Why are my parents so mean to my sister? I am a good boy, a model child, which doesn’t mean the kind of model I wanted to be in the silvery glass of Sally’s bureau mirror. They tell Sally they wish she could be like me, which of course has the effect of alienating us from each other; how can I be her confidant if I am the adored example? I’ve been made complicitous with them. They’ve decided long ago she’s a wild girl, in need of control, and if they aren’t strict she’s headed to the bad. But their strictness seems crazily contradictory: act like a nice girl or there’ll be a shotgun at the door to welcome you home. What are they punishing her for? Desire? Autonomy? Something about her newness, how she’s right at home in a world where they themselves seem to lack friends or know the rules? Sally’s new hair means she fits, cool, part of a group, and they don’t like that about her. They would like her to act like a young lady and thus avoid some imagined fate, something they’ve feared or are trying to leave behind? Maybe they’re afraid she’ll wind up being a white-trash girl in a laundromat, a bunch of babies stowed in some trailer park out on the edges of town, where there aren’t any Daughters of the Eastern Star.

We lived, just one summer, in a big old rented house in the middle of a trailer park. I was friends with two identical little blond twins, boys named Clarence and Darence; they used to play in diapers or training pants, yellow from the tops of their heads to their urine-stained pants to their suntanned feet. Their trailer smelled like pee and laundry soap; they were boring but the fact of their being double offered some mildly sustaining interest. My parents couldn’t wait to get out of the trailer park. The day we moved I was playing with Clarence and Darence in our yard, a plot of lawn not yet swallowed by mobile homes. Being a good host, I invited Clarence and Darence to come along with us in the Studebaker to see our new house, an action which provoked from my father a display of rage that made no sense to me at all, a scene which culminated in that single, unforgettable spanking, on a screened-in porch, painted a medicinal pale green, his face as red as if someone had a hand around his throat and were choking him, while he held me wriggling up in the air and said, “Don’t you ever…”

Don’t ever what? Make friends with the kids in the trailer park? Become the kind of person who could have friends in mobile homes?