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bad as you wanted and get away with it. My parents lately had been gossiping about Alison’s parents, who were getting a divorce, and about the many boyfriends her mother had been spotted driving around in her new Jaguar convertible. I never saw Alison’s parents when I had sleepovers at her house. We were attended instead by a multitude of nannies and housekeepers. The parents, I imagined, were off pirouetting from the wrecks of sleek sports cars, martini glasses still in hand.
    When I told my mother about Alison’s pile of money, she sighed woefully. “That is simply terrible,” she said. “Children should not be talking about money.”
    But money was a part of one’s identity. If you lost it, you lost yourself, or so it seemed to me, and throughout my young life I was keenly aware that this is just what we were doing—losing ourselves. “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” as the saying goes. Even as children, surrounded by so much abundance, we had been warned there wouldn’t be enough to last.
    “One day, the money will go,” my mother often told my brothers and me. “Especially if Dad continues to spend this way.”
    Her warnings encroached like a black cloud on an otherwise lovely day, and the fear of having nothing took hold deep within each of us. Where would we go? How would we live? Having nothing seemed as inconceivable as not existing, and the two became inextricably linked in my consciousness. This constant sense of scarcity—a fear of impoverishment that had been part of our DNA before it became aself-fulfilling prophecy—was a feeling against which my father rebelled with cocktails and ever more aggressive spending sprees.
    One afternoon we came home from swimming at the club to the surprising sight of my father sitting behind the wheel of a new Cadillac Seville parked in the driveway. Standing there with one hand on the gleaming silver hood, he waved us out of my mother’s station wagon. He opened the doors and had us smell the rich red leather seats and try the fancy electric windows and the air-conditioning. Three-year-old Whitney, I remember, smudged the glass, and my father barked at him to go inside the house and wash his hands. I felt a sharp pang of guilt as he slunk off.
    “Come over here, Franny,” my father said. “I want to show you something.” He popped an eight-track tape in a slot in the dash and suddenly Benny Goodman’s jazz filled the plush interior of the car. My heart swelled as I inhaled the new-car smell. I was flying high on abundance, and on my father’s glorious mood—all the more so because, of course, I knew it wouldn’t last.
    My mother frowned and went inside.
    Ollie peered out from behind a curtain. She did her best to protect all of us from my father. Often, after crying and begging her on a Friday, Whitney would ride with Ollie on the bus to spend the weekend in her house in Detroit, at the intersection of Seven Mile and Livernois, near to where the riots had erupted and where the sound of gunfire outside still blended unremarkably with the general hum of traffic. Even as a toddler, Whitney was a survivor.And certainly being cooped up with my father for an entire weekend, my mother off doing volunteer work or playing tennis, promised a roller-coaster ride of unpredictable and treacherous mood swings more threatening than the odd gunshot nearby.
    But now, enveloped in the luxury of my father’s new Cadillac, I was happy. My father turned the key in the ignition and began to back out of the driveway just as Whitney was coming out of the house, his little hands dripping wet.
    “Want to go for a ride?” asked my father as he turned onto our street—Grayton Road—and began to drive away.
    I looked back and saw Whitney’s expression shift from bright expectation to confusion. Clearly, he would not be joining us. My mother pulled him back into the house.
    M y father’s love of cars, photography, and collecting was matched only by his