On a break-neck tour of Nonza: "this is the house your great-grandfather was born in," Marie-Ange pulls us around every square inch of the fifty by sixty foot town center. "Ah," she says as we rush across uneven cobblestones, "Roman! Roman, viens-ici! Jourdan, this is a relative! His great-grandfather is the brother of your great-grandfather! Roman works at this restaurant. He'll take care of you, won't you, Roman?" And there he is in the middle of the square, my age, my blood, promising to watch over me these next four days. "Ah, we are here." And we are handed the keys to a three-story villa with views of the multi-blue-hued ocean on all sides, a beautiful dusty pink house with green shutters and a balcony with a grapevine-covered terrace. "Everything is okay?"

On a tour of Cape Corse, the northern nook of Corsica where Nonza is, Tonton Barbu, black beard painted white at the tips, eyes sparkling after fifty years of salt-scrubbed life, pulls his lime and turquoise Renault off the road, hops out, and plucks a wiry green stalk, quickly stripping it of its leaves and tying a slipknot at one end. "We caught lizards with these when I was a boy." His salt-crusted Corsican demeanor cracks; we glimpse quiet happiness inside.

Tante France decides that her weekend activity is to feed us on a near-hourly schedule. She invites us for dinner, warns us to close the patio gate so the mountain goats won't eat the flowers, and leaves us to prepare. She serves polenta in Grandma-sized portions, doling out polenta-full spoon after polenta-full spoon, stopping at my plate by my pleas of "Ah! C'est bon, merci." Alas, Holly's politeness and total lack of the French language prevents her from stopping the mountainous piles of cornmeal quickly overtaking her plate, her eyes wide with terrified fear at the prospect of finishing each new polenta plop on her dish. She settles herself in, my tiny kids' menu-sized friend, and pushes forkful after forkful into her mouth. We finish our servings without exploding. And then I hear the words that strike fear in my heart: "Do you think we need new plates for the second course?" And out comes the Procession of Overabundance--four more courses of chicken with cornichons, capers, and mustard, cheese, fruit, and cake.

After we can move no longer, Tante France brings out a book of old Nonza photos. Her fingers brush a little girl in pigtails: "she is a grandmother of five"; "he died in the Great War" at a solemn 1904 photo of a boy in a wagon, big eyes staring at the camera. "This is me at 16:" a smiling girl in a rowboat, bikini-topped and short-shorted, arms thrust behind head in a pin-up pose, and "that is my husband, may he rest in peace," directed at a shadowy grin in the corner of the photo, he entranced by saucy France's legs and smile.

There are seventy full-time residents of Nonza. Five families. Everyone's lineage is carefully kept track of: partially, I can only assume, to avoid incest and birth defects. The town is carved out of a heaped-upon cluster of mountains, houses built into each other and the mountain, sharing walls and views of shockingly blue waters 400 feet below, crashing white into black jagged rocky peaks. These days there are more tombs dug into mountainsides and precariously crammed into sea-side caves than residents. Les montagnes et la mer, becomes our most common refrain--the mountains plunge into the sea, with little in the way of flat land or beach between the two. The terrain allows breathtaking unobstructed views of the sea and mountains, and of Nonza--the houses, the square. But also--the unobstructed views mean you can be seen wherever you are. Little wizened people watch from windows, see every wrong turn, every meandering, longer-than-necessary route home. Tante France asks how we like the views from the Tower because she saw us up there. There is something oddly comforting about this, but also constricting. As I walk through town, heads snap to windows, following me as I pass. I leave a wake of whispers: "she is the American Burini girl. The daughter of Tante France's niece."

Deciding that the best way to thank people who love to feed us for their hospitality is to make them dinner, we invite the whole family, three generations, eight people, to a meal at the villa they gave us for the weekend, prepared by three American twenty-year-olds, whose major culinary achievements thus far have involved either the microwave or the Hot Pot. Tonton Barbu brings us to the grocery store and stands in the middle of the produce section, between the lettuce and the lemons, next to the cart, as the three of us race around, collecting ingredients for brownies, salad, chicken, and rice and beans. Each time I return to drop something in the cart, he smiles at me dubiously. I imagine him sending an S.O.S. message to Marie-Ange: "Bring a back-up meal! The Americans are serving us beans and flour!" After we cook dinner, our guests arrive, each holding a quiche or gratin or a platter of Corsican specialties--our culinary abilities are not trusted. But as Tante France lipsmackingly reaches for another piece of chicken, we smile and poke each other's ribs (what we can find of them after days of seven-course meals) in success.

Repeatedly, all of them, over polenta or pastis, walking around the square or on tours of tombs etched into the mountains, call me "Josiane," my mother's name. They shake their heads and hold my chin up to the light and say, "the resemblance is remarkable." Tante France dusts off an album from 1971 of my mother and her siblings at home in Miami. My mother, head back in easy laughter, long straight dark hair winding around her shoulders, stares at me from the pages with my features, my smile, my eyes. My mother at twenty, from the 200-year-old house my great-grandfather, her grandfather was born in, surprises me with myself, thousands of miles from our lives.

