I’m sent to what my parents call “the neighbor lady’s” while they leave for the emergency room. There is some sense about this that I am being consoled, though of course I am not the wounded one; am I looking stricken, is my fear in my face? The neighbor lady has a wonderful maid named Martha; her lap’s practically a continent. We sit at the kitchen table, me and the neighbor lady’s daughter, whom Martha will only refer to as Miss Carla, although she is at most a fourth-grader. Martha makes popcorn for me in a black iron pot (cheery zing and pop against the lid) and says, “Child, your daddy’s going to be all right.”

At all of eight or nine, Miss Carla requires a prefix of respect, her four-letter pedestal. She’s acquired a certain hauteur; she is elongated—because she practices ballet daily, up on toes, hands above her head, becoming taller, more attenuated?—and a little cruel. She teaches me to burn ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass. I don’t like it, don’t see the point, except for the fascination of the circle of focused sunlight, its wavery edge becoming solid as it shrinks down to a punishing pinpoint, as Carla’s very white hand finds just the right position for the lens. She incinerates them with abandon, and they writhe just an instant and wrinkle up. She catches lightning bugs in mayonnaise jars and carries the dying little lamps around as a kind of sorry torch. When I try this one evening, my mother says, “But they might be parents. What if their children are waiting for them?” and I let all the bugs go. Digging in the damp clay of the backyard, Carla and I find a perfectly enormous worm, a foot long and just as pink and big around as my thumb; with her toy spade she chops it in half with abandon, so that each half will grow a new body. She adores and cultivates her power and seeks new theaters of operation in which to exercise it. One day I am myself, in some subtle way not without its fascination, not without desire, its object. She opens her closet to show me her trove of ballet costumes: an arsenal, a ritual wardrobe, the treasure of the trolls kept in the dark beneath their bridge. Glitter and sequin and tulle upon tulle in layers, no single piece standing alone but each a part of an ensemble, each bodice with its attached tutu accompanied by headpieces and matching shoes, sleek and sheened, with their strange, blunt toes.