Georgie threw a dinner party for Babe and Bug, to acknowledge the change in their lives. Babe's daughter, Emma, came, and so did Harald and his then girlfriend, Psycho. Georgie kept stirring more sugar into a pitcher of bitter Brazilian caipirinhas. She also made a special dish that had been her Syrian grandmother's. She wrung ground lamb with water through her hands until pink water ran into the deep blue bowl, which looked good against the lamb. For the first time, Babe realized, really, what "meat" was-the tender mash of it purified by its water bath. Georgie held out a dime-size bite on a spoon-and Babe ate it.

The Bugmans, a loose confederation of four, gathered as a family for the last time. Georgie fed them a beautiful dinner, then had them all draw Chinese sticks from a beautiful wooden tub. (Everything Georgie owned was beautiful, or turned beautiful in her possession.) Babe's fortune said she would get an unusual inheritance from a relative, that everything she achieved would come through her work-and she would get her wish. Greedily, Babe chose another Chinese stick, which said a strange dream would come true. Bug's stick read that he would be granted two wishes. He wished for new rotors for his Subaru-and for world peace. Even Harald and Psycho (who didn't reveal their wishes) seemed content with what they got. Georgie read her own stick last. It said, "You will suffer an illness before old age, and only part of your wish will come true."

"Put it back," said Babe. "Take another."

HARALD SLEPT sixteen hours a day. Babe tried to wake him gently for school before she went to work, played cla.s.sical music on the radio, brought him orange juice, built a fire-but nothing helped. He lied about his meds, hid pills in his socks or saved and took them all at once for a more devastating impact. Maybe she should have done more to give him continuity after the divorce. What should she have done? She'd kept his s.p.a.ceman sheets.

Their funky handmade cabin in the woods off the 609 was temporary-its most potent charm. Even the outbuilding Babe used as a bedroom had torn slightly away from the hillside. One wall angled obliquely from the floor-six degrees, gauged Harald, a precise and mathematical person. The doors rattled like loose teeth, but Babe slept well here, at first, when she knew her son slept nearby, drugged and safe.

She felt almost happy this way, without anything she wanted. Then she began to have visual hallucinations. Once she thought she awakened to find a j.a.panese man dressed in a yellow wet suit holding out a mirror. When she looked at her reflection, she found her head covered with eggs-big white chicken eggs. She tried to pull the eggs off her head before they hatched, but they clung to her hair with glue they'd secreted. The j.a.panese man returned; this time, he wore a blue wet suit. He spoke urgently to Babe in a bubbly, submerged voice she could not understand, but he pulled the eggs from her hair with a tiny red plunger.

Babe believed in work. She'd always worked toward things she wanted. She'd worked on her house, the toy store, her relationship with Bug-all lost now. She used to stay up at night after the children went to bed and paint rooms, work on taxes, read the grand jury report. Even making love with Bug, she'd tick off items on an imaginary list: relieve stress, reconnect, keep balanced. She served her famous marrow jellies to the children, and felt she was building something-bones, muscles, nerve.

Now she lived with Harald, her depressed son, in a whacked cabin whose water smelled of sulfur and stained all the porcelain black. But the morning fog felt clean. She had a job in town where the owners told her every day how indispensable she was-so indispensable, they didn't give her a day off for four months. Finally, Babe quit, and Aisha, the female partner, responded furiously and refused to pay Babe's back wages.

"How could you do this to us? We depended on you. We trusted you," Aisha said. "Now you're stealing the most valuable property we have: our trade secrets."

Aisha glanced at the heavy kerosene ball of the fire lighter by the stone hearth. "If I hear of any other B and B using my cardamom-cinnamon bun recipe, you'll never work in this county again."

Babe said, "If you hit me over the head with that iron ball, I'll come back and haunt you. I'll interfere with the bookings and terrify the guests."

Aisha's gaze wavered. Her weakness: ADHD.

"Call the police, get a restraining order," Aisha told her husband. "Write down the threats she just made." Babe realized that Aisha always took this peremptory tone with him, and wondered what was wrong with the husband, why he stood it.

"Don't bother," Babe said. "I'll go."

She drove home feeling virtuous and free. On the hill outside town, a new couple had brought in African animals-gazelles, elands and zebras. Babe almost hit another car head-on from craning her neck to look at their rare beauty. The antlers on the elands looked hand-carved. Somebody else must have been distracted, too, because just a few hundred yards up the road, three turkey vultures rose reluctantly from the parallel yellow lines, hovered heavily before her windshield and then moved to the side, revealing the carca.s.s of a fox whose face they'd licked clean as a spoon. She smelled rain and eucalyptus on the air, and rushed home. Maybe she'd bake those cardamom-cinnamon buns for Harald, fill the house with a rich, comforting atmosphere. When she arrived, though, she found-literally-a dark cloud over her house. Sometimes life's perverse, Babe thought. You find yourself, which means someone else gets lost.

HARALD WROTE his name in blood on his arm, then drank three-quarters of a bottle of white rum and e-mailed his ex-girlfriend Psycho a long, guilt-tripping letter about his meaningless life. Although he didn't confess exactly what he'd done, the letter was so long and rambling, she put two and two together and called the sheriff, and an hour later the deputy came. Harald, unconscious, did not respond. The deputy opened the front door (unlocked) and found Harald lying quietly on his back, bleeding hard from both arms into the bedding. The deputy said it looked like a murder scene.