She went the same way every morning. There were only two ways to get there, and they both took the exact same amount of time, an irritating part of her life that never really mattered until she started driving. So she went the back way. The mazes of country road made going 40 seem like rebellion. Her go-kart of a car rattled along, windows open, dashboard convulsing with every dip and rut in the road. Under the interstate, past a few run-down houses, then swallowed by trees. They came out of nowhere, it seemed, but suddenly there was a tunnel of green. Straight ahead, a narrow dirt path headed straight uphill, meandering through oak thickness.

She navigated up the dirt road without thinking and hit the gas a little harder, weaving in and out of ancient trunks. There was so much satisfaction in seeing that cloud of unsettled dust in her shaking rear-view mirror, as she barreled through potholes so big that her seatbelt actually had to do some work. The trees eventually broke. Then--around that turn--the rusted fence held the club inside. Burnt grass, tables shaded with tacky umbrellas, and a gigantic cement dinosaur all pushed to get out. The only thing that escaped was the trickling of a hose and the overwhelming smell of chlorine. She jingled her keys in her hand; the boss had made her a set, since she had to be there so much, as Assistant Manager. He had color-coded the three keys with plastic tabs so she'd know which was which. They were all yellow.

Bright blue waves rippled along the walls inside the Clubhouse, flaking at the edges to show bare cement underneath. Piles of soggy, wrinkled clothes were draped on the blue piano in the corner, which was locked and had been for years. No one knew where the key was. Broken goggles, cracked snorkels, stray socks, and deserted diving rings all lay in a heap on the floor, twisted in the piano pedals. Most of the floor was bare, spotted with the reminder of yesterday's drippy puddles, but mismatched carpet ran from one door to the other. It peeled up at the corners, the turquoise and maroon worn so thin that she could feel the floor struggling to poke through to the soles of her chlorine-eaten sandals. She kicked them into a corner, threw down her bag, and headed outside through the glass doors, spotted with splashes and dust.

The grass felt comfortable under her feet. A little crunchy, as usual. It needed to be cut, even though she'd told one of the lifeguards to do it last week. He'd gotten fed up with the rickety push-mower, sick of emptying the bag every 5 minutes, and gave up. She was too busy to notice him inside playing cards with a few of the kids, until it didn't matter anymore. She'd just do it herself. Later.

Mornings at the club were always misleading. Quiet. Unassuming. Rolling grassy hills, empty cement sidewalks, sunshine breaking through heavy clouds to bounce around on the water. All three pools looked clean as she stood on that hill. She got closer, though, and could see the film of dead bugs on top, frogs swimming around with no way out, moles and snakes that had fallen into the filters during the night and drowned. She dumped a jug of liquid chlorine into the water. The smell enveloped her; she hardly noticed, except to realize that her feet burned a little. Her favorite part of the mornings were the radios, one at the top of the hill near the Clubhouse, and the other at the bottom, next to the Big Pool (people sometimes smirked at the names of the three pools--the Big Pool, the Medium Pool, and the Baby Pool--which were so reminiscent of old fairy tales that anyone who didn't know better was surprised. She'd forgotten that it was funny.). The delay never failed to amuse her; from anywhere between the two radios, whether she was cleaning off shaded tables or arranging lounge chairs, the same drumbeats pounded twice, one right after the other.

Two hours of skimming, vacuuming, and toilet-scrubbing later, the morning quiet came to a rumbling halt. Outside the fence, leaves stirred to the rhythm of a distant thumping. The beat was always the same, pounding through the trees. A cloud of dust rose over the deserted parking lot, hung in the shifting breeze for a second, and settled over the pools. Cloudy water again. Notes chimed in with the beat, far-off voices, the grating of tires on pebbles and potholes. Andy's heap of a Bronco skidded around the corner, spit out by the trees, rattling from the combination of too many powerful speakers, worn-out Beastie Boys tapes, and a dirt road that he knew well enough (as Manager) to catch as much air as possible on the way to work. He parked, cut the engine, and the cry of all-too-excited voices carried through the trees from the parking lot above, suddenly loud in the new silence. She glanced at the clock, yellowed and crooked on the wall. The taste of Lysol hanging in the air of the Clubhouse mocked her; that fresh "Mountain Air" never lasted long in the midst of diluted chlorine, hamburger grease, and clumsy, rushed trips to the bathroom by kid after kid. Little feet pounded on the sidewalk outside. Plastic sandals echoed in the air, dripping with Lysol.

It started.

