But when things get too serious someone in the group will say, “Aren’t we getting a bit heavy here?” and for a while they’ll retreat to the primary edge and talk about such things as My Most Trying Moment or The Book That Has Meant the Most to Me or My Favorite Color and Why. Last week they talked about My Earliest Memory.

Kay described the dance recital. By some trick of inversion this memory precedes the rehearsals themselves.

The recital was held in a new, strange place, not the big mirrored room with the dusty floor. Kay was told to wait in a dark place behind heavy curtains. She was shushed by one of the bigger girls, told to stand still or she’d rip her costume, and someone else handed her a large golden basket. Not real gold, but a graceful willow basket, probably spray painted; the handle was twisted and elegant and fit smoothly over the crook of Kay’s arm. A whisper welled up: “Isn’t she darling!” “Yes.”

Then somebody, her sister Joan probably, gave her a push forward, whispering, “One-two-three-jump,” and the next minute they were filing onto a small stage beyond which was nothing but a row of blinding lights and a wall of darkness. The darkness was false, full of held breath and heated expectations, that much Kay could understand.

A number of things seemed wrong. Her dance shoes made a different wash-wash sound on the slippery floor. There was a worrying sense of crowding and falling, and dazzle from the lights. Nevertheless she kept her eyes on the others, tried to do what they did, and reached, when the time came, into her basket. But what was this? This fragrant silky handful ? Whatever it was fluttered upward into the air, a rounded spray of particles that drifted soundlessly to the floor. Again and then again.

There was too much surprise in this, too much of shock and disorder. She observed the cascade of waxy pink and white flakes as they slipped from the angle of her hand, falling on the floor and on the toes of her shoes, and at last identified what they were.

The flower petals, the enchanting basket, her own exalted role, so unexpected-none of these things diminished in any way the humiliation she felt. She had been tricked, caught in a loop of incomprehension, given the hard slap of adult license. Adults were allowed to fool children, to withhold vital information, and this insult was sealed by the banked thunder of anonymous applause, as dense, unstartled and indiscriminate as the applause that comes out of a radio. Still she curtsied and smiled, feeling sick with shame.

Sick, Kay tells the Monday night group, and when she says sick, she means sick. She means weakness, fever, dizziness, shock, shortness of breath, all the fearful symptoms, but she had curtsied and smiled nevertheless.