Lindy comes over to the table, sets down two chocolate malts with a flourish. Then she goes back to the counter to take care of the man who has begun bellowing about needing another spoon. “Relax, you old fart,” she tells him. “Remember your blood pressure.”

“It’s you that give me that high blood pressure!”

“You wish,” she says, sniffing.

Chip leans over toward me. “I really like this place.”

“They have a Halloween party every year; if you want to come, you have to dress like something on the menu.”

“What do you come as?”

“Me? I never go.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you know. Parties.”

“What about them?”

“I hate them.”

“Oh. That’s a good reason not to go to them.”

I take a big drink of my malted. Delicious. Forty-five million calories. “When I was a little girl,” I say, “I used to think people who went to parties dressed like that all the time, that they were a certain class of people. There were people like my parents, who dressed the way they did—you know, Sears—and they never went to parties. And then there were the people who went to parties and they got up every morning and put on their silks and satins and tuxes and went down to breakfast and talked about where they would be going that night.”

Chip nods. “I didn’t know there were bones in bodies. I thought if you made a cut through an arm, it would be all pink, solid flesh, kind of like baloney.”

“I knew the deal with bones,” I say. “But that’s all I knew about what went on inside. I thought there were little cast-iron pots in our stomachs that held all the different kinds of food we ate. Like, there was a little pot for potatoes, a little pot for applesauce … One day I was eating applesauce and I got very worried, because I figured the pot must be close to full, and surely it would overrun, and that would kill me.”

“What did your parents say when you told them?”

“I didn’t tell them. I never told them anything I worried about.”

“Why not?”

“Oh … They wouldn’t have been much help.”

One of my earliest memories is of a time I awakened from a nightmare. I went into my parents’ room and stood beside their bed. “What,” my father said, not opening his eyes. “I had a dream,” I said. “I’m scared.”

“Anna,” my father said, and my mother turned over to say, “So, Myra, you said yourself, it was just a dream. Go back to sleep, now. Look at the time.” I hadn’t yet learned to tell time. But I did learn that night that there were things I must not ask for.