Here in what my father called “Tight-Ass Ville” my parents don’t make any friends, except for one couple, Al and Vi, who like to play cards. Card games are not high on my parents’ list, but when they get together with Al and Vi, cards it is: pinochle, crazy eights. Al is wiry and easygoing, easy to like. He wears exotic short-sleeved shirts in tropical colors like lime and coral, which are never tucked in. Incipient emphysemic, he’s permanently attached to a cigarette, but being quick to laugh, he frequently dissolves into fits of coughing that make conversation impossible. Vi is a blank to me: I find that my memory has completely replaced her with Vivian Vance: broad-hipped, salty and vivacious, quick with a retort. One evening they come to our house for cards; I am to make myself scarce somehow. I watch TV while they drink Tom Collinses and shuffle and deal under the orange plastic bubble of a lamp that hangs above our dining table. But something goes awry, something’s said that shouldn’t be, and the guests make an early departure. Then my mother and father let loose; I am uninvolved in their loud recriminations, but there’s no getting away from their heated argument. I don’t understand any of it, some dangerous and uninterpretable rage swirling around me I can’t do anything to mend. They break a big kidney-shaped ashtray, its aqua glaze flecked with gold; they shatter a lamp. More dangerously, things seem broken on the inside, aswirl, destabilized. He sleeps on the couch in his underwear, she weeps in their bedroom, and in the morning some stunned version of it seems still to continue. I watch them like a wide-eyed spy, double-oh-seven, attempting to assess the damage. They move as if their heads and necks were fragile; they give each other a wide berth, and nobody talks to me. Eventually my father takes me to a movie, a matinee downtown, and when he brings me home she’s still sitting at the dining table in her nightgown, looking out at the neighbor’s pool through the sliding glass door and chain-smoking Salems. What does it matter what she wants? She’s at the mercy of NASA, of the Army Corps of Engineers. She’s survived backwoods poverty, illness, a world war, the death of a child, and twenty years of relative isolation, but will she survive Titusville?