The ducktail incident seems mild next to what follows, that loudly articulated disapproval far preferable to what settles over our house: strain, silence, a heaviness infecting everything, the steam iron moving back and forth over the board deliberately, so slow as to seem calculated, even murderous. The air’s fogged with Salems, and my memory seems cloudy, too, perhaps because of our household’s palpable sense of tension and of gloom, or perhaps because now things happen in such a hurry. The word pregnant is never spoken; a wedding is announced; somewhere in the rush of things my mother says to me, “Your sister has to get married,” a statement fraught with depths I can’t sound.

Sally takes me to the movies, to see The Ten Commandments, a big event; a huge red curtain pulls back to reveal a prologue, in which Cecil B. DeMille tells us how important this all is, and then there’s Egypt, in Technicolor, baby Moses in the bulrushes. I like this; I know this story from Sunday school. I like the way the child floats to safety, and the secrecy of his identity; no one knows he’s a prophet, a miracle maker. I enjoy the plagues: snakes and blood and lightning and bare-chested Yul Brynner as Pharaoh carrying the body of his son, and I like the Red Sea parting like the red curtain, but the movie goes on and on, Israelites in the wilderness, and I have to pee and somehow feel I shouldn’t say so. Outside, waiting for my father to come pick us up, I wet my pants and Sally’s annoyed with me, but then she tells me about her wedding dress anyway, not a dress actually but a suit: very modern, as she presents it, and simple, in beige brocade, with a beige pillbox hat sporting its own small beige veil.

Beige? Couldn’t somebody give the girl a nice white dress? If my parents chose it, it seems a way of marking her shame, of observing some code of honor bizarrely more important than their daughter. If she chose it, it seems like Hester Prynne’s gesture: wear your shame, girl, put it in their faces, and look beautiful while you go about it; you stand up there and you look perfect.