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less you hardly noticed his heavy glasses; he seemed tal er.
    James was an easygoing man, master of his emotions. “The key to life,” he told me once, “is to avoid the highs and the lows. It’s the peaks and val eys that mess you up.” He liked to behave as though his uninflected disposition was because of some philosophical leaning, but I knew it was because passion of any sort brought out the stammer and turned him into a freak. Anyone who has ever seen James when the stammer rode him could tel how much it hurt him. His face and neck seemed to swel as though the words were trapped in there, painful and deadly like sickle cel s.
    And final y, with a jerk, spasm, or kick, the sentence would break free, unfettered and whole.
    My parents didn’t real y fight. The most they ever did was “have words,” which was my mother’s expression. Their disagreements were rare because of James’s little-from-the-left-little-from-the right disposition and also because there was no time for bickering. James ate over at our house only once a week, and once or twice a year he spent the night. When we received him in our apartment, seated him at our table, we treated him like the guest he was. We poured Coke with the meal, said grace like it was Sunday, and even let him smoke in the living room. My job was keeping him in clean glass ashtrays. He said his wife, Laverne, made him stand on the porch with his cigarettes, even when it rained.
    Most children probably remember their parents’ arguments with a stone-in-the-stomach ache. In the seventh grade, I read a novel cal ed
It’s Not
the End of the World,
about divorcing parents. My teacher gave it to me, quietly, in a plain brown sack, after my mother explained to her that she and my father were separated but possibly reconciling, the perfect falsehood to explain his inconsistent presence in our lives. The book was about a girl who was torn apart by her parents’ fighting. I thanked my teacher for the gift, but my feelings could not have been further from those of the traumatized heroine of that Judy Blume book. When my parents argued, it was over me; for the brief duration of their spats, I was at the center of something.
    Mother never argued on her own behalf. It was “always about Dana Lynn.” My father, before he refused to accommodate her demands always, first, insisted that he loved me. There was a time in my life when that was almost enough.
    “This is about fairness, James,” my mother would say, indicating to me that what was once a conversation had now morphed into “words.” I could watch my father’s neck bloat a little, as his defenses gathered there.
    I am not a particularly graceful individual. I’m no klutz, but a person doesn’t see me move and think, “Those hips were made for swaying” or
    “Those toes were born to pirouette.” I am not putting myself down. As my mother would say, “Self-deprecation is not attractive.” And as she wouldn’t say, people in our position cannot afford to make themselves look bad. So when I say that I wasn’t meant to be a dancer, I am just tel ing the basic truth. But that didn’t stop my mother from saying to James, “I think that Dana should enjoy bal et lessons, just as your other daughter does.” She loved that word,
enjoy,
and I had to admit that I liked it, too.
    Turns out, I didn’t literal y
enjoy
the bal et lessons. When I’d envisioned myself as a bal erina, I saw myself in a lavender tutu with pink ribbons laced up my calves. Instead, I ended up in a hot upstairs room at the YWCA, crammed into a leotard the color of bandages, forcing my bare feet into impossible positions.
    When I was about ten, my mother started lobbying for me to take extra classes in science. I was in favor of this, as I liked biology, but at my school we didn’t get to do any experiments. On the last day of the school year, my teacher handed out flyers advertising the Saturday Science Academy at Kennedy Middle School. My mother