We have moved to Titusville, Florida, and I am enrolled in Miss Stephanie’s School of the Dance. Months ago, back in Tucson, my parents told me I would be able to take dance lessons, a promise held out as consolation for moving again, but who is it who needs comfort? My mother plainly, emphatically, doesn’t want to go, but the missile silos are done, the warheads lowered into place. There’s no more work for my father in the desert, the landscape of my mother’s heart. Work is at Cape Canaveral, where my father’s going to build the structure in which the Apollo moon rocket will be assembled, the biggest building in the world (You could fit seven football fields, or all of St. Peter’s Cathedral…).

I imagined Miss Tynes would be pleased when I told her about the dance lessons I’d been promised. But she said, “Oh, no, I hope it doesn’t ruin you!” When I looked puzzled, she talked about spontaneity, unfettered movement, the limitations imposed by expectation and training—but still I don’t think I understood. How could a teacher ever ruin how it felt to dance? Wasn’t it always good to learn?

Our house in Florida is a motley pink stucco affair built around a little atrium, a square of open garden in whose sandy plot sprouts a rubber plant and mother-in-laws’ tongues. Walls of glass surround the open space, so that from almost everywhere in the house you can see the damp sad things, which somehow manage to look more barren than tropical, a reminder of failure rather than evidence of fecundity.

Out back there’s a big vacant lot that leads to the railroad tracks; there I catch an armadillo, which resembles a small pig wearing a suit of antique Japanese armor. I try to keep it in a cardboard box, and offer it lettuce and carrots, wilting items it adamantly refuses. That’s the word for the armadillo: adamant, utterly defined by refusal. Its victory is all negation: the pasteboard liquor carton fills up with no, no, no. I let the beast go.