The man was sturdy and blond, with a carefully tended mustache, and eyes as blue as the wet blue cups in a palette of watercolors. His wife had a weak and lovely mouth that suggested vulnerability, sensitivity, and compassion, but, unlike the dark waddling pumpkins that stood around her, she was tall and strong. She carried their son, an infant. The father took the baby when she left him for the examining room. The people next to him thought that he was crazy, for he stroked the child almost mechanically, muttering something to it in a tight and desperate fashion, though he could not take his eyes off the door where she would come out. When finally she emerged, she shrugged her shoulders as if to say that she didn't know what the doctors had determined. Without a word, she took the baby glad to get him back, and her husband left for another room. As he walked away, he saw that she had a symbol chalked on her back. Then, they examined him. They made him spit into a vial; they took some blood; and they scanned him rapidly while a clerk wrote down what they said. After he put on his clothes, they put a chalk mark on his back, too