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floor.
    “I hope she doesn’t break the TV,” I say.
    “She’ll do what she needs to do,” Carlton tells me.
    “I hate her,” I say. I am not certain about that. I want to test the sound of it, to see if it’s true.
    “She’s got more balls than any of us, Frisco,” he says. “Better watch what you say about her.”
    I keep quiet. Soon I get up and start gathering pencils, because I prefer that to lying around trying to follow the shifting lines of allegiance. Carlton goes for a sponge and starts in on the mud.
    “You get shit on the carpet, you clean it up,” he says. “Simple.”
    The time for all my questions about love has passed, and I am not so unhip as to force a subject. I know it will come up again. I make a neat bouquet of pencils. Our mother rages through the house.
    Later, after she has thrown enough and we three have picked it all up, I lie on my bed thinking things over. Carlton is on the phone to his girlfriend, talking low. Our mother, becalmed but still dangerous, cooks dinner. She sings as she cooks, some slow forties number that must have been all over the jukes when her first husband’s plane went down in the Pacific. Our father plays his clarinet in the basement. That is where he goes to practice, down among his woodworking tools, the neatly hung hammers and awls that throw oversized shadows in the light of the single bulb. If I put my ear to the floor I can hear him, pulling a long low tomcat moan out of that horn. There is some strange comfort in pressing my ear to the carpet and hearing our father’s music leaking up through the floorboards. Lying down, with my ear to the floor, I join in on my harmonica.
    That spring our parents have a party to celebrate the sun’s return. It has been a long, bitter winter and now the first wild daisies are poking up on the lawns and among the graves.
    Our parents’ parties are mannerly affairs. Their friends, schoolteachers all, bring wine jugs and guitars. They are Ohio hip. Though they hold jobs and meet mortgages, they think of themselves as independent spirits on a spying mission. They have agreed to impersonate teachers until they write their novels, finish their dissertations, or just save up enough money to set themselves free.
    Carlton and I are the lackeys. We take coats, fetch drinks. We have done this at every party since we were small, trading on our precocity, doing a brother act. We know the moves. A big, lipsticked woman who has devoted her maidenhood to ninth-grade math calls me Mr. Right. An assistant vice principal in a Russian fur hat asks us both whether we expect to vote Democratic or Socialist. By sneaking sips I manage to get myself semi-crocked.
    The reliability of the evening is derailed halfway through, however, by a half dozen of Carlton’s friends. They rap on the door and I go for it, anxious as a carnival sharp to see who will step up next and swallow the illusion that I’m a kindly, sober nine-year-old child. I’m expecting callow adults and who do I find but a pack of young outlaws, big-booted and wild-haired. Carlton’s girlfriend stands in front, in an outfit made up almost entirely of fringe.
    “Hi, Bobby,” she says confidently. She comes from New York, and is more than just locally smart.
    “Hi,” I say. I let them all in despite a retrograde urge to lock the door and phone the police. Three are girls, four boys. They pass me in a cloud of dope smoke and sly-eyed greeting.
    What they do is invade the party. Carlton is standing on the far side of the rumpus room, picking the next album, and his girl cuts straight through the crowd to his side. She has the bones and the loose, liquid moves some people consider beautiful. She walks through that room as if she’d been sent to teach the whole party a lesson.
    Carlton’s face tips me off that this was planned. Our mother demands to know what’s going on here. She is wearing a long dark-red dress that doesn’t interfere with her shoulders. When she dresses