She busied herself in the fields, remembering how, on her wedding night, she had been called by another name. Was it true, she wondered, that Jacob, the hero of some story, the author of an immense people, had once ascended a stairway lousy with angels? That he had grappled with a passing god? That he had hefted an unheftable stone? She knew, of course, that he had worked seven years and seven more to prove his love, but it hadn’t been for her. For her and the quorum she bore, her avalanche of children, her captains and kings and slayers of lions, order would always mean disorder, first coming last. For her, abundance would always be a funny thing, more consolation than reward, and the world nothing more than an immense, open womb. She tired of saying, Maybe now I will be loved. Or now. Or maybe now. Still, when she rested her uncertain eyes, she sometimes entered a many-roomed house, its walls covered with downy moss, and heard there a thousand voices, each one an echo, each one calling her mother.