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The alarm is set for four A.M., but before it goes off, Grace opens her eyes. The happiness of a dream is still on her. She sees the sign taped to her bedside table written in luminescent purple: GET OUTTA BED. NOW. THIS MEANS YOU DARLING. Her little looove note to herself. Her clothes are laid out; her fishing gear is waiting downstairs; all she has to do is kick out of bed, and in less than an hour she’ll park her father’s car near the abandoned quarry, cross the road, and scramble down the bank with her pole and tackle box.

Through the drawn shade, she sees the sun coming up red and hazy. She thinks of casting out her line and watching it break through the glassy sheen of the reservoir, and her heart actually beats harder. But the room is dim and the bed deliciously warm. Maybe she could sleep for five more minutes, sleep and dream about A.B. . . .

Suddenly she lets out a squawk, remembering the actual dream she had just before she woke up. Damn. She had dreamed about Vronsky. She almost squawks again, but glancing over at her sister, she holds it back. Faith’s hell on wheels if you wake her up. Did she really dream about Richard Vronsky, history teacher with an attitude? Whom she detests.

Actually, Mr. Vronsky doesn’t have an attitude, he has an attitude’s attitude. He doesn’t walk, he struts. He doesn’t speak, he proclaims. He probably looks in the mirror every morning and says, I am a Superior Being. Plus, he has a military haircut, short spikes of dirty blond hair. Plus, she truly hates the way he shaves.

Not, of course, that she’s ever seen him in the act of shaving, but every morning in class she is forced to gaze at his raw-skinned visage, his square jaw flecked with blood, and little bits of bloody tissue clinging to the skin of his neck. Worst of all, though, she is forced to listen to him. “Miss Trembly,” he says to her friend Jane, with exaggerated, ironic courtesy, “please give us the benefit of your profound thoughts on this question.” Sometimes he calls Jane Madame Editor in the same sarcastic tone. Jane’s an editor of the school paper, but so is Boyd Wheeler, and Vronsky never, ever, speaks to Boyd like that.

“Madame Editor, as a person with an informed view of the world. . .” That’s how Vronsky talks, when he talks to a female at all. Jane, because she’s important in school. Shannon Li, because she’s spectacularly pretty. But to Grace, never. She should be glad not to be noticed by such a dismal specimen of maleness, but the fact is that it makes her furious. She has plenty to say about everything, but never gets a chance in Vronsky’s class. How depressing that she dreamed of him! Why not dream about someone she relishes, someone she admires or at least finds good-looking enough to be a sex object? Why not dream about A.B.?

But when she’s the way she is now — in what she calls a state of longing — when the sweet misery rises in her body and at night she curls on herself tenderly; when, all day, she looks at every male creature and wonders when one will ever look back at her and see her the way she wants to be seen; when she cries in the shower for no reason and sometimes even reverts to her old childish habit of hiding in the closet, her face buried and swollen among the clothes; when she’s this way, then there is no knowing what her wilful, her unpredictable, her uncontrollable unconscious will do to her. What dreams it will shower down on her. What little tricks it will pull.

The little trick, this time, was to please her with one of those sweet and stinging dreams in which she is wanted, held, noticed, known. In which all that she feels is given back. Given back by the detestable Mr. V.? Some people believe in dreams as predictors of reality. She could never hold to that view. She knows the difference between daylight and dreams. But, to tell the truth, she’s had dreams like this before, the kind in which things happen that her conscious mind knows are absurd. And not only night dreams. Daydreams, too.

The night dreams, of course, are beyond her control; the daydreams, only slightly less so. She has to admit that often in school only half her mind is present, the other half drifting into a second world where completely unlikely things occur. Love! Lust! Passion! And more. Oh, the headlines! GRACE BIHALLY SCORES AGAIN 0N BROADWAY . . . GRACE, YEAR’S MOST SOUGHT AFTER ACTRESS . . . WILL SHE WIN ANOTHER OSCAR? . . . She adores the theater. She’s in Drama Club, and her mother buys season tickets for the two of them for the Open Palm Repertory Theater every year.

But most of all, she loves her daydreams. In them, she strides freely, she’s a star, playing roles that are dramatic and fabulous and hers because the director wanted someone big enough to handle them. Someone with a big presence, and a big self, and a big voice that moves freely into the world. A voice that’s heard, not hushed.

She’s not alone in these theaters of the mind. Her dreams are inhabited by men, by boys, by males — or, to put it another way, ever present is that human creature with the usual quota of arms, legs, eyes, etcetera, plus a flat chest and a penis. Hmmm . . . that last item — why does that one organ mean so much? Why does she imagine it so often? Why, walking the halls, do her eyes wander downward? Why does she even see it in her dreams?

