My education in beauty had already begun, and the new experience of school brought its brightest exemplar. Little Miss Sunbeam—whose face emblazoned an infinity of bread wrappers, whose image glowed on the sides of fleets of bakery trucks, the buttered bread in her hands like some physical manifestation of happiness—came to Peabody Elementary for purposes of entertainment, as if we were troops who required some recreational distraction, and for the rather shameless promotion of cottony white bread. (Our own brand of bread is Rainbo. I like to steal slices from the kitchen, put the slices in a Mason jar with the lid screwed on tight, and bury it in the backyard. When I dig it up, magic: little galaxies of blue-black mold, fleurs du mal.) Some message about achievement must also have been implied in our grade-school assembly, since this perfect child was so accomplished she merited elevation to the fierce light of our auditorium’s stage.

Peabody was a square building, imposing, multistoried, of gray and somnolent cement, something of civic pride or cultural ambition about it, something already historical and over by the time I got there, though no one had really noticed yet. A Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington hung in our classroom. It was unfinished, my teacher said, which is why his shoulders rose out of nothing, a billow of blank canvas, though it looked to me as if the Father of Our Country poked his head up through a bank of summer clouds, though he seemed oblivious to them, cheerlessly and permanently important. We faced him and the flag first thing in the morning to say the Pledge of Allegiance, sing a verse of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” and then sit down at our desks, bow our heads, and mumble some unmemorable prayer. The best part of the song was the lines

From ev’ry mountainside

Leh-et freedom ring