Although impermanence was the only outward style of life she had known, Tina could hear in her mind’s ear her mother’s call against the disorder she and Weezy created all over the house. “Don’t increase the entropy around here!” that poor woman would shout at them, her love of boxes and containers and drawers to store and order things being her own futile effort against things falling apart. Entirely futile, because those selfsame containers were themselves always on the move.

Her mother used to tell Weezy and Tina the story of her first job as a department-store clerk during a vacation period when she was sixteen and put into Men’s Underwear and Socks in Clark’s basement. “Position in life is everything,” her boss had told her. He was a thin, balding man with spectacles who wore a dark suit and somber air and had attained to the position of head of that section in Clark’s Department Store. Her mother had laughed and told the story as another indication of the absurdity of life.

But Tina had remembered it and had put together a whole series of intonings on position, like the responses on a litany of beads. Her grandmother’s statement, for instance, was “He (or she) has a wonderful position,” and implicit was all the envy and regret that her own children hadn’t gotten there; or that her husband had made money, yes, but not achieved position; or that she herself had been given the only one open to her—woman’s place, in the home.

“Get in position, correct position!” Tina’s ballet teacher would command when she was a child. And the words hung ominously over her after all these years. For one’s position in respect to people, power, place was everything; the man in Clark’s basement had been right.

And when Tina had spent that Thanksgiving at the Jowers’ place on Cape Cod, Tim’s and Jason’s grandmother was always saying “A place for everything, and everything in its place” each time her grandchildren asked her where the car keys, umbrella, books, gloves, or whatever were. Place was like position for that woman, and she had made Tina feel unreal, shallow, because when asked where her home was Tina had stuttered “Rome, but before that we lived in D.C. and before that in Milan . . .” and then had simply petered out in embarrassment; she was reciting a record of shiftlessness to a stony-faced woman who, since her marriage, had lived in a house that had been occupied by the Jowers family continuously for two hundred years and had itself been raised on the spot where the previous dwelling, dating from 1676, had stood until it burned to the ground.