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sharpen my quills, to set me farther apart.
    Sometimes I pretend, but I can always hear, off in the distance, the clicking of a typewriter. I see myself in the third person, a character in a book, an actor in a movie. I don’t say this proudly but as a confession that, even as a friend told me another friend had died the night before I felt not only shock and grief but someday-I’ll-write-about-this. And here I am now, doing it.
    It must seem, to people who don’t know me and even more, perhaps, to the ones who do, as if I’m a cold-blooded traitor, informing on a world that trusted me enough to let me in. So let me say first off that, whatever I say about the Girl Scouts and the cheerleaders and the soccer players and the high school drama club, the person I’m informing on most of all is myself. I’m not writing nostalgically, so the memories may not come out the way some people would like to remember them. (Listen to a twelve-year-old, sometime, reminiscing about the good old days when she was eight. Unable to feel wholeness and happiness in the present, we fabricate happy memories.) I don’t look back in anger, either; maybe it’s Freudian psychology that has made us so suspicious of our pasts. Whatever the reason, there’s an awful lot of bitterness around, too many excuses made, too much stuffed in closets and blamed on things beyond control—parents and wars and teachers and traumas that became real only after the event, when we learned what traumas were.
    As for looking back, I do it reluctantly. Sentimentality or bitterness—it breeds one or the other almost inevitably. But the fact is that there’s no understanding the future without the present, and no understanding where we are now without a glance, at least, to where we have been.

1962
    I DIDN’T KNOW TILL years later that they called it the Cuban Missile Crisis. But I remember Castro. (We called him Castor Oil and were awed by his beard—beards were rare in those days.) We might not have worried so much (what would the Communists want with our small New Hampshire town?) except that we lived ten miles from an air base. Planes buzzed around us like mosquitoes that summer. People talked about fallout shelters in their basements and one family on our street packed their car to go to the mountains. I couldn’t understand that. If everybody was going to die, I certainly didn’t want to stick around, with my hair falling out and—later—a plague of thalidomide-type babies. I wanted to go quickly, with my family. Dying didn’t bother me so much—I’d never known anyone who died, and death was unreal, fascinating. (I wanted Doctor Kildare to have more terminal cancer patients and fewer love affairs.) What bothered me was the business of immortality. Sometimes growing-up sorts of concepts germinate slowly, but the full impact of death hit me like a bomb in the night. Not only would my body be gone—that I could take—but I would cease to think. That I would no longer be a participant I had realized before; now I saw that I wouldn’t even be an observer. What specially alarmed me about The Bomb (always singular like, a few years later, the Pill) was the possibility of total obliteration. All traces of me would be destroyed. There would be no grave and, if there were, no one left to visit it. Newly philosophical, I pondered the universe. If the earth was in the solar system and the solar system was in the galaxy and the galaxy was in the universe, what was the universe in? And if the sun was just a dot—the head of a pin—what was I? We visited a planetarium that year, in third grade, and saw a dramatization of the sun exploding. Somehow the image of that orange ball zooming toward us merged with my image of The Bomb. The effect was devastating, and for the first time in my life—except for Easter Sundays, when I wished I went to church so I could have a fancy new dress like my Catholic and Protestant friends—I longed for religion.

O YSTER R