I had seen the white wedding dress. It was hanging from the shower rod in my attic bathroom. My mom said the steam from the shower would keep it wrinkle-free. Yes, it was a complicated dress, but I hadn’t realized it was a two-woman job—just to put on the dress and take it off. The business about the girl jocks taking showers day and night—not to mention the two girl jocks who slept in a separate tent and took their showers together—didn’t enter into our conversation. My mother could see I was struggling to understand the complexities of her wedding dress.

“The dress has to be laced up at the back, sweetie—it has to be as tightly laced as a corset,” my mom tried to explain.

I must have nodded, or otherwise pretended to understand. I refrained from asking what a corset was. I decided I should stop thinking about all of it. I would stop asking questions; I would not look puzzled. I decided to adopt an uncharacteristic nonchalance. I would henceforth appear to understand, or be indifferent to, everything.

Yes, it was a pose. It went on for years. In truth, I understood very little; I rarely felt indifferent (or impartial, or unconcerned) about anything. Maybe you’re not supposed to be fourteen when your mother gets married for the first time, and of course there were contributing factors, but that wedding weekend, on the evening before the marriage ceremony, I made a choice. I came to a very conscious decision. I would be aloof, detached—even incurious and uninterested—before I would allow myself to be condescended to. Heretofore, only the snowshoer had never condescended to me. Surely, this was a big part of the reason I wanted Elliot Barlow to marry my mom. Henceforth, I decided, I would only be myself—that is, truthful about who I was and all the things I was curious about—in my imagination. This meant, of course, that I could only be myself—this uncool and searching person—in my writing.

What a turning point that wedding weekend was—a watershed weekend for me. My grandmother had asked me to flood the birdbath to overflowing with the garden hose. I knew Nana was hell-bent on ridding her garden of the bad boyfriend’s urine, real or imagined. The silent stone sparrows were as disinclined to sing as ever. Whatever they’d seen, there would be no songs about it.