The coaches make matters worse; uninterested in helping me gain access to physical activity, they actually take an opposite tack, shaming me and other hapless boys as a way of bonding themselves to the rest of the class. They underscore their masculinity, their common strength, by pointing to the failures of the fatties and the girly boys. I can see clearly that the coaches are themselves nervous boys, proving a point, but I’m powerless to do anything about it but keep my resentment in my face, limit the degree of my participation, and get as many excuses as I can: sore throats, bad coughs. The fat boys and the sissies are made to do jumping jacks, to run laps, though some days they just give up and have us keep score. The strong boys, the coaches’ favorites, go off by themselves and lift weights, talking among themselves about the knowledge they hold in common. Coach de Sade stands at the tiled opening to the shower, at the end of my hour of tribulation, making sure that each boy has stripped and lined up, checking off our names.

These hellish days seem unrelieved, so I make of home a refuge: I choose paint colors for my bedroom, absorbing myself in the process, picking out brushes and roller, holding paint chips to the light: dusty sage, like the natural dyes I boiled out of desert leaves years ago, for the walls; a dusky olive for woodwork and bookshelves. I’m going to wrap myself up in someplace private, marked with evidence of myself; my own pictures, and books and magazines, my own music, some incense, a beaded curtain from the import store, my hidden treasure envelope of parts of men. If I have to spend the day with those idiots, at least I can have someplace nice to read.

There isn’t much peace in the rest of the house, however, not since my grandfather’s come to live with us. I don’t know where he’s been these years, but the old man—Orlin, my father’s father—arrives in Tucson on a Greyhound bus, carrying two ancient monogrammed suitcases strapped round with leather belts to keep them shut. His clothes, in the bright undifferentiated light of Arizona, make him seem ghostly: battered gray fedora, scarred cane with a yellow rubber tip, a vest of some kind of boiled wool felt worn over collarless shirts. When he changes clothes, I see his undergarments, scratchy-looking amber things with buttons and plackets; he’s a revenant of the nineteenth century here in our spare room, right off the dining area, where my mother used to keep her painting supplies. Now it’s Orlin’s room, and in no time he seems to have filled it with an aura all his own, as if the old country world of East Tennessee has suddenly been recreated, in microcosm, just behind our yellow louvered doors.