The Book of Knowledge by Doris Grumbach

protected against dust and decay, as though awaiting the owner’s eventual return.
    Near the trunk, wrapped in what Moth called a garment bag, was his father’s black winter overcoat, with its sumptuous velvet collar. Caleb pictured himself as having attained the age and size of Edmund Flowers and being dressed in this fine haberdashery. He was planning to grow very quickly into the entire outfit so he could wear it proudly into the street. To practice, he put on the coat, the derby, a pair of gloves. Thus clad, he felt he had become his father. He was preparing to call on Emma McDermott during the early days of their courtship.
    Caleb went downstairs to find Kate. She was reading a new library book about a boy named Christopher Robin and his teddy bear, a childish story that her brother had scorned when she told him the story.
    â€˜Robin! Pooh! What can we do with that silly stuff?’
    Now he suggested they pretend being their parents, an old favorite game they had played many times before, with variations. He took her hand:
    â€˜Miss McDermott, would you care to come upstairs and be my wife?’
    Still wearing his father’s clothes, he took Kate’s hand and led her upstairs to Kate’s room. He took off the hat, the big coat, and the gloves and lay down beside her. He had thought of a new way of being married. He opened the buttons of his trousers, pulled down her silk underpants, and placed his penis gently along her small, damp seam.
    For some time they lay there, facing each other and staring into each other’s eyes. An unaccustomed warmth suffused Caleb’s chest, his throat, his loins. His penis grew larger, causing Kate’s small crevice to widen.
    It was a revelation to them. Caleb thought of his independent-seeming organ as something apart from himself, a separate object that came to life without his willing it, an extension of some active agency within him over which he had no control. Kate too thought of the moving thing between them as a third party, a new character in their game.
    Then, having been assigned no active role in the drama, the member subsided. They were uncertain how to proceed, holding each other tightly in the clasp of confused children. Caleb wet his lips at the thought of the wondrous pleasures Edmund Flowers might soon receive from Emma McDermott, using what he now knew to be his own capable weapon. Kate, having no capacity for such a vision, believed they had gone as far as would ever be necessary to effect a true marriage.
    Caleb returned to the attic carrying his father’s clothes. Startled by the sound of something stirring, he dropped them on the top of the trunk and walked cautiously toward the noise. Two brown bats rushed past him, their winged arms extended from their furry bodies, their round eyes glittering with astonishment (Caleb thought) at being disturbed in a place they must consider their own. They settled into the rafters, hanging by their webbed forearms, their little heads down, seeming not to see him, not to be watching the intruder. As they hung, their slender bodies touched, their soft coats (it seemed to Caleb) rubbed reassuringly against each other. He put the clothes he had worn into the trunk and sat down on its cover to watch the two bats, who seemed now to be watching him.
    He was fired by a new idea: he and Kate could enact the lives of these two warmly connubial creatures.
    On Kate’s bed that night they played at being bats, according to the new scenario Caleb had devised in the attic.
    â€˜We are to wear no clothes at all,’ he told Kate.
    She lay face down, her arms outspread, her toes pointed down over the edge of the bed, trying to imitate the flattenedout hind limbs of the bat as Caleb had described them. He smoothed himself on top of her, his thin arms and legs stretched along hers. He straightened his toes, like a dancer’s on point, so he could align himself to Kate’s body. Placing his head