thursday’s child born on Wednesday.

Don’t be silly.

It’s just a thought.

Forget about it.

How?

Like that baby song. How does it go? The wipers on the bus go swish swish swish, swish swish swish, swish swish swish . . .

Not all things, Rosalie thought, can be swishily wiped away. Mothers rarely murder their own children. More often they are vandals, writing out messages in ink both visible and invisible, which can never be entirely erased. Rosalie’s mother, not long before her final decline, had stated her verdict on Marcie’s death. “I call it karma,” she said to Rosalie. What she meant was that, because Rosalie had refused to love her own mother wholeheartedly, it was a fitting punishment for Rosalie to lose a child and feel the greater pain of a more absolute abandonment. Rosalie had not replied; since Marcie’s death she had been anticipating such a remark. Her mother could have surprised Rosalie, and carried her verdict to her grave, but, like many people, she could not resist the urge to inflict pain where pain could be felt, to cause wreckage when anything wreckable was within reach.

But now, on this Wednesday, the recollection of her mother’s verdict did not arouse any acute feeling in Rosalie. She was on her way to Brussels, and later to Ypres. It was a sad thing that Rosalie’s mother, who had loved her, had loved only with cruelty, but at least Rosalie could take solace in the fact that her love for Marcie had been kinder, and that she had never demanded that Marcie repay her, with love or with kindness. ♦