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everything stinks, everything is dingy and pressing upon him, stretching his skull out of shape.… That morning his mother was sick. Vomiting into a basin. The sharp acrid smell of it: now he is vomiting himself. He spits again and again, running his tongue around his mouth over the hard ridges of his teeth. Tiny particles of vomit, like particles of food. Slimy, clinging, a film inside his mouth.… When he is finished, trembling, he reaches up to pull the chain and the water begins to flow noisily, lazily. He has a moment of panic, thinking the vomit won’t flush away.
    Jesse has not been sick for years, so this is a surprise to him. Nausea: the internal trembling, the weakness, the panic. A panic located in the stomach. He does not remember having felt so sick before, ever in his life, so helpless and frightened. Shirley is often sick to her stomach, and their mother takes care of her in the kitchen, with the basin. It is too cold to go to the outhouse to be sick. Too nasty there.
    That morning, by accident, Jesse came upon his mother when she was being sick. She was hunched over and, turning to him surprised, her face was pale, her thin, arched eyebrows too severe in her delicate face; she seemed a stranger, with a forlorn, witch-like beauty that struck him. Her beauty. Her face. The odor of vomit, a streak of vomit on her bathrobe. Both she and Jesse were embarrassed. She said quickly, “There’s more privacy in the barn with the cows!”
    It was an expression of hers from her girlhood. Barns and cows. Her father owned a farm.
    “I’m sorry,” Jesse said, backing away.
    That had been about seven-thirty in the morning. His father was still out walking.
Don’t you know, don’t you want to know, where he has gone? Why he can’t sleep anymore?
But he said nothing, standing aside for her to pass, and followed her out into the kitchen. More bickering there—Jean and Shirley. Jesse sat at the table. Bob was snuffling, his eyes watering. Talk around the table was edgy, musical, teasing. Jean was always teasing someone. There was a kind of rhythm to her teasing—a cruelty, then a tenderness. She had a quick, high yelp of a laugh, which was a surprise in her because it was boyish and abrupt. But her smile was slow, teasing. Bob was asking when the Christmas tree would be put up, and Jean was saying there might not be any tree this year. “Ifyou’re bad, there won’t be any tree,” Jean said. “Just because of him?” said Shirley. “Why him? He’s not the only one that counts!” “Be quiet, baby,” Jean said. Jesse thought with pleasure of the Christmas tree. His father would bring it home, tied to the front fender of the car. It would be put up in the front room, inside a small metal tripod with a basin of water beneath, and they would decorate it with things from the two big cardboard boxes kept in the attic—very light glass globes, spirals that looked like icicles, strings of frizzy silver material, colored bows and papers, and figures in Biblical dress. Two or three birds, with feathers that seemed real. An angel. A star of tarnished gold. Candles drawn on cardboard and colored in crayon, which Jesse himself had made years ago. Beneath the tree they would put their presents for one another.
    Their mother made breakfast for them. She still looked pale, shaky. Jesse wondered if the girls noticed. Her bathrobe was damp from where she had wiped off the vomit—a large damp stain in the blue material. But no one else would notice. She put plates on the table, gave them hot oatmeal in spoonfuls. She avoided Jesse’s eye. He hated himself for seeing so much, always seeing so much. He couldn’t help it. They lived so close together, he could not help noticing the straps that sometimes slid down Jean’s shoulder, the flushed, mottled flesh of his mother’s chest if her bathrobe swung open. Sometimes he found himself staring at his father—that strong, large face, the strong jaws, the grinding, relentless