Lonnie knelt down next to William and ran a little toy truck along the ledge of the sandbox, keeping her knees together. She was wearing a pencil skirt and heels as if she were the one being interviewed. I worried about my appearance, though I’d dressed carefully that morning and pulled my hair up so the humidity wouldn’t affect it. I was wearing flats and carrying a backpack instead of a handbag. It felt too casual; I looked like a teenager compared to her.

She left her big caramel-colored purse on a bench rather far from where we ended up standing, and I felt like going over to grab it for her, but also sensed it was not my place to do so. She wasn’t even keeping an eye on it; her attention was focused on her son. They didn’t ask me very many questions. I gave them a few details about the invented families I’d listed on my résumé, not mentioning my latest month of unemployment or the way my stomach cramped with hunger all day long. I reassured them I had no interest in moving back home. “So much to do all the time,” I said of New York, trying to sound eager about the cliché.

I never knew what to say when someone asked me why I’d come to the city. I felt I’d moved for the same reason my ancestors had packed up wagons and made their way across the wide expanse of the American prairie—I wanted to see the elephant. I’d loved that idiom from the first time I heard it. The pioneers had invented a way to sum up both the naïve optimism of someone setting out to make their fortune as well as the jaded cynicism to which it was inevitably coupled. The contradictory nature of the phrase was particularly relevant early that summer, as I struggled to sustain myself. Hungry, broke, yet stupidly self-righteous about my lack of privilege and the very fact of my continued survival in a strange new place, I kept asking myself, Have you seen the elephant yet?

Oregon, or my memory of it, exists mostly in nighttime or the gloaming hours of dusk. I learned to live in that funny dark space. Those houses I occupied were familiar by touch and sound—the popcorn texture of my father’s spackled walls, the smooth wood of my mother’s antique radio, the ticking clock in the kitchen, the quiet creaking of the floors. Life happened by climbing out windows after midnight curfew, wandering through all those big backyards, so big the owners would never find me and the boy I was with. Which boy? Any boy, it didn’t matter; it was dark. Life happened in the dark back seats of cars. Everyone was pale.