It’s my fault. I forgot to ask her if she needed to go.

The man and the lady both turn around. The man says a bad word.

“You poor little thing,” the lady says to Marty. “Don’t worry, your mama and papa will come to get you soon.” She scrunches up some napkins and walks over to my sister. Marty leans away from her, almost falling off the stool.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” the lady says. She looks at the man, who shrugs his shoulders. Then she just tosses the napkins on the floor around my sister’s stool, to soak up the pee.

The man leans into the microphone again. “ATTENTION PARENTS. TWO LITTLE LOST ORIENTAL GIRLS AT THE TEACUP RIDE.”

The lady goes over to stand at the window and the man ignores us. I think he’s just hoping neither of us is going to do anything disgusting again.

Then I hear the lady say: “Hallelujah, I think it’s them.”

Our parents look very hot. I am surprised to see them. Right away Ma reaches for Marty, who’s crying her head off again.

“She wet herself?” Ma asks me, like anyone couldn’t tell.

“Sealy,” Daddy says. He has a funny expression on his face.

“Okay, okay,” says Ma. She says to the lady and man: “Thank you for taking care of them.”

“No big deal, I got nieces and nephews,” says the lady.

The man makes a grunting noise.

Ma points at me. “I told you watch your sister. Can’t you hear? Something wrong with your brain, Sal-lee?”

She takes Marty to the ladies’ room to wash her off, and Daddy and I sit down to wait for them on the concrete wall. I’m so thirsty I think I am going to die. I remember I didn’t get to finish my orangeade.

Daddy touches the top of my hair and says: “Ouch! What a hothead!” He takes off his baseball cap and puts it on my head. It’s sweaty and smelly and way too big but immediately I feel better.

And then I see her.

“Daddy!”

“Ai-yah, what’s this?”

“Minnie Mouse. Look, Daddy, right there.”

“Mickey Mouse?”

“No, Minnie Mouse. See, in the red dress.”

“She’s the one you like, huh, Sealy?”

“Yes.”

He looks at me and then before I know what’s happening my father has lifted me up and I’m sitting on his shoulders, just like the other kids. But Daddy is so tall that together we’re taller than anybody else. We march through the crowd to Minnie and then he sets me down, exactly in front of her, so she can’t help noticing me. I can’t believe it. I stare at her white gloves—so clean, like Nai-nai’s—her white stockings in their slender lady legs, and then finally at her big smiling white and black head with its red and white polka-dot bow that matches her dress.

“You’re more beautiful than Miss America,” I say.

The head tilts toward me like she’s going to say something, but then I remember that of course the cartoon characters don’t talk. Instead, she bends down—she’s wearing a petticoat, I can hear it rustle—takes my hand in her gloved one and gently shakes it, as if I were already grown up and we were meeting at a party.

Behind me Daddy makes a sound. It’s only many years later that I recognize it—my father is crying.

Part Three

15

In the end Ma never carried out her threat and I went to St. Petersburg as planned, two days after my discharge from Willowridge.

During those two days I wandered around the house on Woodside Avenue, trying to convince myself I was normal now, fit to be a citizen of the outside world, although normal was the last thing I felt. Jury-rigged was more like it. The pieces reassembled, and, as Sylvia P. would say, stuck together with glue. A month and a half of medication and group therapy had made me more talkative, but it was an uncensored kind of talkative, the kind that wouldn’t wash at a cocktail party, for instance. Still everyone—Valeric, my group, the MHs—had agreed that I was ready. And it was true that there were things I could do again, like sit down and read the New Haven Register from front to back, or call Fran in Cambridge—I thought she sounded a little off, but maybe it was because she was finally sick of my angst.

The house was too damn quiet. My sister was gone again—this time to Vermont, where an old boyfriend of hers had dropped out of Wall Street to become a carpenter. I avoided my bedroom with all its heavy furniture that was familiar but wrongly placed, like objects in a nightmare. The pink runner on the floor by the bed, which used to lie in the front hall of the house on Coram Drive, was stained forever by my vomit. Our old baroque telephone stand, with its one latticed shelf, was my bed table, mismatched to the simple blond lines of the twin bed that had lost its twin. Most disturbing of all was the wallpaper—enormous abstract brown and beige daisies that had looked to me like deformed children, all those long days I’d lain staring at it. Almost as bad as the apple blossoms on Coram Drive.

I did check the top drawer of the bureau, and the empty vials—Valium and Elavil—were still there. I’d taken thirty-six pills in all, for the thirty-six hours my mother had been in labor with me. Kind of a last private joke. And I noticed that someone—Ma, of course—had removed the envelope containing my will, which I’d anchored under the prancing wooden horse.

My first session with Valerie, I’d asked her what was wrong with me.

“You’re acutely depressed.”

“That’s all?”

It had sounded too minor, like the flu. I was sure that whatever I had was causing my internal organs to rot—I could smell it on my breath.

Understand this: at first death had been a mere flirtation, for instance, catching my foot lying hard on the gas pedal at the curve around Lake Whitney, the one that had killed Darcy and her boyfriend.

But then it became a true love affair, my heart was swollen for it, it lay down with me in bed and seeped into my pores while I slept.

I knew it was a sin. I knew that in the West human life was valued above all else, that it would be considered a virtuous act to keep this body of mine alive, no matter how stupid I got. Valerie had already begun talking about a hospital. Facility, she called it. Nothing facile about it, if you’d asked me, except for the people who wouldn’t have to deal with you anymore.

I was sorry thinking that Ma would be the one to discover me. She had found her own father’s body, face twisted, pillow soaked with the life blood he’d coughed out in his sleep. His favorite, my mother had run into his room every morning, even before the servants came with hot water.

You’d think, given my history, I would have chosen to cut. And I admit I did consider it, standing in front of the mirror in my parents’ bathroom, that ghastly fluorescent light illuminating the blue veins in my already scarred left forearm. There was even a package of Daddy’s razor blades left in the medicine cabinet. But in the end I chickened out. Although I could imagine the kind of pain from a vein rent clear through, could even imagine existing through it, I simply did not want to die in that kind of agony. It would have to be sleep.

I chose the day, a Saturday, when my mother would be away at a Smith luncheon in New York City. The night before I made my will, which was simple. When I was finished I saw that my handwriting was illegible so I did it all over again in big block letters, simplifying as much as possible.

FRAN—ART. MARTY—EVERYTHING ELSE. CREMATE. They’d figure it out.

Then I opened the bottles and spilled the pills onto the scarf Aunty Mabel had embroidered for my sixteenth birthday. Fuchsia satin, with clumps of white kittens in the corners. Counting, I had trouble focusing, the color contrast was so vibrant, the tablets so tiny. I pushed the pills into the middle of the scarf and knotted it up into a bundle. Someone long ago had taught me to do that, I didn’t remember who.