Or does the shame simply commingle with the pleasure, infusing it with something airless, covetous, irremediably solitary: the boy alone in the hothouse of his loves?

Sally comes home with a new haircut. Wisely she’s told no one of her plan; her longish blond hair is gone, the sides now combed back like a boy’s: Love me tender. The haircut, all the rage, is called the DA, a polite acronym for duck’s ass, since the hair in the very back curls up in a saucy point. (Sometime around 1975 hair ceased to have the social and political meanings it once carried in America; dreadlocks or shaved heads or blow-dried stylings still announce our social allegiances, but the signifying potency of Sally’s gesture is hard to feature now, when it would be just one more gesture toward fashion. In 1959 a DA was about class, femininity, and rebellion in a big way, so Sally has broken a rule—another one I didn’t know existed—and all hell’s broken loose.)

Mother’s in the kitchen, smoking and weeping; she hates the phrase “DA” and actually seems to prefer “duck’s ass,” though she lowers her voice on the second word and utters it with a bit of a hissing shudder. Her eyes are a tired red. My father’s entire face is red. He yells, smolders, sputters, and smolders more, but the deed is done. Sally sulks in her room, too wounded even to play records or write in her white five-year diary with the little golden key. She is triumphant but miserable. Old photos of my sister are brought out, childhood pictures in which, in pinafore and long straight hair, she resembles the Alice of the Tenniel illustrations for Alice in Wonderland; her whole name is in fact Sarah Alice. No more; this haircut says hood, says greaser, spells trouble. Motorbikes, biceps, and DAs say, Good-bye Wonderland, good-bye Rainbow Girls, hello rock ’n’ roll.

Tattoos and a life of dissipation cannot be far behind. The unspoken issue (unspoken in front of me, anyway) is sex: Sally’s done what she likes with her body, and the implications are clear, and somehow her freedom seems my parents’ undoing. (We’ll replay this scene, in 1969, over my own lack of a haircut, my own announcement that my body is mine.)