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going on helped, even if what was going on was a fairy tale. Familiarity with the music made the arias more beautiful, too.
    Maybe the plot isn’t exactly twentieth-century realistic, she thought, but that’s only if you take it literally. Longing for what you can’t have is universal. And emotionally accessible.
    Everyone wanted something they couldn’t have. Or maybe they just don’t want the right things. Some of them don’t even know what they want. Like Turandot. The ice princess. And that poor slave girl, so faithful to her master while also obviously in love with his son.
    Ruth was completely swept up by the music, the colors, the emotion. When the lights announced intermission, she was gratified to realize she’d done none of her usual mental flitting, had no negative fantasies about retirement or To-Do lists or Jeremy-the-enigma. All she’d done was wrap her attention around the opera.
    However, like Pavlov’s dog, her bladder responded to the break. She bolted for the women’s room and her heart sank at the ten-person line. It was the cold, hard fact of restroom life: Women waited, men didn’t.
    â€œI’ll bet the men don’t have to wait,” she groused.
    â€œDo they have more stalls, do you think? Or are they just faster?”
    â€œWanna find out?”
    â€œWe need to level the peeing field.”
    Giggles all around. Then, as if they’d rehearsed, everyone got serious about waiting patiently. As she advanced from the anteroom to the main room, she counted: Four stalls, and I’m ninth on line. That’s like being third on line for a single stall. Not too bad.
    She turned to the long horizontal mirror to her right and multi-tasked. Hair, lips, cheeks, eyebrows. And check out the tummy. How could David say he didn’t see it?
    Finishing her personal mirror-work, her eyes brushed past the reflections of the women in line. She was struck—who wouldn’t be?—by the wild head of light-brown frizzy hair on a woman near the end of the line. Thick, curly, with no attempt at good manners or any other form of restraint. It reminded her of kids at a swimming pool who yell to their parents, “Look at me, look at me. See what I can do. Look, watch me do a trick. Look at me.” Beneath it all, the woman had one thick eyebrow.
    Among all the black sequins, rhinestones, and silk, she wore a huge blue and green print creation, the kind of dress usually referred to as a flowing robe.
    The hair may be different, she thought, but not the mono-brow. That’s Vivian.
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    SHE’D FIRST SET EYES ON VIVIAN, her Peace Corps Volunteer hut-mate, after six dusty hours on a washboarded red-clay road in a crowded bush-taxi. Emerging from the closely-packed vehicle, her brain shaken like a malted from the bumpy ride and the fatigue, she saw the village where she’d be living for two years. The huts were various shapes and sizes, but were all the color of the ground. There was an occasional fromagier tree whose base looked like the rich folds of a wedding gown spread out at the bride’s feet for the traditional picture.
    A large white woman emerged from one of the mud brick structures. She wore a faded blue version of the standard wax-dyed cloth wrapped around her waist like a beach cover-up, a reddish version around her head, and, separating the two competing patterns, a tee-shirt that had once been white. Ruth thought it hadn’t taken her Peace Corps hut-mate very long to go native. Vivian, as she later recounted, was awed by how clean Ruth was.
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    â€œRUTH, OHMYGOD, RUTH, is that you? Is that really you? Here on the same bathroom line as me? Is it really you?” Vivian’s eyes widened as her voice got louder and louder.
    Everyone looked up.
    Busted, thought Ruth. “Vivian? Vivian Denise Cassidy? Is that you? Geez, it must be … thirty years now? How are you?”
    Plum-sequined Ruth and