The Reeds always came first on cloudy days, without fail. When the sun was out, they didn't show until after dinner, when it was chilly and the girls could complain about their purple lips and shivering legs. Rachel and Virginia both had huge eyes, which they talked with. They never spoke to anyone but their mom, just jumped off the side of the pool over and over again, from the same square of cement. Mrs. Reed rocked little Rose in her stroller from a nearby chair, smiled too much, and cried out, "Look at little Dolphin Rachel! Look at her go! Swim, Rachel, swim!" in a voice brimming with so much enthusiasm that anyone within earshot wanted to laugh and scream at the same time.

Jordy Haskins, the blonde toothless wonder who never wore the same bathing suit twice and always charmed his way out of trouble, bolted through the door next. He flashed his 8-year-old grin, ducked into the bathroom, and shuffled out minutes later wearing yet another pair of trunks that she had never seen.

The red-headed Massaroni kids made their entrance, one of wild, snarled curls and violent energy. Little Jack immediately ran over and started karate-kicking Andy, squealing mischievously as Andy toted him outside, slung up over his right shoulder. Their parents followed some five minutes later, lugging bulging tote bags and armfuls of inner tubes that no one ever played with. They already looked tired.

She lost track of shrieks from the parking lot and footsteps pounding through the door after awhile. Tables were piled with coolers and towels. The rush for lounge chairs began as mothers fought for somewhere to lie down, relax, and ignore their kids. Basketballs thudded on the court next to the pool, sailing through netless rims. The diving board sprang rhythmically, lifeguard whistles sliced through the air, hoarse warnings of "WALK!" got more exasperated. She held someone's ice cream cone while he went to the bathroom. A little boy ran through the Clubhouse, his wet feet proving to be bad news as he went flying and ended up sprawled on his stomach on the tile, sniffling at a bruised knee and busted ego.

She handed out band-aids and good advice, frisbees and smiles. Some kids ran through, waving and shouting her name in passing, others (the older ones who, in their pre-teen dignity, were too cool to show excitement about being there, a stage she remembered well) stopped at the front desk to play a quick game of cards with her or brag about their game of mini-golf at Funplex the night before. Their parents always stopped to ask her where her parents were ("They'll be up later, they're on their way..."), if the water was cold ("Yeahhhh, it's pretty chilly, but once you get in you'll get used to it..."), if it was going to rain ("I heard about possible thunderstorms, but I don't know, we'll be watching out for them..."), if she had heard yet about her freshman college roommate assignment ("Not yet, but I'll let you know when I do..."). Always the same people, the same questions, the same bathing suits and sandals (except for Jordy).

The heat got worse, and the sweat on her back mingled with ice water dripping from that soggy plastic bag on her shoulder, covering another bee sting. Her feet were shining scarlet on the bottom, smooth and scalded from hours of barefoot poolside pacing. They'd run out of chocolate ice cream in the snack bar, and someone was crying. The Medium Pool was closed because of an "accident"--no one was sure when it happened, a little boy just found a "rock" on the bottom, picked it up, and it crumbled in his hand. Time to shock the pool. The Big Pool pushed capacity, with everyone avoiding the dirty Medium Pool, grossed out by the idea. By the next day, they all would have forgotten. Big kids ran around the Baby Pool with Super Soakers, spraying each other in the face and knocking over toddlers unknowingly, until someone's mother complained. The prized lounge chairs were piled in a fort on the grass, teeming with kids looking to hide from their parents in a surge of sneaky genius. Someone's mother complained about that too. Chlorine was too low in the Big Pool, pH was too high. The men's bathroom was closed. Brian had overflowed the toilet again, and hadn't told anyone again. All of the male staff members were guarding, or cleaning the Medium Pool, or siphoning chlorine to put in the Big Pool. In the meantime, little boys ran around in front of the roped-off bathroom with wide eyes and desperate, dancing footsteps. She finally gave up waiting for someone else to come do it, threw her leaky ice pack in the overflowing garbage, grabbed a random rusty garden tool (the plunger was nowhere to be found), and cleaned out the toilet herself.

Suddenly, whistles sounded and a collective groan erupted from outside the cobweb-laced windows. Water lapping. The patter of footsteps. Her ears perked up, and the distant rumble bounced off sticky tiled walls. Thunder.

She wandered out of the bathroom, a little spring in her step now, holding the rusty garden tool out at her side between two fingers. Careful not to let it drip on her leg. Through the bug-splattered front windows of the Clubhouse, overlooking the dusty grass and stirred-up pools, she watched the sky crack open. The rain fell in a wall of release. Squealing, people scattered, sprinting for umbrellas, roofs, dry towels. As if they weren't wet already. The lifeguards all smirked as they strutted up the hill, twirling their whistles around their fingers, smug in the idea of being paid for sitting around. As long as there was thunder, the pools were closed.

The grass slurped thirstily from the sky. Hasty wet footprints and splash-marks dissolved on the darkening cement. Raindrops fell heavily on the surface of the pools, hundreds of tiny circles spreading into one another until the bottom was hidden by lapping turbulence. Car after car inched down the hill, splashing through puddles and reflecting occasional flashes of lightning in their side-view mirrors. No dust. She sat, for the first time all day. Her shorts stuck to the plastic-covered chair. She didn't think to gripe.

