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portable IV pole as a tree one Hallowe’en when I was six or seven and showing up at a party as Johnny Apple-seed. By the time I was in junior high, however, her struggle had become more difficult; the first time she was carried out of the house to an ambulance in the middle of the night screaming that she was being ripped apart, I sat on the floor of my room paying very close attention to the model dragon I was gluing together until my uncle, her brother, knocked on my door frame and told me she was probably going to live. I thought that if I looked at him I might discover he was just as frightened as I was, so I kept my eyes on the dragon’s right hind claw, which with a great deal of concentration I finally attached successfully.
    After tenth grade my de jure grounding was over, but soon enough my father was spending all his time in Alabama arguing a desegregation case for which he was later named Trial Lawyer of the Year by the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice; the case lasted a year, during which period I had to spend all
my
time taking care of my terminally ill mother and my younger brother, who had heard from Jamie Adams that Allison Orson had said I was a lesbian, and wanted to know what that meant. I still resented my mother deeply, because she kept doing things like collecting any mail that came for me, asking me if it was from people she’d want me to be in contact with, and throwing it away if I told her it wasn’t. It didn’t occur to me to lie, and since we had moved to a house with a back door a picket wouldn’t have done any good, so all the mail from kids on the pen-pal list I’d gotten from the gay youth hotline went unread into the trash. The return address on one letter was so illegible that it was impossible for me to tell who had sent it. My mother, in a backward baseball cap because she hadn’t been well enough to go to the stylist in months, opened the envelope and proceeded to read me passages from my own mail, grimacing at the expressions of affection contained therein. I sat frozen in helpless fury before her until I realized the letter was from a straight friend I had met at summer camp. At this point she allowed me to go and read the rest in my room, where I sat on my bed and turned the pages and trembled with hatred.
    I spun elaborate fantasies in which I would confront her, implacable in my oratory, and reduce her to a quivering pudding capable only of tearful attempts at reconciliation, which I would ruthlessly spurn. But when your mother gets out of her wheelchair and crawls up the stairs in her nightgown on hands and knees bleeding from diabetic neuropathy, gaily pretending that she has simply found a particularly invigorating new form of exercise, and all you can do, since your father is five hundred miles away saving the world, is make her a rum and Coke with enough Bacardi to knock out a rhinoceros, it becomes difficult to tell her that when she rejected your sexuality she hurt your
feelings.
    Almost twenty years later, her reasons for reacting so badly to my coming out remain shrouded in mystery. Perhaps she had some traumatic experience as a child—more traumatic than all the rest of her experiences as a child, which, given my much-married grandmother’s propensity to cruelty, is really saying something—that predisposed her to rabidity. My great-great-uncle was purportedly the queeniest queen ever to queen his way down Queensville Pike; possibly she blamed herself for passing those genetic tendencies along. After she died I was looking through some of her papers and found a letter in which she seemed to come close to confessing an attraction to a woman who had lived around the corner from us when I was five. Maybe she was just jealous that I could say it and she couldn’t.

    Eventually, after I’d run out of friends to make scarves and hats for, I decided I needed to move on to something more challenging. I was sort of dating a guy named Mike; he was about to move to Boston