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curling up their hulls, to a lone seagull skimming the water, to clouds pink with the beginning or the end of a day. Until I saw Kelly’s bedroom, it hadn’t occurred to me that other little girls woke up to posters of daisy-sniffing clowns, puppies in wooden crates, or, in Kelly’s case, kittens with unraveling balls of yarn. I never asked my father why tall ships, but I’m sure his answer would have been that ships got you places. He was right. Those ships made me consider the oceans of the world, made me want to learn their names, live on the very edge of them. Planes and cars and trains could get you places as well. So maybe the answer, the less logical one, had something to do with the bodies of water themselves, those difficult-to-navigate expanses in between lands.
    Other than the maritime prints, my bedroom was a room with a bed, a desk, a chair, and no toys. My father said that play was something children should do outside in the sunshine. He said play was also about strengthening the body. All the toys he gave me fulfilled both tenets. Bicycle, jungle gym, swing set, Nerf balls, and a trampoline. My hair was cut short to keep it out of my eyes when I jumped up and down. My jeans were Toughskins to keep the knees from ripping when I fell. My skin deepened into a warm brown from all the afternoons of growing strong and tall underneath the North Carolina sun.
    During the summer when Kelly and I were only eleven and already painting our faces with Paradise and Ocean hues, my father must have sensed that there was change in the air. His response was preemptive in nature. He began to tell me that my cheeks were pink like apple blossoms. That my eyes were the shape of hickory nuts. That the color of my hair was that of a river at nighttime. He didn’t know that my great-uncle Harper had been telling me things like this for years.
    The appearances of Dill and Wade in our letters also marked the beginning of reticence. That word wasn’t part of my vocabulary yet. So, instead, I thought I was being selfish. The result was the same, a withholding.
    In America, a country of abundance, in North Carolina, a state of plenty, children were expected to share. Most childhood misbehaviors could be traced to a refusal to do so, and parents and teachers hurled reprimands accordingly. Stop being selfish! Why are you so selfish? Selfish children don’t go to Heaven! No dessert for the selfish! This last one was a favorite of my mother. She had learned from her mother that food was both reward and punishment. Considering what came into and out of my mother’s kitchen—the unnecessarily canned vegetables, the shaken and baked, the hamburger helpmeets, and so on—the food at our table was always punishment. The last word of my mother’s mealtime threat, though, was for me an antidote. The word “selfish” brought with it the taste of end-of-the-summer corn on the cob. Not the kernels but the juice at the honeycombed core after everything has been gnawed away. Poor DeAnne—she had no way of knowing why her rebukes always brought a smile to my face.
    This was my silent mealtime prayer:
Say it again.
Tell me I’m selfish.
Please, help me get the taste of your dinner out of my mouth .
    The nightly cross that I had to bear was dependably one of the following casseroles: chicken à la king, tuna noodle, beefy macaroni.
    Consistency was the strongpoint of my mother’s kitchen. Variety meant never having the same casserole two nights in a row. Variety also meant that the casserole’s crispy topping was a rotation of bread crumbs, crushed saltine crackers, broken potato chips, or Durkee’s fried onions (the last only on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other special occasions). For a brief time in the mid-eighties, right before my father passed away, when DeAnne was experimenting with “exotic” flavors, her weekly menu also included a three-layer taco casserole (one of the layers was the contents of a small bag of corn chips) and a