"Two minds?" Messer interrupted. Then he laughed, because old-fashioned teachers have no problem with laughing at students, and he said, "I love it when Miss Goodman makes a mistake."

My mistake was to prove prophetic. For my own marriage is undeniably a union of two minds. It is an intermarriage, but not in the religious sense. It is a yoking of opposites. For my husband is nocturnal and I am diurnal; he is usually late and I am always early; he is a floor spreader, and I a table piler; he is a pacer and I a sitter; he dithers, while I make snap decisions; he is a natural dancer, and I can barely follow his lead; he loves every movie he sees and I tolerate few; he reads our children "The Phantom Tollbooth" and I read them "Little House in the Big Woods"; he has an unerring sense of direction while my grasp of geography is shaky. We are all of these disparate things, and our differences go deeper. For I am a word person, a fiction writer, and my husband is a numbers person. When I say I am a fiction writer, you know what I mean. When I say that David is a numbers person, well, actually, I don't know exactly what I mean. "He is a theoretical computer scientist," I say when asked. "It's a kind of math, um, you know -- theory of computation. His specialties are design of algorithms, graph theory, optimization, network flow ..." I trail off.

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