Everything seems wondrous omen when looking is encouraged.

Muriel laughed while I explained how a really fat man was bent double on a couch, was cutting his big toenail with the concentration of a brain surgeon. Muriel gave off her spoilt, cruel laugh that hinted at some unknown former beauty. “A big fat one,” I said, feasting on the word, “so fat, and all his pinkies stickin’ out! He’s home at noon because I bet he is … a baker who’s retired.” She checked over at me, her mouth tightening with … pride? She turned back to her map with new vigor; and I glimpsed a bed—it was passing us backwards, seemingly going faster than our streetcar—and two nude pinkish-yellowy adults of no particular sex, pushing at and into one another. One of them wore a single black saddle oxford. That is all I know. I said nothing. Instead, I turned and sat there, stunned, posture-perfect, my legs too short to reach the floor, staring straight ahead, commentary stalled. I still thought Dogs were the Boys’ Ones and Cats the Girls’. For all my show-off guesswork, despite my art and mild precocity, I did not yet know where babies came from. Now I leaned into her tea-at-office scent, I watched her long white forefinger tracing encrypted red floor-lines: “Birds of Paradise, stuffed, various: See 4-C.” What, oh what, would Aunt have told me of those two human thrubbing lumps, framed in so speeding a bed deciphering into each other’s middles? Everything, probably. And simply, probably. Oscar Wilde wrote, “One is no less good judge of a thing for not having done it oneself.”

But I didn’t dare ask.

Today’s goal, the Museum of Science and Industry; how grand a title that yet is for me, perfect Deco phrase. Our parents sometimes took Brother and me to dusty state museums in Raleigh; but after forty minutes, we grew fretful; or, rather, Bradley did. By then the entry’s official turnstile looked more intriguing than those plaster cavemen lummoxed around a campfire (one red Christmas-tree bulb under crushed tinfoil). If we didn’t read labels and follow the arrows, our parents went crazy. They would jerk us to the parking lot as soon as we started “acting funny.” Dad would “pop” the crowns of our heads and then say to shush up or he’d REALLY give us something to cry about. Mother grew more serene and pretended she noticed nothing and would never really help us against him.—But with my great-aunt and in holy, knowing Chicago—anything I pronounced either interesting or dull, that interested her.

Just now, in “Gems and Fossils,” I pointed out how sad it was that the black silhouettes showing a man and a woman standing on arrows should mean nothing more than where the nearest bathrooms were. Aunt nodded. “Fine point, Owl. I expect you’ve just made me notice that forever.” Was I playing on her own aversion? By now, how could I tell where her wishes ended and my assignments began?