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father … really. And I don’t want to go to graduate school.”
    And so I did not tell Paul my dream, in which I had painfully walked that downhill mile toward the scene of ourfamily’s dissolution, and the heady start of my own adolescence. Instead, in a familiar way, Paul and I argued about my future, and as usual I took a few stray shots at my mother.
    And Paul died, and I did after all go to graduate school, and then my mother died—quite young, it now seems to me, and long before our war was in any way resolved.
    A very wise woman who is considerably older than I am once told me that in her view relationships with people to whom we have been very close can continue to change even after the deaths of those people, and for me I think this has been quite true, with my mother, and in quite another way with Paul.
    I am now going back to a very early time, long before my summer with Paul, in Yugoslavia. Before anyone had died. I am going back to Hilton.
    When we arrived in Hilton I was eleven, and both my parents were in their early forties, and almost everything that went so darkly and irretrievably wrong among the three of us was implicit in our ages. Nearly adolescent, I was eager for initiation into romantic, sensual mysteries of which I had dim intimations from books. For my mother, the five years from forty-two or forty-three onward were a desolate march into middle age. My father, about ten months younger than my mother—and looking, always, ten years younger—saw his early forties as prime time; he had never felt better in his life. Like me, he found Hilton both romantic and exciting—he had a marvellous time there, as I did, mostly.
    My first overtly sensual experience took place one April night on that very stretch of road, the gravelled walk up above the highway that wound down to our house, that I dreamed of in Yugoslavia. I must have been twelve, and aboy who was “walking me home” reached for and took and held my hand, and I felt an overwhelming hot excitement. Holding hands.
    About hands:
    These days, like most of my friends, I am involved in a marriage, my second, which seems problematical—even more problematical than most of the marriages I see—but then maybe everyone views his or her marriage in this way. Andreas is Greek, by way of Berkeley, to which his parents immigrated in the thirties and opened a student restaurant, becoming successful enough to send their promising son to college there, and later on to medical school. Andreas and I seem to go from friendliness or even love to rage, with a speed that leaves me dizzy, and scared. However, ambivalent as in many ways I am about Andreas, I do very much like—in fact, I love—his hands. They are just plain male hands, rather square in shape, usually callused and very competent. Warm. A doctor, he specializes in kidneys, unromantically enough, but his hands are more like a workman’s, a carpenter’s. And sometimes even now an accidental meeting of our hands can recall me to affection; his hands remind me of love.
    I liked Paul’s hands, too, and I remember them still. They were very smooth, and cool.
    Back in Hilton, when I was twelve, my mother violently disapproved of my being out at night with boys. Probably sensing just how exciting I found those April nights that smelled of privet and lilacs, and those lean, tall, sweet-talking Southern boys, she wept and raged, despairing and helpless as she recognized the beginning of my life as a sensual woman, coinciding as it probably did with the end of her own.
    My feckless father took my side, of course. “Things are different down here, my dear,” he told her. “It’s a scientificfact that girls, uh, mature much earlier in the South. And when in Rome, you know. I see no harm in Emma’s going to a movie with some nice boy, if she promises to be home at a reasonable hour. Ten-thirty?”
    “But Emma isn’t Southern. She has got to be home by ten!”
    My mother filled me with a searing