Last night I was in the library waiting to go in to dinner. I shifted my legs away from Warren, and snagged my stockings on the wicker chair. As though it had been his fault, I shot Warren a sour look, so he went on to dinner without me. I opened the book in whose margins he had scribbled, “How foolish we were to fear loneliness!” and next to a particularly Latinate passage, “Oh, get off your stilts.”

Dinner was one of those times when the past gets a good going-over. Chatty and Warren and Karen all have access to their pasts. Does it matter that I can’t remember if the living room couch I built a fort behind was black or tweed or plaid? Or if something I think I did turns out to be in Jane Eyre? So much of the time, what I came away with from a day was the shape of my mother’s barrette, and not what she said to me. They were always made of tortoise shell; some of them were oval, some were square. The barrettes were large, and held a low ponytail. It is the easiest way to keep hair out of your face, but I won’t do it—it makes me look too much like her. Warren has a heart-shaped island, and I have a heart-shaped face. Karen has the face I would want if I could choose, but maybe you would say that the unconventional face is the one you would rather paint? Forget about her—just keep thinking about me.

Didn’t you think it was odd to find raisins in your “fresh” fruit salad?

When I was in school, I often got sick from the fear of classes. I fought off the feeling by keeping a fistful of raisins with me. Before going into a class, I would shake part of a box of raisins into my hand, and close my fingers tight around them. Steadily, throughout the hour of class, I would take a single raisin—now warm and plump with sweat—and slip it into my mouth when the teacher couldn’t see. I never chewed the raisins. I would swallow each one as a hedge against the nausea, and so get through each class. I needed the most raisins in math, the fewest in English. I kept this up until I finished junior high, just as, years later, I swallowed pills, tranquilizers, to get me through a day, no longer staving off nausea but a feeling of approaching doom. For me, raisins are still so completely pharmacological that I’m surprised when I see them in grocery stores, in cellophane-wrapped “lunchbox” packages of six.

I can’t stand raisins now, and was relieved when you separated them and left them on your plate. As you might imagine, folks here take exception to what is on their plates, too. My first night here, Chatty warned me away from the fruit drinks, concocted as they are in the blender the gardener used once to whip up a frothy pitcher of mole repellant—equal parts cod liver oil and dish-washing detergent—which he painted along the rodents’ corded trails in the garden.