Dorothy was eager to go and see what she could see, but they wouldn’t let her walk out alone. “A city is not a prairie,” Aunt Em proclaimed through the damp washcloth laid from forehead to chin. “No place for a compromised girl without a scrap of city wits.”

The spring air wafting through the open window next morning revived Aunt Em. Al these flights up, it smeled of lilacs and hair oil and horse manure and hot sourdough loaves. Encouraged, the flatlanders ventured outdoors. Dorothy carried Toto in a wicker basket, for old times’ sake. They stroled up to the carriage entrance of the famous Palace Hotel and pretended they were waiting for a friend so they could catch a glimpse of sinful excess. What an accomplished offhand manner they showed, sneaking sideways glances through the open doors at the potted ferns, the swags of rust-red velvet drapery, the polished doorknobs. Also the glinting necklaces and earrings and cuff links, and gentlemen’s shirts starched so clean it hurt the eye to look. “Smart enough,” said Aunt Em, “for suchlike who feel the need to preen in public.” She was agog and dismissive at once, thought Dorothy, a considerable achievement for a plain-minded woman.

“The Palace Hotel is al very wel,” said Dorothy at lunch—a frankfurter and a sumptuous orange from a stal near Union Square—“but the Palace of the Emperor in the Emerald City is just as grand—”

“I shal be il.” Aunt Em, going pale. “I shal be il, Dorothy, if after al we have mortgaged on this expedition you insist on seeing San Francisco by comparing it to some imagined otherworld. I shal be quite, quite il.”

“I mean nothing by it,” said Dorothy. “Please, I’l be stil. It’s true I’ve never seen anything like most of this.”

“The world is wonderful enough without your having to invent an alternative,” said Uncle Henry. A tired man by now, not a wel man either, and stretched to put things baldly while there was time. “Who is going to take you in marriage, Dorothy, if you’ve already given yourself over to delusions and visions?”

“Snares of the wicked one.” Aunt Em, spitting an orange seed into the street. “We have been kind, Dorothy, and we have been patient. We have sat silent and we have spoken out. You must put the corrupting nightmare of Oz behind you. Close it behind a door and never speak of it again. Or you wil find yourself locked within it. Alone. We aren’t going to live forever, and you must learn to manage in the real world.”

“I should imagine I’m too young to be thinking of marriage.”

“You are already sixteen,” snapped her aunt. “I was married at seventeen.”

Uncle Henry’s eyes glinted merrily and he mouthed across his wife’s head at Dorothy: Too young.

Dorothy knew they had her best interests at heart. And it was true that since her delivery from Oz six years ago, she had proved a rare creature, a freak of nature. Her uncle and aunt didn’t know what to make of her. When she had appeared on the horizon, crossing the prairie by foot—shoeless but clutching Toto—long enough after Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s home had been carried away that they’d built themselves a replacement—her return was reckoned a statistical impossibility. Who rides the winds in a twister and lives to tel about it? Though Kansans set store on the notion of revelation, they are skeptical when asked to accept any whole-cloth gospel not measurable by brass tacks they’ve waloped into the dry goods counter themselves. So upon her return, Dorothy had been greeted not as a ghost or an angel, neither blessed by the Lord nor saved by a secret pact she must have made with the Evil One. Just tetched, concluded the good folks of the district. Tetched in the big fat head.