Changes

The story gets its title from Susan, another of the party guests, who had a peculiar experience on a mountain pass in Nepal. A bobcat mauled her arm (now amputated), but before it struck, Susan remembers it 'placing his paw on her shoulder as if to say, politely, ''Hello''?' She describes it almost like a spiritual communion. The bobcat is a symbol of everything that's lying in wait for us; some of these shocks may be blessings in disguise, but to start with they will be painful – and that is certainly true of the dying marriages at the story's core.

In 'The Banks of the Vistula', Margaret, a student at a Lutheran college in Minnesota, plagiarizes her first linguistics essay and inadvertently convinces her Polish professor that she's a Soviet propagandist. The next story, 'Slatland', reuses multiple elements: the Scandinavian Midwestern milieu (Saskatchewan this time), the Eastern European references, and the key relationship with a professor. The narrator is even named Margit, all too similar. Margit meets with a psychiatrist at her father's college twice, once to help her deal with her parents' divorce when she falls into depression at age 11, and then 20 years later to help her figure out whether her Romanian fiancé is cheating on her.