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banisters from the stairs. "Good old wood," my grandmother said.
    "What about upstairs?" my father asked.
    My grandmother attempted to dissuade him. "It's black as night up there; besides, I wouldn't trust those stairs."
    I'm a good stair tester. I always watch for this in movies where there is a fire and heroes rush in. Do they test the stairs first? If not, the critic in me cries, "Fake!"
    My father decided that since I was little I could risk it best. He sent me up the stairs as he and my grandmother worked to dislodge the railings. "Call out what you see!" he said.
    "Any furniture or such."
    What I remember is a child's room strewn with toys, most specifically Matchboxes, which I collected. They lay on their sides and backs on a braided rug, the die-cast metal bright in yellows and blues and greens in the dark, burned house. There were children's clothes in the open closet, singed along all their hems; an unmade bed. It had happened at night, I remember thinking when I was older. They were sleeping.
    In the center of this bed was a small, dark, charred cavity that went through to the floor. I stared at it. A child had died in there.
    When we got home, my mother called my father an idiot. She was livid. He arrived with what he thought might be a prize. "These banisters will make great table legs," he announced. I chose to remember the Matchboxes and the Raggedy Andy, but what child leaves behind these toys, even if slightly blackened? Where were the parents, I wondered all that night and in the nightmares that followed. Had they survived?
    Out of fire grew narrative. I created for this family a new life. I made it a family like I had wanted: Mom and Dad and a boy and girl. Perfect. The fire was a new beginning.
    Change. What was left behind was done so on purpose; the little boy had grown out of his Matchboxes, I imagined. But the toys haunted me. The face of the Raggedy Andy on the path outside, his black and shiny eyes.
    The first judgment of my family came from a six-year-old playmate of mine. She was small and blond, that kind of towheaded blondness that dissolves with age, and she lived down the road at the end of the block. There were only three girls my age in the whole neighborhood, including me, and she and I played at being friends until we got lost in the wider world of grade school and junior high.
    We were sitting on my front lawn near the mailbox pulling up grass. We had just that week begun to ride on the bus together. As we pulled grass up in fistfuls and made a little pile by our knees, she said, "My mom says you're weird."
    Shocked into a sort of mock adulthood, I said, "What?"
    "You won't be mad, will you?" she pleaded. I guaranteed her I wouldn't.
    "Mom and Dad and Jill's mom and dad said your family is weird."
    I began to cry.
    "I don't think you're weird," she said. "I think you're fun."
    Even then I knew envy. I wanted her blond, strawlike hair, which she wore down, not my stupid brunet braids with the bangs my mother cut by strapping plastic tape across them and cutting along its edge. I wanted her father, who spent time outside and, on the few occasions I ever visited her, said things like "What's shakin, bacon?" and "See you later, alligator." I heard my parents in one ear: Mr. Halls was low-class, had a beer gut, wore workman's clothes; and my playmate in the other: My parents were weird.
    My father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did. Then I began to catalog and notice. They mowed lawns. They drank beer. They played in the yard with their kids, walked around the block with their wives, piled into campers, and, when they went out, wore joke ties or polo shirts, not Phi Beta Kappa keys and tailored vests.
    The mothers were a different matter and I