They went somewhere every Saturday night, I told him—this was before they’d begun their tradition of hosting weekly dinners—and would leave me at home to eat microwaved meals with the sitter. They went to dinner, to the theater, to a lecture, to visit colleagues—and, sometimes, to the opera. On these occasions, they would listen to the sound track all week in preparation, and I’d be alternately entranced and repulsed by the voices streaming out of the speaker. Mostly, I tried not to listen, because doing so would make me think too much about the moment they would leave. I always stood at the window after they’d walked out the door, in a cloud of my mother’s perfume, looking down at the street below, waiting for their tiny heads to emerge from under the awning of our building. I would watch them hail a cab. I would watch this dollhouse version of my father open the door for my mother. I would watch her delicately lift her dress to step inside and my father step in after her. Then the door would close, and the cab would leave, and I would strain at the window until I could no longer see the taxi’s two bright red eyes.

That particular Saturday, I was given a dress and told to put it on. I was going to join them. When I found out, just hours before, I was flooded with an excitement so intense it felt like terror. Now it was my tiny head ducking into the car. I was so overcome with emotion as we got into the taxi that I wanted to scream. I looked up toward the windows of our tall building, reflecting the sunset, as if to tell the ghost of me standing there, I’ve made it.

“What would she have said?” Freud asked. “The ghost of you?”

“She would have said, Calm down.” A warning.

My father had told me to calm down when I was in these moods so often that by this point I’d learned to say it to myself. After one temper tantrum, he had given me a rubber band to put on my wrist and instructed me to snap it against my skin when I felt on the verge of the next flood of emotion. Was I wearing a rubber band that night? I couldn’t remember. I did remember thinking those words—calm down—as I looked out the window of the taxi. The city rushed past, red neon bleeding into yellow into green into blue. A mother, bent forward, pushed a stroller, tendrils of her hair floating in the summer breeze. The sky was orange feathers. Two parents took their child between them, one hand each, and swung him high over the sidewalk. His laugh ricocheted off my window.

Calm down, I told myself, calm down.