At twilight the town vehicle we call the mosquito truck rolls through the neighborhood, billowing a fog of DDT that thins out as it drifts across the yards. It’s as if that fog clouds everything, the whole world heavy with moisture, subject to mildew. I think it is my mother’s mood, ponderous, swelling, spilling out. I’ve seen a movie called Donovan’s Brain, in which a man’s brain, removed from his body and kept artificially alive, mushrooms and swells till it’s monstrous, floating around the lab attached to an umbilical neural cord, threatening everybody. She attempts to continue painting, setting up her easel and little jars of turpentine in a corner of the living room, but her Florida landscapes are all stormy coasts, palm trees against a gray heaven’s turbid atmosphere. The work stalls; she broods in the living room like Satan in Doré’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, up to his waist in the icy lake at the bottom of Hell. The easel abandoned, she fixes herself a vodka collins.

I am not off to a good start with my new fifth-grade teacher. In our first geography lesson, a review of the southern states, she uses her wooden pointer to identify the yellow shape of Texas on the unrolled wall map, and notes that one side of the state is bordered by the great river whose name she pronounces RYE-oh Grand.

I point out that since the name is Spanish, it is pronounced REE-oh Grahn-day.

She asks how I know and I point out that I read Spanish, and have seen the Rio in question, where it borders the city of Juarez, and that it is shallow, wide, and muddied with brick-red silt.

Well, she says, this is America, and we say Rye-oh Grand.

I go to Miss Stephanie’s with my friend Jimmy Sunderland, the first person I have ever met who’s as big a sissy as me. This is startling; he repels and entertains at once; he’s funny, sometimes swooningly silly, with a butch waxed crew cut that seems too boyish for him. He is chubbier than me. (Our parents, in fact, have a hidden intent in paying for these after-school lessons; they want us to slim down.) Jimmy rhapsodizes about books or movies he loves in a way I find both familiar and embarrassing. I enjoy ferreting out the ways in which I feel superior to him, though I cannot express these since Miss Stephanie is his cousin, and the two of us comprise the entire boys’ tap class. Secretly I feel he is not as smart as he pretends to be, and that his enthusiasm for show tunes somehow misses the point, as if he sees only their shiny surface, not their true grandeur.