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select,either little bum or little finger, steak or chicken? What kind of a restaurant is that, Mother? I had indeed noticed only little bums and little fingers so far, but I thought this was simply a reflection of the small size of my sample. (In a similar vein, though most of my coevals at Jiminy Cricket were white, on the basis of the skin colour of a few of them, reinforced by things I had seen on television and in magazines, I was quite confident that there existed people who were black, brown, yellow, red, blue, orange, perhaps even striped.) But no, there were only two, my mother insisted. Even more astonishing, she said that little bums were to be found exclusively in girls and little fingers exclusively in boys. Girls, by definition , were females with little bums who could only be wives. Boys, by definition , were males with little fingers who could only be husbands. I should remember these permutations for there were no others. No, husbands could not be girls. No, a wife could not marry another wife. No, no, no.
    In the time of a brief car ride I became an indubitable boy, I discovered one of my defining characteristics and the universe, up till then myriad, broke into two camps. I was grief-stricken.
 
 
 
     “Est-ce que je peux toujours aimer Noah?” je demandai, éclatant en sanglots.
 
     “Can I still love Noah?” I asked, bursting into tears.
     “Bien sûr,” repondit ma mère doucement, me passant la main dans les cheveux. “Aime-le autant que tu veux. Il est important d’avoir des amis.”
 
     “Of course,” my mother replied soothingly, running her hand through my hair. “Love him as much as you want. It’s important to have friends.”
    Friends? Oh, Mother. I was given permission to love, yet I could sense — I cannot quite explain how — that oceans were now trapped in aquariums. She must be mistaken, I thought. I kept at her, convinced that there had been a misunderstanding. But I was so immeasurably confused that I could only approach the matter from the small end, this niggling point of biology.
 
 
     “Femelle et mâle? C’est tout? Même sur les autres planètes?”
     “Female and male? Is that all? Even on other planets?”
     “Nous sommes seulement sur cette planète-ci, mon amour, la planète Terre.”
     “We’re only on this planet, love. We’re only on planet Earth.”
     “Pourquoi elle s’appelle Taire? Ça veut dire quoi, Taire?”
     “Why is it called Erth? What does Erth mean?”
     “Ça veut dire ‘ici’ en grec et en latin.”
     “It means ‘here’ in Greek and Latin.”
     “Et nous sommes seulement sur cette planète-ci?” je dis, regardant par la fenêtre, comme si le bord de la planète était juste passé le champ.
     “And we’re only on this planet?” I said, looking out the window, as if the edge of the planet were just beyond the field.
     “C’est très grand, tu verras.”
     “It’s a big place, you’ll see.”
     “Il n’y a personne sur aucune des étoiles?”
     “There’s nobody on any of the stars?”
     “Pas que nous sachions.”
     “Not that we know of.”
     “Et il n’y a personne sur la lune?”
     “And there’s nobody on the moon?”
     “Non.”
     “No.”
     “Seulement ici?”
     “Just here?”
     “Seulement ici.”
     “Just here.”
     “La Taire?”
     “Erth?”
     “La Terre.”
     “Earth.”
     “Femelle et mâle?”
     “Female and male?”
     “Mâle et femelle.”
     “Male and female.”
     “Alors elle est femelle ou mâle, cette voiture?”
     “So this car, is it female or male?”
     “Euh … façon de parler, elle — non, non. Mâle et femelle s’appliquent seulement aux êtres vivants.