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stewardess who handed me a gold plastic set of pin-on wings before we walked to the arrivals gate.
    My grandmother had me picked up from the airport by a driver in a company car. The driver worked for a plastics company that still had my grandfather’s name, though he’d been dead since before I was born. The driver reminded me a little bit of my father—he had the same reddish-brown skin, the same big smile—and while we waited for my luggage to come around the baggage carousel, he gave me a stick of cinnamon bubble gum that I folded and tucked into the pocket of my shorts along with the wings, which I could feel pressing into my leg. My parents, as consolation for shipping me off to my grandmother while they spent the summer in Brazil researching indigenous environmental activism, had loaded my suitcase with books. It was something they did every time they went somewhere without me. Along with the small paperback dictionary my parents had given me last summer, I kept a couple of the new books with me to thumb through on the plane: Introduction to Rites and Rituals; Talismans: A Photographic Record , Natural Wonders of the Amazon Rain Forest .
    The book on talismans I found particularly intriguing. I looked at pictures of stones and amulets, brightly dyed pieces of fabric, small and elaborately carved sculptures, and wished that I had brought something magical with me. I wondered if gum or plastic was strong enough to be a talisman; I thought of fashioning the wings into a protective necklace. My own interactions with my grandmother had been limited: my mother avoided family events whenever possible, and at the handful I’d accompanied her to, my grandmother had barely spoken to me. She was the only thing in the world I’d ever seen my mother scared of, my mother who told offhand stories about living through monsoons in Asia and military coups in Africa and near encounters with poisonous foot-long centipedes in South America the way other people’s mothers talked about what they’d had for dinner the night before. Every time she got off the phone with my grandmother, my mother drank a glass of wine, followed by three cups of Zen tea. My father, who almost never yelled, raised his voice at her from behind their closed bedroom door when she made plans that involved seeing her mother, telling her she ought to know better by now and refusing to go with her. They’d fought over sending me to my grandmother’s in the first place, an argument I’d strained my ears to hear and silently hoped my father would win.
    Usually when my parents traveled, I stayed with my aunt Claire, my father’s sister, but she’d been in poor health, and my mother worried that having me for the summer would be too much for her to keep up with. My father pointed out that I didn’t need much keeping up with: I read books, I ate when compelled, I sometimes wrote embellished accounts of my day in a leather-bound black diary. I was the sort of child who generally had to be coerced into playing with other children—the kind whose parents took her to anthropology department cocktail parties so often that their colleagues referred to me as their youngest graduate student—but my mother had said it was too much to impose on Aunt Claire, and anyway, it wasn’t me my grandmother hated, it was her, to which my father had responded, Give her time. I rolled the words over and over in my head, willing him to be wrong, but if I thought my grandmother would like me better when my mother wasn’t around, our reunion quickly disabused me of the thought.

    “Unbelievable,” was the first thing my grandmother said when she saw me. From the airport to her house, it had been twenty minutes of loopy, winding roads, packed so densely with trees that looking out the windows from the backseat of the car, I could often see nothing but the green canopies that shaded us. My grandmother’s house was at the end of a circular driveway, a white wooden old southern