Like a rotund gourmet of fine foods and exotic liquors, with a palate able to discern the most delicate and subtle flavors, the slightest nuances that distinguish that which is truly fine from that which is merely expensive, he samples this and that and makes his selection. It was a pastime that gave him immense pleasure, but became tedious as a practical occupation. Really, they do have their moral counselors and all that, he reasoned, to guide them through the unceasing process of courses, degrees, schools and careers. A nasty business, but necessary, he supposed. For you see it is revealed that his burden, his personal purpose and service to the young, was something that is not accounted for in an institute of learning. To have it tainted with utilitarian premises would be a profanation unto the temple. Perhaps religious vocabulary seems irreverent in this instance, yet it is the true ambience of his relationships that must be represented. His worship was less of one God than of many; less of their ordinances than of the concepts they incarnated; more than all of this, he was the avatar who sat resplendent in some small intellectual glory, reaping indefinable pleasure in the notion of that worship.

One only, the author of the finely-written letter he held in his hand at this moment, had had sufficient fire and perseverance to force his almost unreserved admiration. She he had allowed to come back from time to time, and present her progress; indeed, he followed it with a fervor that surprised even his own sense of the beneficial and appropriate--appropriate in the formal scheme particular to these relationships that they should develop and follow, so that each is recipient of his proper due, and there is created a distance from which the characters might perceive more clearly and have room for the action of the drama inevitably played out between them.

It had been a very long time since their last interview. The slight blue pages he held between his thick fingers seemed to expand into a volume of indeterminate length; each leaf covered from top to bottom with something that had been infinitely special and so much of the past. It was a story neither one of them could tell, and yet it existed as surely as if he could turn to his shelves, look down a long row of romantic novels and pick out the one with his own name as half the title. How many of these there could be, he wondered, and smiled to himself a slightly mischievous smile. But that was of the past too. The neophytes diminished in quantity and quality as the strength and energy he had to expend in maintaining an appropriate image for this end, exhausted themselves in their efforts to put out so much. The receipts too had diminished--it had been dry years for the manufacture of youthful inspiration. They came to him now with the dust of older dreams wiped cleanly from their vacuous heads. They came to him so much hardened. If it could be said that the youth was suffering from the general state of things, Magnano was someone to judge that. It was what he felt--or didn't feel--that made him sad.

I'm fat, over three hundred pounds fat, but I'm not ill. On this particular evening, I've got the remote control to my father's 27-inch Magnavox in my back pocket. I'm on the lookout for living rooms lit up like 1920s shadowgraphs--that is, for people watching TV. So far it's been a slow night. The Wilkes, who also own a Magnavox, left this morning in their Caravan, their rear piled so high with sleeping bags and fishing poles Mr. Wilke nearly backed over his mailbox. They'll be gone one week. Dr. Bednarski, who lives in the white bungalow with black shutters across the street, was watching a crime show, but his system is a Sony and incompatible. I crawl away from Mr. Mallak's window well, determined to find action somewhere on the block. I lift the latch on his gate quietly, step into the alley with enough surety to convince even the Rainville's bull terriers that I'm only Mr. Mallak out for a stroll, and they keep their mouths shut.

I take in Mr. Hartwig's prize Versailles rosebushes with my nose, as well as people's garbage. It's 10:45 on a cloudless night, and I'm excited because at eleven the Late Movie comes on on channel 12. Tonight it's Frogs, starring Ray Milland and Sam Elliot, in which a Fourth of July family picnic is interrupted by plotting reptiles and amphibians, a movie I think everyone should see at least once. The Pauls' kitchen light is on, I see from the alley, which means only that Mr. and Mrs. Paul have tucked in their six-month-old daughter Gayle and gone to bed. On the other side of the alley live the Ruechels, a house of six boys I have so far been able to avoid. Beyond the dark wall, which in daylight is a spirea hedge, my best friend from high school, Jess Roeder, appears to be throwing a party. Though I know it will depress me, I enter his backyard between two Norway pines and a newly planted dogwood, feel the cool spray on my face and arms from the sprinkler system next door, and crawl up to the shingled siding of a renovated early 1900s three-story Colonial. Jess is a month and three days younger than I am, yet is married to a Minneapolis girl named Lorna, has been to law school at Drake, owns a house featured each December in our city council's Tour of Homes.

You are ten. Your father sets the can of Black Flag down on the grass, calls you over to the window well in the back of your house. "There, son, is a black widow spider." You kneel on the lawn looking into the hole above your basement window, at the ribbed siding arched outward against the earth, at the collage of darkened leaves, at the chipped and encrusted window casement. In the corner sits the blue Superball you lost months ago when you slammed it as hard as you could against the driveway, watched it soar into the sky like a rebounding particle from space. You searched every inch of the yard for that ball, now there it is, looking newer, bluer somehow, than the day you forked over all the change in your pocket except a nickel and six pennies to the beige-faced lady behind the counter. You don't see the black widow immediately; it is as small and dark as the blind spot of an eye.

