I

There was a semiapocryphal figure, in my childhood, who could not even boil water. I forget who she was: a Southern girl, I think, who went to finishing school in Virginia with my mother.

“Oh,” my mother used to say, snorting a little and tossing her head half scornfully and half with a kind of wistful envy, “oh, she couldn’t even boil water!” Then my mother would add, “... before she was married!”

For a long time I believed that the first pangs of connubial bliss brought with them a new wisdom, a kind of mystic knowledge that slipped with the wedding ring over all the fingers of the bride, so that at last and suddenly and completely she knew how to boil water.