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was sandwiched in the middle of the crowd, she saw them as if from a great distance, from a far, chilly point on the periphery. She kept half an eye on Ezra out of long habit, for she had done so, without quite wanting to, through all the weeks and months of high school that had come before, and maybe he had noticed: when he and Christina broke up after a run of graduation parties, it was she whom he called. He was miserable but talkative. One still had to pay for long distance in those days. On a Saturday morning in early October, he appeared on the steps of her freshman dorm, despite having enrolled at a college more than three hours away. By the time Ezra got into graduate school, they were an old couple, a familiar sight. She, too, had her tales of New York. The park he spoke of, and its hazardous paths—she once knew them well.

“Tell him,” Ezra urges, his voice turned in her direction. It comes as a surprise: she thought she had gone unnoticed when she glided into the room, wearing socks.

“It’s true,” she says to their child. “Julia was huge. She was everywhere.”

“And I bladed right into her,” Ezra says with satisfaction, the splendor of the story holding all of them in its embrace. For a moment they absorb the fact of being together in the darkened bedroom, just the three of them, the older child probably off brushing his teeth somewhere. Ezra says to his wife, from the low edge of the bed, “You remember that day,” in the sure-sounding voice she’d first liked in history class, and huskily she answers him, “Mm-hmm, I do,” when in fact she has been quickly sifting through her brain only to find that she has no memory of it at all.

This is the second time today that her mind has failed her, but the first instance was so mild that it barely registered. In the late afternoon, drowsily driving the boys to their martial arts studio, she heard on the radio a story about the chain restaurant Medieval Times, where diners can watch live jousting tournaments while eating without the help of utensils. The big news was that the restaurant had decided to replace all of its resident kings with queens. Despite this change in leadership, the radio host remarked dryly, the servers at Medieval Times would still be referred to, going forward, as “wenches.”

She perked right up at the sound of that friendly old word, which carried her instantly to the broken-backed couches and burnt-popcorn smell of their high school student center. For a brief spell there, wench had been the slur of choice—originating with the boys, one had to guess, but soon enough used in good-natured address from girl to girl. To her ears, it summoned not so much a barefoot slut with a tankard as the lanky, lacrosse-playing classmates of her youth, addled on weak hallucinogens and jam bands. The word filled her with sadness and warmth. But she couldn’t for the life of her recall how to use it convincingly in a sentence. Hey wench, good game today. Stop being such a wench and pass the popcorn. Bye, wench. Later, wench. It all sounded wrong.

“Why are you talking to yourself?” her younger child asked from the back seat.

“I’m just trying to remember how to say something,” she told him.

“In English?” he asked, sounding worried.

The problem, she sees now, is that in its heyday she never seized the chance to say the word herself. Nor was it ever said to her. So the failure wasn’t of memory but of another sort. She hadn’t shaped her lips around the word; it hadn’t been lobbed fondly in her direction. Somehow the lacrosse players had known not to say it to her, or for that matter to any of the black girls, few as they were. For them, a tone of collegial respect had been specially reserved. So many pleasant exchanges, straightforward smiles! She might as well have been wearing a pantsuit during all those years. Yet dull Christina had been called a wench more times than could be counted. Along with a few humorous observations about the size of her mouth. Which would explain, wouldn’t it, popular opinion regarding her resemblance to—

“Funny that she didn’t have an entourage in tow,” she says.

“Was she being followed by the paparazzi?” the child asks.

“Nope,” Ezra answers serenely. “She was completely alone. Enjoying the day.”

“Without even a bodyguard?” his wife asks in the dark.

“Not as far as I could see. But then again, I didn’t see that it was Julia Roberts until I was looking down at her.”

“Between your legs,” the child says.

“I helped her back up to her feet and we each went on our way.” Ezra is straightening out the comforter, by the sound of it. “I wasn’t looking around for bodyguards. I wanted to get home as fast as I could and tell you.”

“We didn’t have cell phones,” she explains.

“You were too poor,” the child says soothingly.

She doesn’t protest. The history of technology is too great an undertaking at this hour.

Also it’s true: they lived on very little then. Home was a garden-level apartment in a neglected corner of an outer borough, its distance to the nearest subway stop the original inspiration behind the Rollerblades. From next door came the incoherent cries of an old man and the smell of decades’ worth of fried meat. They kept the windows open in all seasons, because of both the smell and the furious radiators, controlled by some invisible hand.

A steel-legged café table with a laminate top was where they ate, worked, studied, and wrote thank-you notes. Despite the small checks that occasionally arrived in the mail from relatives living in less expensive places, Ezra still needed to have a part-time job while taking classes. He was descended from two generations of advanced-degree-holding black professionals who loved him unconditionally but regarded the project of “art school” with