“Neighbor lady”—as opposed to referring to her by name—is an economical means by which my parents convey disapproval almost entirely overshadowed by fascination. The elements of her character that are to be censured are precisely those that assure unflagging interest in her as a topic of conversation. She’s a single mother, a term no one’s thought of yet; the phrase of the hour is “out of wedlock,” which has to be explained to me. “Neighbor lady” avoids the sticky problem of the appropriate prefix; would she be insulted by “Miss”? Does she defile the dignity of “Mrs.”? To her face, they take the Southern tack of blurring her to a “Mizz.”

She is or was, my mother says, the mistress of a Famous Jazz Musician from New Orleans. My mother inflects New Orleans in a way which makes that pretty name seem aligned with Mistress, a pair of soft words, against the hard and opaque opposite term, wedlock. As if they represented two cities, choices a person might make, the shadowy and slightly indecent New Orleans on the one hand, and plain well-lit wedlock on the other.

Mistress is evocative and inviting: sibilant, a little hissy. (I love the phrase hissy fit which is what people have when they get upset.) The word’s tinged with a bit of Carla’s mean streak, and her mother’s lush burst of red hair, a color my mother maintains is nothing the Lord intended. She’s often away; is she visiting the clarinetist? Is he the one who buys the outfits that rustle and shine in the dark of that closet, ensembles enough for an entire nine-year-old corps de ballet?