I don't really envy Jess Roeder, I think, as I plant my high-tops in the granite pebbles next to the house and try not to crush any of the boughs of two carpet junipers situated side by side beneath the electric meter. I'm to the right of the bay window, looking in at a kitchen table covered with assorted chips and snack dips. There's samba music coming through the window screen. I hear the voices of men whose pinstriped midsections are visible from the kitchen counter up and from the oak cabinets down. I recognize Jesse by his slim frame, so different from my own, and by the sureness in his manner of speaking, also different from my own. He and what I take to be his colleagues are talking about mechanics at the Imported Auto Garage on Highway 29, telling each other about the times they were soaked for routine body work, oil changes, tire rotations. My father has always driven Volvos, which he takes to Horak's Shell on Third Avenue for servicing. I crouch on all fours, crawl along the cement foundation over purple-leaf barberries and potentillas, to the downspout which marks the corner. As I stand I note that I am within six inches of being as tall as a full-grown pyramidal arborvitae and just as wide.

I cut through a vegetable garden to the white stucco Tudor owned by Judge Thomas and his wife Celia, see the shadows on the south side of the house, see the judge's fifteen-year-old daughter Becky and three of her girlfriends lying on sleeping bags in front of the set. It's a Zenith but with a remote-control detector the same frequency as the Magnavox at home. I hold the command to the window, punch in 12 so that it shows up on the television's channel indicator, press ENTER and watch an MTV interview cut to a scene from Frogs.

"Why'd you change the station?" demands Becky Thomas's red-haired friend, a girl with cupids covering her pink pajamas.

"I didn't." Becky is a dark-haired girl I have admired from a distance since she was six.

"Neither did I," says a tall blonde girl clad in nothing but a light blue men's button-down shirt. "The remote control's way over there," she says, pointing one of her long, sun-tanned legs at the corner next to the wall.

On the screen is the scene near the beginning of the movie in which Kenneth is locked in a greenhouse with a Gila monster and fifty or sixty bearded lizards. Together they push over a jar of Malathion, another of 2,4-D, and the fumes rising from the toxic chemicals cause Kenneth to slump to the floor. "This is so stupid," says the red-headed girl. The blonde crawls over the thighs of a smaller blonde girl with glasses, who is wearing only a bra and a pair of men's white boxer shorts, picks up the remote control and points it at the set.

"Flip it back to where it was," says the girl in boxer shorts, and I watch the screen scramble past fifteen different programs until she finds MTV. But I am undaunted. I believe these girls need to see this movie. I punch in 12, press ENTER and zap, we see Kenneth's body on the floor of the greenhouse covered with lizards, the Gila monster inching forward to finish him off.

"God," says the red-headed girl. "It did it again."

"This is weird, you guys," says the thin blonde, sliding back inside her sleeping bag.

"Try punching 21," says Becky Thomas, but this time I cancel the blonde's command with my own remote control before she has a chance to enter it on the set, and my program stays on.

"It's not working," she says.

"Let me try it," Becky says. She punches 21, but as soon as I see it on the indicator, I press CANCEL, and again my program wins out. "I don't know," she says at last.

"I'm getting weirded," says the thin blonde.

"Yeah," says the red-headed girl, "me too."

Then Becky Thomas surprises me. She comes right up to the window in her T-shirt and yellow underwear, says, "Tommy Pass? You out there?" I duck below the window. I am not Tommy Pass, though as I look at her heart-shaped mouth and necklace of pink beads, I can't help wishing that I were. Her cheeks are flushed; she wants Tommy Pass to be there on the other side of the metal screen, crouched below the window, huddled next to the chimney of white painted bricks. "He did this once before, you guys. He came to the window when I was watching TV and changed the station with his remote control." The crickets are chirping, but I am so near the judge's daughter I can hear her breathe. "I'm going out there," she says, and I see the excitement in her eyes. I hear the sliding glass door being unlocked, the heavy pane grating on the aluminum runner. I lie on my stomach behind a blue spruce, watch the girl come around the corner of the house. At night my black pants and T-shirt blend with the lawn. The girl looks right at me, right at the fat flesh of my face, but sees only a light spot under the tree, a beige bed of pine needles and dead grass.

"I see where he was standing," she says to her friends. She is standing barefoot outside the window, examining the indentations left by my shoes in the tall grass next to the house.

"How big are his feet?" asks the tall blonde. She has come to the window.

"Big," says Becky Thomas. In the warm night, I smell her sweet perfume.

"Maybe it's not him," says the blonde.

"Don't say that."

"Well, maybe it's not."

