ABSTRACT
By the time I was three, I had a girlfriend. Nancy lived around the corner. For us the barbed-wire fence between ritual and play had not yet been strung tightly by the guardians of boundaries. It was slack, and we easily jumped it to marry our dolls one day, each other the next, and our parents the day after. I have few memories of her. Mostly I draw on stories Mom used to tell, along with a couple of old photographs. In one I have my arm around Nancy's shoulder; I am being the boy and she, the girl. In the other we are both girls—splashed in scarlet lipstick and decked out in dresses and curlers. I recall a third, now-lost photo in which we are pretending to be Hawaiians, We had seen these exotic folks in movies and knew they lived across the Pacific, which hovered just beyond the horizon over which the sun set in San Diego. We are sporting newspaper hula skirts, never once imagining that we are dancing out the national ambition to annex the paradise of the Pacific.
