I would rise from bed and go stand by the window, which looked out upon ancient trees full of birds and squirrels and spiders and crickets and tree frogs. In the stand beside my bed were the journals of my imaginary love affairs and the notebooks of my imitation Emily Dickinson poems and the copy of One Arm and Other Stories, by Tennessee Williams, which Charles William had given me to read. I had gotten as far as “Desire and the Black Masseur,” then put the book away.

I would open the drawer and look inside, then quickly close it and take off my gown and go over to my dresser and open my underwear drawer and find my underpants and bra and put them on. I would add a pair of pink corduroy shorts and a cotton off-the-shoulder blouse and find my sandals and go downstairs, following the smell of bacon and coffee. Perhaps the kitchen would already have begun the work of dinner, filé gumbo or vegetable soup or the famous Aberdeen stew, which took three days to prepare. It was made of fresh tomatoes and new com, okra and chicken and ground black pepper. It had to cook for forty-eight hours to reach the desired consistency. Only the descendants of Highland Scots could have invented a way to make stew the exact consistency of oatmeal, but they had triumphed, and it was my father’s favorite meal. Tears would come into his eyes at the thought of Aberdeen stew and when my mother’s kitchen was at work creating that wonder he looked at her with disarmed, tender eyes. It must have been in such a mood that my unexpected brother, Johnny, was conceived.

Not that conceived had any meaning to me except in reference to the Gettysburg Address. I was looking up the wrong words in the dictionary in my continuing attempts to find out something about sex. Why didn’t I ask Charles William? I wonder now. Why didn’t he volunteer some information? Maybe he thought I knew. I was so innocent, I didn’t even know what to ask.

All I knew of sex was menstrual blood. I loved the sight of it upon my panties. Sometimes I would wash the blood off in the sink, scrubbing and scrubbing until the last trace of it was gone. Sometimes I just dropped the panties down the clothes chute. The panties floated down the wooden chute, landing atop my father’s dusty work clothes on the basement floor. A hidden tribute to Electra, Sophocles, Freud. Ah, my poor innocent father. Indra’s net, the net of jewels, in which each jewel contains the reflections of all the others. A universe of life is a drop of dew at any intersection. Every morning one of the maids would go downstairs and collect all the clothes and bring them up into the kitchen and sort them out and stuff them in the washing machine. Into the white tub they would go, there to mix their blood and dust and eggs with bleach and lye and water and emerge like vestal virgins to hang out on the clothesline. Later, they would be submitted to the ritual of the iron. A week later I would lift them from my dresser drawer and put them on and wear them off to spend my daddy’s money or drive his car. He, meanwhile, would be off somewhere in his khaki pants, wheeling and dealing to buy a road grader or a coal mine, never knowing his pockets contained the last vestige of a packet of his genes. Ah, sweet mysterious, boundless feast at which we so often wander blind and bound and starving. If we could understand one thing entirely, we might understand it all.