The local schoolchildren who had often before given Dorothy a wide berth now made irrevocable their policy of shunning her. They were unanimous but wordless about it. They were after al Christians.

She’d learned to keep Oz to herself, more or less; of course things slipped out. But she didn’t want to be figured as peculiar. She’d taken up singing on the way home from the schoolhouse as a way to disguise the fact that no one would walk with her. And now that she was done with school, it seemed there were no neighbors who might tolerate her company long enough to find her marriageable. So Uncle Henry and Aunt Em were making this lastditch effort to prove that the workaday world of the Lord God Almighty was plenty rich and wonderful enough to satisfy Dorothy’s curiosity for marvels. She didn’t need to keep inventing impossible nonsense. She keeps on yammering about that fever dream of Oz and she’ll be an old spinster with no one to warble to but the bones of Toto.

They rode cable cars. “Nothing like these in al of Oz!” said Dorothy as the cars bit their way upslope, tooth by tooth, and then plunged down.

They went to the Fisherman’s Wharf. Dorothy had never seen the ocean before; nor had Uncle Henry or Aunt Em. The man who sold them hanks of fried fish wrapped in twists of newspaper remarked that this wasn’t the ocean, just the bay. To see the ocean they’d need to go farther west, to the Presidio, or to Golden Gate Park.

For its prettier name, they headed to Golden Gate Park. A policeman told them that when the long swel of greenery was being laid out, the city hadn’t yet expanded west past Divisadero Street, and anything beyond had been known by squatters and locals as the Outside Lands. “Oh?” said Dorothy, with brightening interest.

“That’s where you’l find the ocean.”

They made their way to the edge of the continent first by carriage and then on foot, but the world’s edge proved disappointingly muffled in fog. The ocean was a sham. They could see no farther out into the supposed Pacific Ocean than they’d been able to look across the San Francisco Bay. And it was colder, a stiff wind tossing up briny air. The guls keened, biblical prophets practicing jeremiad, knowing more than they would let on. Aunt Em caught a sniffle, so they couldn’t stay and wait to see if the fog would lift. The clammy saltiness disagreed with her—and she with it, she did declare.

That night, as Aunt Em was repairing to her bed, Uncle Henry wheedled from his wife a permission to take Dorothy out on the town. He hired a trap to bring Dorothy into a district caled Chinatown.

Dorothy wanted so badly to tel Uncle Henry that this is what it felt like to be in Oz—this otherness, this weird but convincing reality—that she bit a bruise in the side of her mouth, trying not to speak. Toto looked wary, as if the residents on doorsils were sizing him up to see how many Chinese relatives he might feed.