Becky Thomas bends over, presses the crumpled blades with her palms. That's when I realize my shoes have left prints in the lawn from the window to the blue spruce. She looks right at me, only this time I think she sees me. "Tommy Pass? If that's you, you better come out from behind that tree." She doesn't want to believe there's a strange fat man underneath the spruce, a spruce she watched her father plant, which works to my advantage. "Tom?" she calls out. "Tom Pass?"

She takes a step forward. I hold my breath, keep my bloated body still. At this point, a blink could be fatal. "Yeah," I hear, and my head jerks against a low-hanging bough, but it's okay because she, too, has heard the husky voice of a boy beyond the spirea hedge. "Tommy," she says.

"Hey Beck," says the boy, who comes up behind me on the newly sprinkled lawn. His work boots land on either side of my protuberant sneakers, the soles of which I painted black for just this situation. He sees me, I'm sure of it, but he doesn't say a word. I watch him greet Becky. He notices her T-shirt and yellow underwear, touches her white cheek with the side of his hand. "What're you doing out?" he asks her, taking her hand in his.

"As if you didn't know." She places his hand on her nyloned hip, wraps her long white arms around his neck.

"I was out on the street and I heard my name."

"You mean," says Becky Thomas, "after you left the window."

"What?"

"The window." She motions with her head at the window into the living room.

"I wasn't out terrorizing," he says, "if that's what you mean." He pushes her away, his long lean arms dangling at his sides like billy clubs. "Who are you really waiting for? Sully? Barbie? You know, Beck, the guys at school have been talking. Your name's come up a few times." The boy named Tommy Pass puts his hands into his pockets as if loose they might start swinging of their own accord, do more damage than he ever intended. "You really disappoint me," he says, a phase I suspect he has taken from his father.

As I listen to their conversation, I long to hold the child in my corpulent arms, press her to my breast, assure her that she needn't fear disappointing anyone, not herself, and other people least of all. "I haven't seen Sully or Barbie," she says. "I'm having a slumber party. Missy Jaeks, Mona Peterson, and Carol Bautsch are over."

"Mona Peterson?"

"Yeah. She'll tell you the story. The television set kept switching to this frog movie."

"Really?" he asks. "Did Mona think I did it, too."

"I don't know," Becky Thomas says. "Why would she?"

"How should I know?" says Tommy Pass. "All right, I'll come in for a little while."

"Where is it?" you ask your father, and he points at it with the can of insect spray. Cobwebs droop from their window casements like the negligees you have seen on his closet door. Dried-out dead spiders hang from the jambs and sashes, their tiny legs crippled as arthritic fingers. The black widow is perched on the top of a brown egg sac, there where your father points the aerosol spray tip, suspended in space on a web beading with wetness. A wonder you haven't seen it straight off. Perhaps you expected it to be hiding underneath the top rail of the window or in one of the long cracks in the weather stripping. Instead it is about six inches below the rounded lip of the corrugated metal, its legs sprawled out like the veins of a leaf, its body bloated like a pustule of ink. It is still, except for its pedipalpi, which hold a fly.

Becky Thomas leads Tommy Pass around the corner of the house, and I shove the remote control back in my hip pocket. I stand up, trembling. From now on, I tell myself, I'll have to avoid Judge Thomas's house, at least when his daughter is watching. Even if she doesn't understand the physics behind infrared radiation, she knows there's nothing supernatural about channels changing at night. I step into the Thomas's front yard, and as I pass the lamp post, I hear voices belonging to Tommy Pass's friends. They are standing at the end of the driveway, a group of six or seven, all wearing yellow Hornet letter jackets. I dart out of the light, but it's too late. A congenitally chubby boy, who will no doubt be as fat as I am by age twenty, sees me and says to the others, "It's Fig Newton. You see him? He cut into the front yard of Sweeny's old house."

"Big Fig?"

"Positive. Saw him."

I am back in Jess Roeder's yard, on the side of the house, running as fast as I can across the lawn, a blancmange flung into the night. My weight, far from slowing me down, gives me momentum. Behind me, I hear the snapping of nine-bark branches, the crack of a newly planted tree hydrangea; the boys are crashing after me. One day in third grade, a kid named Layne Eggers nicknamed me after the Nabisco fruit bar, and for eighteen years, the nickname has stuck. About twenty yards behind me, a boy hurls "Fig Newton" at me like a QB passing a football on the scramble. "Hey Fig-Face!" he yells. At the edge of the back lawn, I tip over some garbage cans in the alley, hoping to trip them up on the other side of the spirea hedge. These boys may be faster than I am, but I know this neighborhood like a skin graft. I barrel down the alley, cut back through Mr. Hartwig's trellises of pompon de Paris, duck under a wire clothes-line, not because I see it, but because from experience, I know it's there. Cutting across his cement porch, I hear the clank of shins on metal, the boys meeting the trash can obstacle. "He went thatta way," I hear one of them say, "into Hartwig's yard." I'm on the driveway when one of the boys ensnares himself in rose vines, then another catches his neck in the clothesline. As I cross Fulton Street three boys come out from behind a blue Pontiac, two others down the block a little way, close to the high school. "There he is!" one of them says. I'm in Mrs. Bolte's backyard now and know exactly where I'm going to hide.

