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them as payment on a bet he’d won. At first he refused them, but then remembered that my birthday had passed uneventfully two days before, so he loaded them in the junkpile Pinto he drove.
    In Idaho on welfare, skiing lessons were not possible; ballet classes were totally out of the question. There was black and white TV if the electricity had been paid. There was a deck of cards with naked women on the backs which could be used if Libby was not enrapt in solitaire. And, of course, from time to time there was chocolate.
    One year it came from Ghiardelli’s, shipped to us in a discreetbrown package, the chocolate wrapped in soft insulated foil. It was a five-pound block, and Noel slowly unwrapped it much like I thought other fathers might unwrap a bowling trophy or a beautiful Father’s Day tie. By slivers, we ate that block of chocolate, tasting how the bitter and the sweet were suspended together, which was the lesson of life in windy Idaho, where the snow or the dust was always blowing—either “salt or pepper,” we always said.
    I remember not wanting to turn eleven, not wanting to turn twelve, and then not wanting Christmas. Under the tree there was a huge toad in a cracked glass aquarium for my sister Marnie. She was six and terrified of the dazed thing that kept jumping against the glass until it finally and forever lay still. A used crock pot for Libby that had the faint odor of someone’s burned chili still in it. We maneuvered through that Christmas and its gifts like, I suppose, you tip-toe through land mines. Relief and wet underarms when it was all through.
    The impossible darkness of turning sixteen took hold of me, and honestly I can’t say what it was that birthday that Libby and Noel dreamed up: a garage-sale coat, somebody’s worn-out flute with a six-pack of loose sheet music which, of course, I wouldn’t have been able to read. By then I was so full of wanting that I couldn’t see straight.
    It took the next twenty years to get beyond all that. Cordell Murphy, my husband, paid for me to forget. Massage, long afternoons of counseling, three weeks in the Alps in total silence. Finally discouraged with my slow progress, he took me to the side of our house one Fourth of July and hit my head twice against the shake shingles. I kicked back and then it was over—the foul taste of powdered milk. My irrational yearning for silk, for trinkets, for shoes, for socks. The gruesome details of chocolate.

Paperweight
    I f it weren’t for my body, I could fly, I could go anywhere, I could be anything. I learned this fact long ago, and yes, there was regret and suffering from it, there were nights I cried, there were whole summers spent in an upstairs bedroom where I surrounded myself with ladies’ magazines and poetry and my brother’s borrowed
Penthouse
. Lying across the bed or spread on the parquet floor, I was the tall, sad witness to myself: arms and legs and all the rest of me that I wouldn’t have given fifty cents for.
    When I think of my body, I usually see Martin Heffler trying to pull open the stage curtains for our fifth grade’s rendition of How
the West Was Won
. Martin was only a fourth grader, and maybe that had something to do with it, but really, it was the curtains that wouldn’t budge—gold brocaded velvet, beautiful to look at, but ponderous as a ton of wet laundry. At the far right of the stage Martin was up there grunting, actually grunting. He was red-faced and the curtainsweren’t going anywhere. Cruelty, inattention—I don’t know what it was, but the teachers just let poor Martin struggle for a while, which was wrong because they basically understood the laws of physics. The curtains were a rock and Martin was a pebble.
    How
the West Was Won
turned out to be more an assignment than an artistic creation. The pioneers were deadpan and the Indians communicated only with timid war whoops. By far, it was Martin