For that matter, why must she always dream of men and boys? She’s cool. She’s accepting. She wouldn’t, on principle, object to a dream now and then about a girl, a woman, a female. But no, in and out of sleep, day or night, winter or summer, it’s males. And not always the ones she’d choose.

Mr. Vronsky is not an anomaly. Her dreams are often rich in other totally unsuitable and unwanted types. She once dreamed about a politician as well known for his florid, handsome face as his Maine accent and tight-lipped opinions about those people who “don’t pull their own weight in society”: unmarried girls with babies, whom he has scolded publicly and at length for not “controlling” their “wayward sexual urges.” As if he, pure soul, had never had a wayward urge of any kind in his life!

In the dream about him, she was sitting on a stool and he, in a chair, was tenderly stroking her leg, while at the same time talking to someone else. Men make the best monsters. Those were his dream words. Yes, the best, Grace had cried, her voice rising to a crescendo, and she thought how brilliant he was, and all the time he was stroking her leg, but as if he didn’t know what he was doing, and she was staring up into his face, breathless and quivering.

Now that she’s remembering all of her disgusting dreams, how about the one with Mr. Naples? Oh, she is perverted! Mr. Naples of the thinning hair and bad breath? Mr. Naples, her father’s friend? A man she has never, ever, had the least, tiniest thought about as an object of desire? He and her father talk about the stock market, the stock market, the stock market. They are the definition of dull.

In the dream, though, Mr. Naples’s effect on her was far from dull. He smiled into her eyes and said, Grace. Only that, only her name, and it drove her completely crazy. For at least a week, she went around with the dazed thought of him in her mind.

Fortunately for her sanity, he came over to visit with her father again. “Hello, Grace,” he said.

“Hello . . . Mr. Naples.” She had stared at him in amazement. There he was in all his boring glory. She had dreamed about him? Why?

No answer.

No answer, either, to why Vronsky this time, or why she has never dreamed about the one person she would welcome into every dream. A.B. Lovely A.B. Does he elude her dreams because she won’t allow herself to even think his name? Will permit only his initials into her mind? Silly initials, as if made up in some kindergarten of love. Anyway, it is all hopeless. She can never have him. She is twice as big, three times as clumsy, nowhere near as athletic. He is beautiful, graceful, popular. Everything she isn’t. And he is her secret, her hopeless secret. One more hopeless thing about her.

She sits up, swings bare broad feet onto the floor. Faith is still curled up in the next bed, mouth half open, silver nails clutching the sheet protectively near her neck. Grace glances at her younger sister with the old, odd, and familiar mixture of anger and tenderness, then strips off the Redskins shirt she sleeps in. Do not look in the mirror. It’s an order to herself, but one she disobeys. She can rarely resist the reality of herself, the need to force acceptance. This is me. This is what God or genes or Mom and Dad gave me.

The look is quick. She doesn’t need a long look.

In a flash, she sees the massive body, sees how she defies and distorts and disturbs the image of a “normal” girl, of what a girl is “supposed” to be. The height of her, the width of her, the bones of her, the large breasts, the rounded stomach, the heavy thighs. Girl? Nothing girlish or feminine here. (It’s at this moment she always remembers that day in the cafeteria hearing someone call her a buffalo.)

In grade school, when she was already larger than anybody, the teacher had read the class a book called Stuart Little, about a child born as small as a mouse. Grace, as large as Stuart was small, had felt a deep kinship with him, imagining that her parents must have felt exactly like this when she was born — dismayed and startled. Normal-sized people giving birth, in Stuart’s case, to a mouse-sized child. In her case, to a whale-sized child. She had weighed over thirteen pounds at birth. Nothing could have prepared her poor parents for that. Both her older brothers had been a normal six pounds, and so was Faith when she was born a few years later. In the midst of all this normalcy — Grace.

She had written a story about Stuart Little that year. He was in his car, off to see what he could see. Along the way, he caused excitement everywhere. People turned out in droves to admire him. The best part of the story, though, was when he met Grace. Alone in her room, she would act out this scene.

“You’re Miss Grace Bihally?” she would cry in a tiny Stuart Little voice, from a crouched position. “You can’t imagine how delighted I am to meet you.” Springing to her full height, she would look at the floor and return the greeting. “Mr. Stuart Little! You can’t imagine how I admire you!” And then off they’d go to have adventures together.

At some point, it came to her that while small is cute, even adorable, large is simply awkward and unpleasant. She began to wonder if, unlike Stuart Little, who was born to his family, she had slipped into hers by some horrid mistake. In the supermarket with her mother, she would stand by the checkout counter, reading the stories of lost children and mistaken identity in the newspapers lining the racks. PARENTS DISCOVER ONLY CHILD NOT THEIRS, ACTUALLY BELONGS TO FAMILY OF TEN . . . KIDNAPPED BOY FINDS DYING FATHER AFTER FIVE-YEAR SEARCH . . . NURSES ADMIT MISTAKE, BABIES SWITCHED AT BIRTH.