When the first yellow jacket rounds the corner of the house, I'm lying on my stomach on two bags of compost, wedged in between Mrs. Bolte's two-car garage and screened atrium. "This is where he went," says one of the boys, scanning the area between the foundation of the house and a landscaped mound of bark.

"Maybe he jumped the fence," says another.

"That tub?"

"You don't see him anywhere!"

"That doesn't mean he isn't here."

There are only three boys now. I watch them split up to cover the lawn. A dark-haired boy with track medals takes the porch, checks underneath the chaise longue and redwood-stained picnic table. The two blond-haired boys move out of my field of view, but I can hear their legs in Mrs. Bolte's dianthums and leadwarts, hear them shaking her mock orange and Russian sage. When they get to the clumps of chest-high pussy willows along the back rail of her picket fence, they kick the brittle stalks and snap them in half like straws. One of the boys topples her cement birdbath. I hear the splash of water on grass, the cracking of the bath against its pedestal. I detest such needless destruction, though I understand its impulse. "You in there, Fig?" says one of the blond-haired boys. "Come on out, Figgy."

"You think he ditched us?"

"Looks that way." The two blond-haired boys come back into view. The taller of the two stares up the trunk of a honey locust, a thin-branched tree which in winter can barely support the weight of snow.

"You think he's up there, Corey?"

"Sure, Waldo-ski," he says.

"Let's get out of here."

"Pass is probably palucking Becky Thomas."

"You think so?"

"He's done it before."

"You want your ball?" your father asks, but before you can answer, he fires the death spray at the black widow spider, coating its body with a fine white sheen. The spider, leaving its egg sac dripping in the center of the web, scrambles straight into the blast like a kamikaze. You watch it climb onto the lip of corrugated metal. Your father holds the can an inch away from its tiny head. The yellow eye of death looms in each of its eight. Your father says, "Pay attention, son." He presses the button again. This time the spider bounces into the air, and from the edge of the web, mortally poisoned, it eyes you. It tries to straighten itself out, but its legs curl under it like singed hairs. Your father lets it crawl onto the grass. It no longer radiates panic. It wants simply to be left alone. Your father flips it so its orange hourglass faces the sky. Then he presses it into the earth with the rim of the can until its body breaks in half and white fluid seeps from its cephalothorax.

The boys take off like deer, but I wait about ten minutes before leaving my cover. Out from between the garage and the house, I notice lights on in Mrs. Bolte's basement, so I crawl over grass and cedar chips to her window well, plant my belly in the center of her coiled garden hose. The window is a double-hinge, open about four inches, and Mrs. Bolte is sitting on a velveteen Barcalounger in front of a Magnavox the same model as my father's. A gray woman in her sixties, she was my World Lit teacher in high school the year her husband died of a lymphosarcoma. She is watching a church service on one of the Christian networks when I take out my remote control and flip the channel to Frogs, entertainment more worth her while than fire-and-brimstone televangelism. It's the scene in the movie in which Maybelle, an eccentric butterfly collector, is pursued down a boggy path by Florida 'gators and winds up tripping on her dress into leech-infested quicksand. When the scene comes on, Mrs. Bolte cranks the handle on the recliner and sits bolt upright.

She punches in her channel, but I pull the CANCEL routine and the two of us watch Maybelle attempt to climb out of the swamp, her fleshy face and arms dripping with black leeches. Mrs. Bolte spars with me only once. When the scene shifts to the drawing room of Jason Crockett, the game-hunting patriarch played by Ray Milland, Mrs. Bolte leaves her chair with the conviction of a believer. I assume she's going to turn off the set, amuse herself with some epic poetry, but when she walks past the television altogether, I realize she's got something else in mind. She takes a black box the size of a Monopoly game off the top shelf of her bookcase, unhooks a crucifix from the panelled wall, sets both on the end table next to her chair. Meanwhile, the only character who knows what's going on, Pickett Smith, is shuffling people off the island through a jungle laden with anacondas and puff adders, iguanas and poisonous leopard frogs.

Mrs. Bolte takes a Ouija board out of its box, unfolds it on her lap, sets the wooden crucifix carefully on the alphabet, her fingers resting on the plaster-of-Paris Jesus as if on the home keys of an antique typewriter. "Benny," she says, "I feel your presence in the room with me tonight. In the walls and in my bones. Dear heart, I want you to talk to me. Flip the stations around. We'll watch whatever you want tonight--Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Invasion of the Body Snatchers--but I want you to tell me how you are. Are your joints causing you pain?" I see the crucifix move across the board under her painted nails, see the curled feet of Jesus point to the N in the upper right-hand corner. "No, I wouldn't imagine they would be. You were a martyr, a real martyr. Anything else you want to tell me? You were always such a marvelous speller."

