Her mother had always set aside an hour on Saturday afternoon to do the household accounts, and so she does the same, just the same way, sitting at the kitchen table with a pot of tea and two arrowroot biscuits on a plate at her elbow. The house is quiet, except for the solid tick of the kitchen clock. To let her do her accounts in piece, her husband has taken the children out to run errands. He always does; she cannot concentrate if they disturb her.

She writes down all their financial incomings and outgoings for the week, entering each amount and description into her ledger, neatly under headings. The information comes from notebooks that she and her husband keep with them: so much for savings (house repairs, retirement, vacation, children's college plans), so much for hydro, so much for the phone bill, so much for busfare, so much for gas, so much for groceries, so much for child care. Her own notebook is neat and detailed; his is much messier, but after 15 years of marriage, she has no trouble deciphering his scrawl and making sense of his abbreviations.

She tots up the figures twice, to make sure they agree. They usually do, although lately, she's been finding more discrepancies, which annoy her. Look--income should exactly equal expenditures, but this week they're out $12.38. Her husband has once again failed to write something down in his notebook. She will have to speak to him. This has been happening more often lately. She sighs, moving uneasily in her kitchen-table chair. She wonders if there will be a scene again, or one of those long cold silences. Why does he resent this process, when it's just good management?

She knows he doesn't like the notebook, doesn't feel that household accounts are all that important. None of their friends keeps detailed accounts, he said. It wasn't as though they needed to track every penny. They were both professionals, with good incomes. It was a lot of work for her, he said. "I don't mind, but if you want, you could take the job over," she'd suggested, but that went down badly, so she dropped the idea, puzzled by his resistance. People should keep accounts. That was just being responsible. That's what her parents had taught her.

Her mother taught her too that she was responsible for her family's health and well-being. She labours strenuously to ensure that suppers are well-balanced, meticulously meeting federal guidelines. She pores over lists of nutrient values. She has single-handedly, and against much silent resistance, shifted the family over to a heart-healthy low-fat high-fibre diet, with a heavy emphasis on lightly steamed vegetables and unprocessed whole grains, meat (usually chicken breast) only three times a week. She herself never drinks, but she does allow her husband to have a glass of red wine three or four times a week, because she's read that that's good for health--but not more than one glass, and not more than four times a week. She pours out his glass for him and hands it with a light laugh and a comment about its being his medicine. She knows he likes red wine; she doesn't quite understand why so often he either gulps it down, or doesn't touch it.

She realizes that she has made no progress for the last few minutes at her next task, working out the month-end totals. In fact, the pencil has fallen from her fingers; she makes a sudden grab before it can roll off the table and fall to the floor. She's startled by her own movement and her heart starts to race. The stress of it all... She finds herself pulled back into the vortex of anziety. Her daughter.... The girl is 12, and 12 can be difficult; she doesn't always want to do what her parents expect. Her marks aren't as high as they should be, for such a bright child. She has always believed in setting clear boundaries for the children, having high expectations, expecting results. She is concerned that the children know the right ways to do things--each bed in her house is made up drum-tight every morning, rooms are tidy, clothes put away. Maybe she's stricter than some parents, maybe she doesn't always show affection as much as she should, but she does it out of love for them. Children need guidance; otherwise what poor decisions could they make?

What on earth is wrong with her? She tries to add up a column of figures three times, but she can't concentrate, the sum slips through her mind like a live fish through her fingers, it will not stay with her. Unaccountably, she feels suddenly weak as water and her eyes ache with tears--she, who is never weak, never cries! She only wants their good. She only wants them to have security, to follow the right ways, to live long and prosper, to be prudent and protected and safe in this bower of right law and custom. But these are good things. She is loving them best by managing them with such forethought and care, protecting them from their own wrong impulses. Isn't she?

There is a chaos right at the corner of her mind's eye; if she swivels her attention toward it, it recedes, dissolving and reforming just outside her peripheral vision: a phantasmagoria, a confused and whirling mass. There is a forest, endless and full of music, where the leaves are alive with light and the shadows are rich and deep, blithe and brimming with laughter. There is joy in that forest, and risk, and tremendous forces whooping it up; massive and dangerous angels, huge and copper-coloured, souls so bright they blind her eyes and so black they frighten the very stars. Here there are great serpents in Chinese red and gold, dragons in leaf-green and vermillion, and manticores and chimerae, and bravery and adventure. Just for a minute, she wants to throw her accounts out the window, pour a big glass of wine, kick off her Birkenstocks, and run riot with the dragons and angels--but then her good, clear calm mind says, this is nonsense. You're just being silly. Get a grip on yourself.

She shakes her head to clear it, pushes herself away from the kitchen table and stands up, stretching: a solid, sensible matron with neat straight dark hair, such a good woman. The green beans in the backyard vegetable garden are ready for picking; she will get the children to bring them in, and they can have that wonderful Thai bean-and-cabbage salad for dinner tonight--it's been shown that cruciferous vegetables lower one's long-term risk of bowel cancer.

She sits down again, refreshed by her stretch, takes a biscuit, pours a cup of tea, and resolutely closing out all other thoughts, begins to balance the family checkbook.