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silhouette, on summer evenings, men mowed the grass or washed automobiles—but no one knew anyone. The place suggested somehow a necessity for distance, and thus on that first day—before the neighborhood existed, really—there was no one to greet us first of all, and no will to greet us even if there had been, as we did not greet those who followed us there out of theunformulated conviction everyone shared that one’s neighbors would inevitably move on.
    My father pulled cautiously into the drive of our new home: “This is it, guys,” he said. We spilled out onto the sidewalk together; my mother, producing a key from a chain around her neck, ceremoniously unlocked the front door. Then all of us wandered through the vacant rooms together, the freshness of things inspiring in us a brand of reverence—“Don’t touch the walls,” said my mother. Our voices echoed in the empty, painted chambers, alien, unsettling sounds. In astonishment we stood at the threshold of our dining room. An imitation chandelier, festooned with vaguely absurd cut-glass diamonds, hung by a chain from the ceiling. In the bathroom two sinks had been set in the tile; the wings of the mirrors swiveled on chrome hinges and the cabinets were stained with linseed oil. We inspected the kitchen together. My mother operated the garbage disposal; my father slipped the brass bolt in the Dutch door. We admired the counters and the window sills and closets. It seemed that some diminutive empire had been created for us, bordered by fences and careful rockeries, to close out that other world of wind and sand from which we had recently emerged together.
    “We have to celebrate,” announced my father. “We’ll bring everything in first, then eat, have a party.” He backed my mother against the kitchen sink, hoisted her up and turned her in a circle; her heels flew out behind her. “I should have carried you across the threshold,” he said, snapping his fingers. “What was I thinking of?”
    “It’s not too late,” my mother told him.
    He carried her across, of course. It must have seemed tohim then that the life he had dreamed of was within reach. How was he to know then what he would have to bear? That my mother would die of lymphoma twelve years later? That they would sell this new house within five years? That he would sit by her in the hospital and wish for an end to it all?
    That night, since we had no beds yet, Harold and I slept on the living-room floor—or rather didn’t sleep because the place was too strange, the house too noxious with fumes of paint, the night too sultry, too windless. I’d always slept in the same room with Harold and had carried this tradition with me to the new place. But it occurred to me now that I didn’t have to. In the new place there was a bedroom for everyone.
    “You think things are going to be different here?” I said.
    “Some things,” said Harold. “Sure they are.”
    “Like what?” I asked. “Name something.”
    Harold turned onto his back beside me. We’d stripped to our underwear, and lay facing the ceiling with our hands behind our heads, our elbows pointing out like wings. The light from a streetlamp gathered in the window and swarmed across Harold’s tightened rib cage and over the as yet untainted plasterboard. “Like a lot of things,” he answered. “I don’t know.”
    “I’m glad I’m going to have my own room,” I told him. “I can do whatever I want now.”
    We were silent for some time. It was the kind of silence that often follows insult, when no one is quite certain of the meaning of silence—a nervous interim, even between brothers.
    “That’s fine,” said Harold, after a while. “Fine.”
    “It has to be,” I told him. “So there.”
    He slept after a while. I didn’t. I never slept as well asHarold did, and still today I seem always to be restless when others have slipped into the world of dreams.
    It was the day of the moonwalk, a thing that seemed to us more