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sure I remained planted on the bench, but I didn’t have the energy to make any more trouble.
    Finally, my mother arrived. She wore a cardigan over my favorite of her T-shirts, this one from the Pink Pussy Cat Boutique. It had a sly-looking cat on it and words that, just the other day, I had struggled to read: “Stroke Me and I’ll Purr.” Of course I didn’t know that the Pink Pussy Cat Boutique was an infamous sex shop in the West Village. I just thought the cat was cute.
    When I saw her, I started crying.
    â€œWhat happened, Jessie?”
    I told her the whole story, about the deformed plastic mats, about the pixie-haircut fiend, about the life sentence handed down by the troop leader.
    â€œOh well,” she consoled. “Maybe they’ll forget about it and let you back in.”
    But I knew that would never happen. We walked over to the classroom where Kathy remained in a Brownies meeting with a slightly older troop. I looked through the window. She was still in the weaving circle, and I could tell things had gone more smoothly for her. But she didn’t look thrilled. She looked stoic, her glasses balanced on her nose, her brown hair hung straight and flat on her shoulders, her pudgy face tensed as she listened to the parting words of her troop leader.
    When Kathy came outside, she walked apart from the other girls.
    â€œHow did it go?” my mother asked.
    â€œFine,” Kathy said curtly.
    â€œDo you want to go next week?”
    â€œYes,” and that was it. When my sister didn’t want to talk about something, there was no coaxing her. And my mother wasn’t one to coax. I didn’t feel like talking either, and we sat in silence in the backof the VW bus. But my father was home that night, and I told him what happened. Now that I would never be a Brownie, there seemed no reason not to.
    â€œScrew ’em,” he said. “It’s an inane fascist organization. I can’t imagine why you would ever want to be a part of that.”
    His reaction left me feeling better and worse. Better because he made me believe that the Girl Scouts were stupid anyway; worse because now, I felt stupid for wanting to be one in the first place. At the time, I didn’t consider where his comments left Kathy, who was determined to struggle on in her troop. But then Kathy always had a kind of determination that I never did. She seemed almost immune to my father’s pronouncements. There was a distance between him and her, a mutual distrust. And as I became increasingly obsessed with Daddy, she became increasingly private and emotionally contained. My mother saw the bond that had formed between Daddy and me. Though I thought I looked strange, with my drifting eye and blond hair, she reminds me today that I was charming and cheerful—and, as she puts it, “infinitely easier to get on with than Kathy.” Perhaps so. I just remember how very afraid I was for Daddy, that something terrible might happen to him. I felt better and safer when I was with him, and feeling safe became my obsession. Even at six, I felt I had to always keep tabs on my father because my mother never did.
    In the months that followed, he traveled more and more to New York. His work for the Lampoon seemed to be picking up. In part, that was because of the piece he had written late that summer. I can still remember how he came bounding into the house from his barn office, declaring proudly that he had something in mind for the magazine.
    â€œIt’s called ‘How to Cook Your Daughter,’” he told us.
    Cook your daughter? I was beside myself. “Why do you want to cook us, Daddy?” I sobbed, my face crumbling.
    Kathy never flinched. She announced that if my father was going to write about cooking her, then she was going to write about cooking him . “What a splendid idea!” my father said, and he encouraged her to write and draw a companion piece. “We’ll