Bliss

Thirty years old and suddenly wanting to bowl a hoop down the pavement, to throw something into the air and catch it, Bertha Young cannot say why she is so happy. There is a pear tree at the end of her garden, in perfect flower, and by evening it seems to her the emblem of her whole life: her husband, her baby, her clever friends coming to dinner, the cool blonde guest whose silence she reads as a shared secret.