Truth was, I was almost delirious. I’d been taking steady pulls from a bottle of vodka since dessert. We only had dessert when Dora came home, though she never ate any.

I knew most people started drinking with other people before they drank alone, but I went in the opposite direction. I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions. I didn’t need other people around to want that feeling for myself.

Dora told me she’d been with a man for the first time. It was hard for her to say it, I could tell. She never talked about things like that. I asked whether she’d liked it. She said it had been alright. She asked me whether I was drunk.

I asked about the guy. Who was he? Someone headed off to law school, she said, next fall. She hadn’t heard from him since she left his bed. “What does that mean?” she asked. “You know about this stuff.” I was seven years younger, but what she said was true.

I told her it could mean a lot of things, and I wasn’t sure any of them were good. I asked whether she wanted to see him again.

“I want him to want to see me.”

I nodded.

“I just wish I didn’t give a damn.”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with giving a damn.”

“No,” she said. “I guess you wouldn’t.”

In those days the house was quiet, like there was a funeral happening that no one could discuss. My mom didn’t know how to talk to me. She was scared, I think, scared of the sadness that made me want to drink and sleep all the time, but she kept hunting for signs that I was secretly extraordinary. Sometimes I caught her reading the crumpled school tests that I’d thrown in the trash. Or else I’d open the bathroom door and find her in the hallway, as if she’d been listening to me singing in the shower. I had this feeling like her life was already done, and now she was waiting for mine to start. Made two of us.

There were always boys. Most of them I didn’t even like that much, but they seemed like the easiest way to change my own life. After eleventh grade, I ran away to Berkeley with my American literature teacher, Arthur Boy. We joked about his name. He was my first real man. Mostly he wasn’t a very funny person. Save me from my wife, he said. From myself.