Our auditorium was put to less sanguine but equally instructive use the day Little Miss Sunbeam appeared. Was the girl on the bread wrapper actually drawn in her likeness? More likely I saw one of a series of Misses, since all that was required were apple cheeks, a pinafore, and those signifying ringlets, weirdly quaint and otherworldly even in 1959. Who was she? Older than as presented, I imagine, a girlish almost-teen in a Shirley Temple dress, white ankle socks, and tap-shoe Mary Janes.

Those tap shoes! They partook of something, gleamed with that Rainbow Girl allure—something like a kind of ectoplasm spread across an ordinary surface, transformative, lending the lucky thing a resonance, an authority.

Silence, the house lights dimming, the velvet curtain black now, and drawn. A drumroll, and then a voice we’ve never heard before, an assured voice from TV or the circus, “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, brought to you by the Sunbeam Bread Company, the little lady herself, Little Miss Sunbeam!”

And she launches herself through the curtain’s opening, flinging both sides back with a showgirl’s knowing toss of the arms, and begins to dance a full-throttle no-holds-barred tap routine. She is a dynamic entity of blondness, legs, and polka dots, her arms spun in circles as she does time steps, tap shoes clicking out an entrancing speedy patter, ringlets bouncing, and then—wonder—she opens her mouth to sing, and does. What I could not tell you now, can in fact barely reconstruct the details of her performance, it is such a rhapsodic blur of aesthetic achievement, show business, and glamour. Her dance seems spontaneous, so effortless does she make each move appear, but of course it’s carefully planned, a faultlessly executed performance of who she’s labored so to become, any sign of her work subsumed in the bravura of her art. She is my first diva, probably all of twelve, a painted doll in rouge and big eyelashes, and who wouldn’t be entranced by such a production? Since it’s both transcendent and a little frightening at once: she is of us and yet so much more than us; there is no danger to her body; she is beyond limit and has entered a realm in which she is above all harm.

I have a problem with my parents, which has to do with what to call them. I don’t know when this began, the origins of my situation seem to go so deeply into the past. I’ve only six years of experience, far less of memory, but as my tiger demonstrates, forgetting is a long, deep well, already dark with layers of unrecorded time. Who knows what occasions and relics that seemingly empty shaft contains? I have no conscious awareness of this problem, of course, as children never have terms for what in their lives is truly grave.