This was followed by a long part about the way I’d looked at Wilson’s breasts. “You still look at my breasts, you know,” Em pointed out. She reminded me how we had danced together at my mom’s wedding; I was a very tentative dancer, Em wrote, but I was not at all tentative about staring at her breasts. Em had lifted my chin and pointed to her eyes, indicating where I should look. I’d been fourteen, at my mom’s wedding; my eyes had roamed back to Em’s breasts. Em had kept lifting my face to her eyes. I was relieved to learn, later in Em’s long letter, that I didn’t stare at Em’s breasts—“not as much, or in the same way”—anymore. My mom’s wedding had been more than twenty years ago. Not even Nora had complained about the way I still looked at Em’s breasts—“not for ten or twelve years, or so,” Em wrote.

My boy-girl etiquette had been lacking. I knew better than to stare at a woman’s breasts, but both Em and Nora had noticed the way I was looking at Wilson. (Mary Marinelli must have noticed, too.) Why would Wilson wear such a see-through blouse with such a sorrowful, older woman’s bra? Why would a preternaturally tall woman with noticeably small breasts want you to see exactly how small her breasts were? Wasn’t Wilson pathetic? I was thinking, even as I checked to be sure I hadn’t lost or misplaced the notecard with her phone number. I knew I was attracted to Wilson in the way I was attracted to pathos, as a writer.

Both the past and the future are a couple of things not to like about book signings.

37. THINGS TO DO WITH A PENIS

I was thirty-nine in late January 1981, when Ronald Reagan became the fortieth president of the United States. The most loving and best-loved people in my life were two lesbian couples and the trans woman who was my stepfather. I was still seeing Wilson, who was still depressed and very tall, but she hadn’t hurt herself washing her hair and she never bent my penis. Wilson and I weren’t living together; I was still living with the snowshoer in the little Barlows’ apartment on East Sixty-fourth Street. The next year, Em would pantomime Reagan’s proposed constitutional amendment on school prayer. President Reagan, a born-again Christian, was an advocate for reinstating prayer in public schools.

Reagan tried again in 1984, when he asked Congress, “Why can’t freedom to acknowledge God be enjoyed again by children in every schoolroom across this land?” In 1985, Reagan complained about the Supreme Court ruling banning a “moment of silence” in public schools—Em had trouble pantomiming a “moment of silence.” In 1987, Reagan repeated his request for Congress to end what the president called “the expulsion of God from America’s classrooms.”