Jesus' feet scuttle over to the I, to the L, the O, and V. "That's all very fine," Mrs. Bolte says. I see the corner of one eye fill with water. "Don't spell it out. I love you, too. Only now it's cold and rarefied, like the love one has for a great old poem. God, oh, God," she says. She looks at the pane of glass, and for a second I think she sees me, but her eyes are glazed, and the wrinkles on her forehead arch into perfect temples. At this point she could be seeing just about anything in the sheen I lurk behind, even Benny. She turns her face to the board. "Harold Lindstrom came by yesterday. You should have seen how he admired the pussy willow you planted that Veterans' Day. He said he was thinking of doing up his yard the same way. Now I told him he could have the birdbath. Not the precious one, never that one. The one in the garage, sweetheart. Tell me you don't mind."

But Benny is reluctant to tell her much of anything. The crucifix sweeps back and forth across the board like the needle of a radio tuner. Only there's no sound but the croaking of frogs, and I begin to think maybe the two really are communicating. "I knew it," she says. "Now you're angry." This is a bit too much for me. I believe in an indifferent universe. So with fifteen minutes left in the movie, I punch 45, press ENTER, and watch the screen flip back to the evangelist and his blue-robed choir. "You don't want to watch this," Mrs. Bolte says. But I do not change the station. "Does this mean you're leaving?" I put the remote control back in my hip pocket as Jesus edges to the side of the board like a wind-up toy that's running down. It's over. I'm not doing this anymore, I tell myself, as Jesus drops off like dead weight between Mrs. Bolte and the armrest.

"Fudge," she says.

Your father wipes off the bottom of the can with his handkerchief, then empties the can onto the tiny egg sac. "Don't want the progeny running around," he says, and you kneel in the grass for a long time looking at the black widow severed on the grass, at the dark bud on the green lawn.

When I reach the front yard of my house, I check the garage to see whether my father is home yet. He's not, which is fine with me. He's a proctologist with a penchant for nurses, who has since the day of my mother's funeral expected me to be as smooth with the ladies as he is. But I have never been smooth with anyone. Jess Roeder is the only friend I've ever had. Inside, I lock the front door, switch off the porch light, and slam my hands as hard as I can on the oak balustrade down the steps to the basement. In my bedroom, I put Life in a Cage onto the turntable and listen to my favorite guitarist of all time blast out his brains on a Hagstrom-Swede. I take off my black T-shirt and elastic pants and throw them onto the heap in my closet. I take Herman Munster out of his terrarium, lie naked on my unmade bed, and let the Mojave brown tarantula crawl around on my blubbery flesh. In this country, tarantulas must have their venom glands removed by an arachnologist before they may be legally sold in pet shops, but sometimes their fangs are also removed. Before I forked over the hundred and fifty dollars for my tarantula, I made the pet shop owner show me both of its pitch-black teeth. Herman Munster lowers his abdomen to my rib cage, pulls in his legs like loaded springs, and pounces cat-like onto my left breast. He sinks his fangs into the flesh below my nipple, then scrambles backward into the tufts of brown hair as if proud of the new pink welt he's left.

I hear the motor of the electric garage door, then the footsteps of my father on the stairs to the basement. Behind them like an echo are footsteps which could belong to either Lorraine Lodgekins or Colleen Burns. I turn off the lamp beside my bed, pull the sheets over Herman and me. My father opens the door to my bedroom just a crack, and a strip of light from the hall crosses the side of my face. Without opening my eyes I know that it is Miss Lodgekins who is with him.

"Dennis is asleep," my father says.

"Good," says Miss Lodgekins.

"I look at him, and I want to cry," my father says.

"Come on," she says.

Miss Lodgekins closes the door and dissolves the screen inside my head. Under the covers, Herman Munster sinks his fangs into my belly. I try to push him off with my hand, and his scopulae drag across my side. As I roll over he scurries across my back, down my legs to the end of the bed where he will spend the night, reposed between my feet. Falling asleep, I wonder what I'll say to Mr. Mallak when he knocks on the door tomorrow morning at nine and asks to speak to the Baron von Richthofen.

I'm in the air in the cockpit of an Albatross D III, a Sopwith Camel off my left wing tip. I pull back on the flap levers, crank the control yoke hard right, and aim my machine gun at the shiny fuselage above me. The pilot pulls back on the thrust lever and arches his plane to the left, a maneuver I have anticipated with the front and rear sights of my machine gun. I jam in the operating rod, press the firing lever with my thumb, but no bullets come out. The cartridge box isn't feeding properly. The other pilot lowers his plane to my level. I look into the dark eye of his flash suppressor. Shortly, I know, he will spray me with fire.