Memphis seems a lost world now, made strange by our absence from it, so remote it might as well really be in Egypt. My mother and I visit once, on the train, an adventure alternately dreamy and boring; the black tracks seem to cross the desert forever. In little Southern towns, people sell box lunches from the platforms, and I’m allowed to lean out the window and give a lady a dollar for a white paper box containing a piece of fried chicken and a delicious buttery biscuit. We see Sally’s new baby, her third, and we move in a world I barely recognize. At Christmas Sally sends elaborately wrapped gifts: airy white divinity she’s made herself, all melting white sugar and big pecans; Avon sachets; jewelry for my mother from Sarah Coventry, a special sparkling ornament tied to each bow. The presents are beautiful; she wants to please. Her gesture seems to come from very far away.

My junior sexual investigations are not limited to lithe Walter. I have also entered into a secret liaison with a neighbor girl, Lorraine Gunther, who is a rather Juno-esque thirteen. Lorraine (pointedly pronounced LORR-aine, not Lorr-AINE) has invented a name for our game, Sneak Previews, which even then strikes me as a bit smarmy. She’s taken pleasure in telling her mother that we play Sneak Previews, which she explained is a game in which we tell each other the plots of new movies we have heard about. This explanation is obviously inadequate for the frequency with which our sessions are scheduled.

Mrs. Gunther belongs to one of two new categories of adults I have recently learned from my parents. She is a divorcée, which is a descriptive term plainly offered as a judgment, though what is described or judged, exactly, I can’t tell. Thus the term connotes things specific to Mrs. Gunther: arched eyebrows drawn in pencil, pedal-pusher pants, a collection of Chesty Morgan albums. (My other new category is spinster, a niche occupied by Beulah across the street, who drives an elaborate pink-and-gray Buick and has, in her stale and doilied living room, porcelain figurines of shepherdesses. Beulah, my parents suggest, is prissy and overly fussy because she has not had a man; Mrs. Gunther demonstrates the results of having had too many.)

Sneak Previews is conducted at the Gunthers’ when the divorcée is not at home, or at my house when my mother is at painting class. We usually go into the closet anyway, for added safety or drama. Lorraine, who is in junior high and goes to Catholic school, something which is a complete mystery to me, removes one article of her clothing at a time, as do I sometimes: the game is more about her nakedness than mine. Her breasts are large, with big dark brown nipples like my mother’s; her body is very white and between her legs is a dark triangle of hair I don’t think pretty.