And I do, or at least better than I do with most boys, who seem already possessed of forms of knowledge opaque to me, things they grasp and I do not: baseball gloves, for instance, the inflation of rubber balls, marbles, the choosing of teams, names of models of cars. Where they got this knowledge I don’t know; already I have a dawning sense that either it is too late for me to ask the questions or that questioning is not the way such understandings are gained. If you have to ask the rules of the boys’ world, you can’t possibly be one of the people who has the answers. To ask would betray my hopeless ignorance.

Or maybe I don’t want to know.

During one of my parents’ sporadic attempts to make friends, we go to visit a man with whom my father works, another Army engineer also engaged in the huge project of building underground silos in the desert, gigantic holes lined with corrugated metal, which will house white rockets tipped with nuclear warheads. The engineer—handsome, in blue jeans and tight white T-shirt, warm in an unselfconscious way I am not used to—lives with his wife and son in a white trailer I think fascinating: such a long and narrow house, full of hiding places to stow things away. My father and his friend talk and drink some beers, my mother and the friend’s wife tour the trailer and talk in the kitchen, and then all of them sit outside in folding green-webbed lawn chairs and talk, while I am to play with the son. He is my age and All Boy, smitten to the core with astronauts, the current pursuit and obsession of All Boys.