She had gulped down these stories, diving right into them, right into a big wet pool of poor-me-in-the-wrong-family fantasies, heart pushing in her chest until she got to the happy ending. Because, of course, the child in the wrong family was always an unhappy child, sometimes a badly treated child, ordered around, not fed well, made to do all the hardest tasks. Only when reunited with her true family would the lost child, at last, find the happiness she deserved. Sniffle. Sniffle.

Grace got older. She left behind both Stuart Little and lost—child fantasies. Luckily. Tears don’t become her. Something else she knew about herself.

Faith mutters something in her sleep. Pretty Faith. Small Faith, perfectly formed Faith, graceful, feminine Faith. Faith, who could never be mistaken for the child of any other family.

“Oh, hell,” Grace says. It comes over her like that sometimes.

“Whaat?” Faith mumbles anxiously in her sleep, disturbed by Grace’s voice.

Like everything about her, it’s large, outsized. It’s nearly another presence, her voice. “Sleep, Faithy. It’s okay.”

She bends to tie her sneakers, remembering how, once, in her Stuart Little phase, she had bargained with herself that if she could stand on her left foot for an hour, Stuart would appear. She couldn’t, and he didn’t.

She stands now, bends her right leg back, and holds her foot against her butt. Nothing to it. She stands like that for a minute, two minutes, five minutes. Heck, she could do this for an hour. Maybe Stuart would show up this time.

The birds are starting to sing. She’d better get going. She picks up her faded, gray fedora, a hat that her entire family unites in disliking. They think it makes her look like a bag lady. She puts it on. She doesn’t just like this hat, she loves it. She found it in a Salvation Army bin and embellished it with buttons that her mother wore back in the days before she became who she is now. The buttons say corny things like Question authority. . . . Delight in disagreeing . . . Women hold up half the sky. It’s amazing to think that her mother once wore these opinions boldly on sweaters and jackets. “My rebellious phase,” her mother says, blinking, as if that time were a door to nothing that she had passed through.

Grace goes down the hall. Her mother comes out of her bedroom, tying her blue robe. “Hello, sweetie,” she whispers, and before Grace can answer, her finger flies to her lips. They go down the stairs together.

“You’re going fishing now?” her mother says, as if hoping she’s got it wrong. As if, after all these years, she’s still stunned by this large daughter, so different, so unlike herself. Not that she has ever said such a thing. She wouldn’t, and nobody in the family would. Grace is treated (no other word for it) wonderfully. Her parents defer to her, respect her, love her. Her sister and brothers — well, they’re sibs. They’re fine. They accept her as she is. They all do. They try to, anyway. They try their best.

Grace hears herself thinking these things. They try to . . . they try their best. And knows that she’s always known this, that it’s the truth: they try, her family. They do try. But why must they try? Why can’t they just do it?

This answer, she knows. Because who she is, is strange to them. She has always, in some fashion, known this, too.

And now she thinks that maybe the dreams she lives in, the daydreams and the night dreams, are there to help her make her way through her life, to help her stand steady, even when her big legs want to crumple.

But just now, on her way fishing, standing under her mother’s anxious gaze, Grace has another dream, maybe a vision, in which she sees herself walking down a road into a spreading, diffuse white light, a light that leads her on, as if it’s a silken rope she’s holding, leads her on and on, and away and away . . .

“What?” her mother says.

She must have made a noise.

Grace shakes her head. “Nothing, Mom. I’ll be home around ten,” she says, consciously subduing her voice.

“I’ll have breakfast for you.” Her mother pats Grace’s arm, a soothing familiar gesture.

Grace has always loved her mother‘s touch, but now she has the surprising notion that her mother is afraid of her and touches her this way to keep her soothed and smoothed, undangerous, as if there’s some strange mechanism inside her (the one that has made her so unlike all her mother’s other children), which might, if not handled gingerly, explode.

Grace walks to the door, trying not to rock the floor, trying, for her mother’s sake, to seem smaller, quieter, less.

Today, she thinks, she’ll come back. But one day she’ll walk out the door and keep walking, just keep walking until she finds — well, what? The light? A place where she belongs? A place in the world where she can be as big and strong and loud — as Grace — as she was born, as she naturally is? Is there such a place? Is it possible?

Yes. She hears that. It comes from neither inside her nor outside her. It simply is. Yes. And for a moment, right there in the ordinary doorway of her ordinary home, she stands in the white light and seems to understand everything, the chief thing being yes. Yes, there is such a place. It’s an instant of grace. Grace’s grace. It’s an instant only, and then it’s gone, and she’s out the door, and the morning light draws her on, big-footed, big-voiced, big-herself Grace.