Maybe my parents are afraid they won’t be who they want to be, if their daughter’s a bad girl. Probably a DA means she will soon be fallen, has fallen already? Are they just afraid that they will lose her? I fell for Jerry, and Jerry really fell for me. I don’t like falling, but sometimes I court it anyway: Carla and I play a game in the yard where we spin and spin, arms spread out wide like dervishes, until we plop on the grass and feel the world go on whirling around us. Is that how it is for Sally, a dizzy new way of making things spin?

My father says he fell in love with my mother on a picnic, in a park in Sweetwater next to the cemetery, when a dog came running out of the graveyard with a bone in its mouth. Other girls would have found it macabre, he says, but your mother just laughed and laughed. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine my parents so young, not yet irrevocably joined to each other. These are the days of the New Deal, the slow upswing out of the Depression, and my father and his brother are working for the Civilian Conservation Corps, building stone stairways and picnic shelters in state parks, lining hiking trails with logs: make-work projects to put bread on the table and stop the economic hemorrhaging. Uncle Clarence—the bolder one, more socially at ease—dates my mother first, and that’s how my father meets her. At first she thinks he’s awkward and a little funny, but then he keeps hitchhiking to Sweetwater from the CCC camp to take her out, persistent, sort of goofily fun, evidently capable of devotion. She’s been sick, some sort of influenza or rheumatic fever, which has kept her down nearly a whole year; she’s thin, and though she’s recovering she’s kept a slight pallor warmed by the flush on her cheeks: a slightly fevered look, mildly tubercular, which my father finds irresistible.