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acrobat didn’t walk till eighteen months. And you remember the trouble I had weaning him?”
    “Maybe now that he’s a big four-year-old fella he’ll take it easy on you,” Mae said, smiling at me through the smoke.
    At that moment the doorbell rang, and in anticipation of my first guest I wriggled out of my mother’s arms, slid my arched spine over her knees, and landed on the floor under the table, and crouched there. “Aren’t you going to answer the door?” my mother asked. But I had no intention of doing that; I only wanted to hide.
    The day was momentous, but parties were mixed blessings. You got presents, all right—pick-up sticks, or crayons, or flat boxes of modeling clay in many colored strips—but they were the lesser presents of party admissions. And we all had to sit at the table with ridiculous pointed paper hats, and paper plates and noisemakers and popping balloons and pretend to a joyful delirium. In fact, a birthday party was a satire on children directed by their mothers, who hovered about, distributing Dixie Cups and glasses of milk while cooing in appreciation for the aesthetics of the event, the way each child was dressed for it and so on; and who set us upon one another in games of the mostacute competition, so that we either cried in humiliation or punched each other to inflict pain.
    And it was all done up in the impermanent materials of crepe paper, thin rubber and tin, everything painted in the gaudy colors of lies.
    And the climax of the chaos, blowing out the candles on the cake, presented likely possibility of public failure and a loss of luck in the event the thing was not done well. In fact, I had a secret dread of not being able to blow out the candles before they burned down to the icing. That meant death. Candles burning down to the end, as in my grandmother’s tumblers of candles, which could not be tampered with once lit, memorialized someone’s death. And the Friday-night Sabbath candles that she lit with her hands covering her eyes, and a shawl over her head, suggested to me her irremediable grief, a pantomime of the loss of sight that comes to the dead under the earth.
    So I blew for my life, to have some tallow left for the following year. My small chest heaved and I was glad for my mother’s head beside mine, adding to the gust, even though it would mean I had not done the job the way one was supposed to, with aplomb.
    G randma lived in the room next to mine. She was a desiccated, asthmatic little woman who wore high-laced shoes and all manner of long old-fashioned dresses, and shawls, usually black. She lived a very private life, which made me wary of her. She stayed in her room for hours on end, and often came out in such a thoughtful, brooding state as not to notice what was going on around her.
    She was very slender and tiny with delicate features. But her face was all wrinkled and her complexion was sallow. She wore her long wavy grey hair neatly braided and coiled when she was feeling well, and uncombed and flying when she was unwell. Like my mother, she had the palest blue eyes. But they lookedat me, these eyes, either with great smiling love and animation, or with no recognition in them at all. I never knew on any given day whether Grandma would know and love me, or stare at me as if she had never seen me before.
    Had I known precisely what her trouble was, it might have helped to remove some of the terror of her in my mind. My mother only told me what a sad hard life she had had. She had lost two children many years ago. And the year before I was born, her husband, who would have been my grandfather, had died. In this view Grandma’s behavior was appropriate. But then why did she insist that my mother taste everything she put before her on the table? Grandma would not eat anything if my mother did not taste it first. She believed my mother, her own daughter, was trying to poison her. She sat with her hands in her lap and stared at her food. So now, whether