The diving pool: three novellas - By Yoko Ogawa & Stephen Snyder Page 0,16

boxes that had once held gauze or cotton balls, we'd stare through the window into the examination room.

"We'll get in trouble if they catch us," I said. I was always more timid than my sister.

"Don't worry, they won't do anything. We're just kids," she'd say, calmly rubbing the glass with her sleeve to wipe away the condensation from our breath. As we pressed our faces up against the window, we could smell the white paint inside. That odor, like an ache deep in my head, still reminds me of the clinic after all these years.

The room was always empty at midday, before the afternoon appointments began, and we could study it to our hearts' content. A collection of bottles arranged on an oval tray seemed particularly mysterious. They had no caps or seals, just glass stoppers, which I felt an irresistible urge to pull out. The bottles had been stained brown or purple or deep red by the fluids they held, and when the sunlight shone through them, the liquid seemed to glisten.

A stethoscope and some tongs and a blood-pressure cuff lay on the doctor's desk. The thin, twisting tube, dull silver fittings, and pear-shaped rubber bulb of the cuff made it look like a strange insect nestled among the other instruments. There was an odd beauty in the unintelligible letters printed on the medical charts. Next to the desk was a simple bed made up with faded sheets. A square pillow lay in the middle. It looked quite hard, and I wondered what it would be like to sleep on. A poster on the wall read "Position for use in treating breech presentation." In the picture, a woman in a leotard was curled up in a ball on the floor. She lay there in the yellowed poster, staring vacantly into the distance. Then the chimes from a school somewhere in the neighborhood would start ringing, telling us that it was time for the afternoon examinations. We knew that we had to leave when we heard the nurses coming back from lunch.

"Do you know what they do on the second and third floors?" I asked my sister one day.

"That's where they have the cafeteria and the rooms for the mothers and babies," she answered, as if she'd just been up to have a look.

Sometimes we could see women at the windows on the third floor. They had probably just given birth. They had on thick bathrobes, and their hair was pulled back in ponytails. None of them wore makeup. Wisps of hair floated around their temples, and their faces were expressionless. I wondered why they didn't seem happier at the prospect of sleeping above an examination room full of such fascinating objects.

My sister came back before noon, and I found her in the front hall just as I was getting ready to leave for work.

"What did they say?"

"I'm in the second month—exactly six weeks."

"Can they really tell that precisely?"

"They can when they have all the charts," she said, pulling off her coat and hurrying past me. She didn't seem particularly excited by the news. "What's for dinner?"

"Bouillabaisse," I said. "The clams and squid were cheap."

She had changed the subject so quickly that I completely forgot to congratulate her. But, then again, I wasn't quite sure congratulations were appropriate for a baby who would be born to my sister and her husband. I looked up "congratulate" in the dictionary: it said, "to wish someone joy."

"That doesn't mean much," I muttered, tracing my finger over a line of characters that held no promise of joy themselves.

DECEMBER 30 (TUESDAY), 6 WEEKS + 1 DAY

Since I was a little girl, I've disliked the thirtieth of December. I could always get through the thirty-first by telling myself that the year was finally over, but the thirtieth was confusing somehow, neither here nor there. Cooking the traditional New Year's dinner, cleaning the house, shopping—none of my tasks were completely finished.

When my father and mother got sick and died, one right after the other, my ties to the New Year's season became even more tenuous. Nor did things change when my brother-in-law came to live with us. Still, breakfast this morning was a bit more relaxed than usual, since I didn't have classes and my brother-in-law's office was closed for the holiday.

"When you haven't had enough sleep, even the winter sun seems too bright," he said, squinting behind his glasses as he lowered himself into a chair. The light shining in from the garden fell on the