Take Minna. Alice is always going on about how beautiful she is. Yeah, if you like that look—a great big pair of fake tits screwed on like a lid, and eyes that always look like they’re trying to see through your pants to how much money you’ve got in your wallet.

No thank you.

I know Minna had a rough start. All those years in that crusty basement practicing piano until her fingers ached and God knows what else. But listen, we all get served a deck with some cards missing. Get up and get on with it, is what I say. I’ve done my reading about all of it: neuroses, psychoses, anxieties, and compulsions, blah, blah. I used to work for the Dr. Howard Rivers, of the Rivers Center for Psychiatric Development, for God’s sake. And I’ve seen my fair share of churches and twelve steps.

It all boils down to the same thing: are you going to play the cards you got, or are you going to fold?

For example: I didn’t exactly have it easy growing up. We were in Silverlake, Georgia: land of shotgun houses and trailer parks, an all-white county park, peach trees with fruit like drooping tits, and summers that slapped you in the face like a dog’s tongue. Dad had a mouth like a closed-up zipper, and when he looked at me at all, it was usually to ask how come I couldn’t play nice like the other girls and stop getting into brawls on the playground and why can’t you ever learn to listen.

I don’t think I ever once saw him kiss my mother or even hold her hand. He spent all his time with his friends at the Rotary Club, especially his friend Alan Briggs, and my mom used to go into hysterics on the phone with her sister, wondering where he was and whether he was cheating on her and what she would do if he left her for some young tramp. And then one day when I was seven, she came home early from her once-a-month steak-and-lobster buffet dinner with the girls in Dixie Union and found my dad and Alan in bed, buck naked. At least, that’s the way my mom told it to me later.

My dad and mom divorced, and Mom and I had to move to a small one-bedroom in what was still called the colored part of town. It was 1960 in the South, which was like 1940 anywhere else in the world, and at school whispers went around that my dad was a queer and I was a nigger lover besides. Those aren’t my words. Silverlake, Georgia, was a pretty place, full of ugly people. I remember houses set up in a row like dominoes, yellow in the morning sun, explosions of bright red trumpet creeper, and picket fences dusty with pollen; and I remember “Whites Only,” and fields crawling with chiggers, and cockroaches the size of a child’s palm wriggling out of the drain.

Colored, black, white, yellow, queer, straight—from the beginning, it never mattered to me, maybe because even though my dad hardly ever said a word to me, and liked to diddle his male friends behind my mother’s back, and wore the same bowling shirt every Saturday and Sunday, I still loved him. Who knows why or how. Maybe only because he brought me candy buttons, or let me sit on his lap while he cruised down Main Street in his sky-blue El Dorado, big as a boat, shark finned and smooth.

Parents teach us our very first lesson about love: that you sure as hell don’t get to choose it.

My point is, I didn’t sit around sobbing about my problems and expecting everyone to feel sorry for me. I wanted out of Georgia, and so I got out of Georgia, and I didn’t wait for some man to saddle me with a ring and a lifetime of laundry to do it.

By then it was 1970, anyway, and things were changing. The farther north I got, the more they changed, until finally, in New York City, I discovered it had been the future all along.

Funny, isn’t it, how quickly the future becomes the past? I bet Trenton doesn’t even know who Jimi Hendrix was. Joplin, Neil Young, Jerry Garcia—forget it.

What can I say about Trenton? A sad sprout of a human being, halfway between a boy and a broccoli. Then there’s Caroline, a big sodden biscuit, soaked morning through night. I’m not one to talk—I liked getting knockered sometimes, who doesn’t?—but at least I had the decency to do my drinking alone.

Richard was probably the worst of all of them. Couldn’t keep his prick in his pants and made everybody’s lives miserable with his whims and his moods and demands, especially at the end. No chicken soup, I want tomato. Turn the heat up. Now turn it down. Now up again. We used to catch his poor nurses crying in the dining room, hidden in the dark, hunched between dusty furniture—grown women, blubbering silently into their palms. The biggest favor Richard Walker ever did for anyone else was die.

Do you think I’m being harsh? I’ve never been one to sugarcoat the truth, and at least I’ve still got a sense of humor, even if I’m all splinters and dust everywhere else. That’s another thing that drives me crazy about Alice: no sense of humor at all. I can feel her, wound up tight, like a soda about to explode, like clenched butt cheeks.

So I ask you: What’s she holding in?

TRENTON

The truth: that’s all Trenton wanted. For someone in his family to tell the truth.

It was seven o’clock and he was lying in his old bedroom, which looked almost exactly the same as he remembered it except for the piles of junk everywhere, listening to the murmur of his sister’s and his mother’s voices. They were arguing about what to do for dinner. And it occurred to him that since the last time he’d been to Coral River, he probably hadn’t heard a single word from either one of them that wasn’t some kind of lie.

He didn’t know why it still mattered to him. Maybe it was because he’d been hoping for integrity. He liked that word, integrity, had picked it up in Brit Lit II, which among the guys at Andover was known as Boner Lit. The teacher, Ms. Patterson, was hot. Most of the teachers at Andover were really old, past forty, and strapped into their clothes like psychos into straitjackets, as though their fat might attempt an escape.

But Ms. Patterson wasn’t. She was twenty-eight—she’d told them so—which wasn’t that old. And she looked even younger. She wore her hair loose. It was soft and brown and kind of fuzzy, and all the girls made fun of her because they said it was frizzy and she didn’t know how to blow-dry it right. They made fun of her clothes, too, because she wore sneakers sometimes with her skirts and dark old-lady tights; and other times, loose black pants and a shapeless fleece on top.

But Trenton liked that. He found he couldn’t even jerk off thinking about the girls at Andover, even the girls younger than him. They were all out of his reach. Their jeans were suctioned to their butts and their hair was slick as an oily river, and their mouths were always curled up and laughing at a joke he was never a part of, and on weekends they took planes and cars down to New York and came back, triumphant and smirking, with a new story: they’d gone down on so-and-so in a cab. They’d done ecstasy and taken over the DJ booth at Butter.