For a very long time I believed we were powerless in the grip of the Army Corps of Engineers, that transfers were just an inevitable consequence of the kind of work my father did; it wasn’t till years after my mother died that he started talking one day about all the bastards he’d worked for, how he had a knack for saying the thing that nobody wanted to hear, and so it was hard to get along with supervisors: sometimes he’d just quit before they fired him, or sometimes they’d take the initiative and tell him to move on. This came as a bit of a revelation; all this time I’d thought of our moves as passive, visited upon us, and suddenly it seems we couldn’t stay in one place because my father couldn’t get along with people. Another move: unpacking the boxes, arranging the paintings she’d brought along, my mother must have wondered how long we’d stay this time, must have wondered if any plan she’d make might last.

Why didn’t I see this before? He clearly couldn’t get along with us; his taciturn surface would erupt, now and then, into something abrasive and unfeeling. “Us”—are she and I a unit, joined by our common opposition to him? That’s how I think of it, sometimes, my mother and I joined by our sensitivity, our common tastes. I’m her ally, bound to her by character and personality, though I don’t always think I’m the ally she wants.

At my school there’s a little model of the solar system, a machine my teacher called a Tripanzee planetarium. Turn the crank and colored glass balls move around in orbits, mimicking the pattern of planets in their rings around the fixed yellow globe of the sun. Some planets have moons affixed, smaller spheres that circle the larger bodies they’re bound to. My father and I spin around my mother like that, as if we’re both bound to her larger gravitation; is that why I can’t see him, quite, because the larger pull of her obscures him?

Transfer: Lancaster, California, in the Antelope Valley, the desert above LA—the birthplace of Judy Garland, though I didn’t know that then. Spiky, lunar-looking Joshua trees ringed our neighborhood drive-in theater, at the edge of the suburb, where I’d go and watch awful movies from an air-conditioned bank of seats upstairs over the concession stand: Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage, Vincent Price and Annette Funicello in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.