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because she didn’t hold sex off very long. “My family disowned me. They never liked Daddy, said he was a bum. I don’t think your father ever forgot that.”
    “Do you wish you never got married?”
    “Oh, you know. When I was single, I had a job, I had money, I bought nice clothes, went on vacations. I did what I pleased. Then when you marry, you go where the man wants. I moved to Wallingford. I hated it. I didn’t know nobody. Then you kids came. I don’t know. If you want to be happy, you stay single.”
    “But you love Daddy?”
    “Oh yeah. But I cried in the beginning. I was so homesick. I missed my friends. I missed my job. And your father never wanted me to work. A man has his pride. But once I got my license—you were, what were you, fifteen?—I said, the hell with this. We needed money. That’s when I started down Bradlees. Now, my legs, standing on those concrete floors. And taking care of two houses. I’m not getting any younger, you know.” My mother could only talk for so long before she started complaining.
    “Ma, you don’t have to clean my house.” I tried to nip it in the bud.
    “Yeah, well, once you have the baby, I won‘t, believe me.” Just then Bam Bam knocked on the door with his head. Bam Bam never said a word except “Bam Bam” and he only said that when he knocked on your door with his head.
    “Are you going to let him in?” my mother said.
    “Yes.” I got up and opened the door.
    “What you let him in for?”
    “I like him.”
    Bam Bam sat at the table between us.
    “Honest to God, Beverly, I can’t believe you’re having a baby in a couple of months. You better grow up.” This was her favorite and most irritating thing to say. “Have you met any neighbors yet?”
    “No.”
    She raised her eyebrows.
    I should want to talk to Bam Bam’s aunt—the woman he and his sisters lived with? She ignored her children, looked like a walrus, and lived with a guy who had no teeth. Or the lady across the street, who polished her red GTO as often as she changed her clothes? It was true sometimes I wished I could invite one or two of the prettier ones over, but the one time I did talk to neighbors it had been a big mistake. They were Stu and Marsha Heckle, who lived on the other side of my house. I called them the Uglies because he had big angry pimples and a pin head while she was shaped like a mushroom and you could see her pink scalp through her hair. As if being so ugly weren’t enough, they were also Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was sitting on the front steps, while Raymond watched a baseball game inside, and Mr. Ugly came out and offered me a brownie “the Mrs.” had made for a meeting they were having that night of the Parents Against Sex Education in Schools Committee. “You really think sex education’s wrong?” I ventured.
    “Darned right,” said Mr. Ugly. “Some stranger telling our kids about the birds and the bees? What gives them the right to take prayers out of the classroom and replace them with sex?”
    This made me want to barf, since I figured if somebody had given me the scoop on birth control, I might not be stuck, a pregnant teenager on a front stoop in the public-housing project listening to a perverted Christian confuse prayers and sex.
    “Like the Uglies?” I said to my mother. “I’m supposed to talk to people who don’t believe in sex education?”
    “Everybody’s entitled to their opinions.”
    “And so am I. I like Bam Bam. And I wish you’d butt out. It’s my business who I talk to.”
    “I better go.”
    I immediately felt bad for yelling. “What’re you cooking tonight?”
    “I don’t know. It’s so hot, I thought I’d just have kielbasa and potato salad. And you?”
    “Sloppy joes.”
    “Why don’t you have the stew? I don’t know how you kids can eat that stuff.”
    “Ma.”
    “All right, all right. I got to go pick up a few things at Jeannie’s. You want to come, you need anything?” Jeannie’s was my father’s