The paramedics bandaged Harald's arms and head. (He'd fallen and gouged his temple; at first, the gouge seemed more serious than the slashed arms and the alcohol poisoning.) The ambulance drove him two and a half hours to a psychiatric hospital, which someone called "the Bug House." Babe almost laughed when she heard that-"the Bug House." Not that it was funny.

She felt afraid to visit her son there, afraid of seeing him for what he was-a scar. His arms were marked so that he would never again have real privacy around his body; any stranger could read on his arms what he'd done. He didn't want to see her anyway. He felt, the head nurse said stiffly, "quite violent about it." So Babe drove home. A black widow spider lived in the jamb of the front door; she had to open the door carefully or she would kill it.

Her eyes wouldn't close when she lay down, so she had a lot of time to clean. The cabin sparkled pointlessly. She hung up kitschy stuff, Madonna night-lights, a portrait Harald had done in high school of Christ represented as a gopher on a cross. She carried wood and kindling, split logs, swept pine needles off the little decks, made altars out of pinecones and broken necklaces. When she finished this work, she started on the stones. She moved one up from the ravine onto the deck. It was an unusual stone-larger than most, smoother, whiter. It had holes bored into it that certain mollusks make. Then she found another stone, and then another; it was like finding mushrooms-once you knew how to look, you saw them everywhere.

She brought stones inside and put them away. Moving stones made her tired, and after she worked she slept.

IN ONE OF her vivid reveries, Babe met a rock star as he drove toward the highway in a low-slung sports car, a vintage Corvette. Babe walked along the road, gathering stones, and the rock star pulled up alongside her and rolled his window down. "I have a cabin," he told her. "I hardly ever use it. Go down there whenever you want and hang loose."

Babe walked farther down the road. Immediately the landscape changed and became wild. Vultures circled overhead. Sharp rocks jutted up fifty feet into a sky that glowed yellow, like the moon. A small reptilian animal chased her, baring its sharp teeth. Babe knew that the animal would attack, and it did: It charged and bit her hand. The wound left a trail of blood behind her, but now the terrible thing Babe had known would happen had happened, and she could relax. The mad animal seemed calmer, too. They walked down the road together like old friends, but no cabin waited at the end where Babe could hang loose.

SOME EVENINGS, she carried only three or four stones up the ravine. She piled them on the fireplace or used one to hold down a stack of bills on a table. Other times, she gathered more and stored them around the house. One day, she filled the whole fireplace with stones. Then-because she could use the outdoor shower-she filled the bathtub. Sometimes she couldn't help herself. Sometimes she felt ashamed. She carried stones into her house the way people drank or did junk. She thought about not doing it; sometimes she stopped for a few hours or a day and began to feel calm and free. But then the day darkened and she went outside, imagining herself simply going out to gather firewood, knowing that a fire was impossible. Just the weight of the stones in her hands, in her house, comforted her. From the void of black s.p.a.ce where she lived (in her body), they brought her, even, to the edge of bliss.

AS A LITTLE BOY, Harald used to climb into her bed in the evenings to read. Once, when she asked him why, he said, "Because it's warm." Babe said, "We haven't been in bed for fifteen hours!" And Harald shrugged and said, "It's still warm."

More recently, Babe remembered his brown eyes looking up at her from over the top of some book-Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre, or The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Goethe, or Pain, s.e.x and Time, by Gerald Heard, or Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae, by whomever-the humor there, the bit of perversity. He said, "Mom, you should smile more."

Babe yelled, "Are you kidding? I am the only person in this family who smiles every single day! I smile at customers! I smile at you!"

Harald said, "No, I mean you should smile-for fun." And he smiled his dazzling rare smile, because he'd caught her shouting, at the end of her rope.

ONE AFTERNOON, Georgie called and asked how Harald was doing in the hospital. "About as badly as possible," said Babe. "What else is new?"

Georgie said, "I found out this morning that I have breast cancer." When Georgie said the words breast cancer, Babe looked at the stone in her hand-a five-pounder. A window closed, leaving just a tiny aperture through which Babe saw her hand and the stone in her hand.

"Left-handed women are more likely to get it," Georgie went on in a clinical voice. "Something to do with asymmetry in the female, more hormones gathering in vessels on the left side, near the spleen. The left arm acts as a kind of hormone switch, turning the estrogen off and on."

"Who told you that?" asked Babe.

"I was up all night, reading."

Babe thought of Georgie's left hand always in motion, setting type, scissoring a chicken up its back, stirring up a pitcher of caipirinhas. Writing a list, Georgie held her pen in that protective way lefties do. Chopping an onion or writing a letter or deadheading her roses, Georgie switched the chemical sauna on and off.

"What are you going to do?" Babe asked.

"What else can I do? Raw foods, single-malt scotch, surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. I'm going to do it all." Georgie laughed a gutsy, throaty laugh, like an old lounge singer. "Oh, but wait, do you want to hear the best part?"

"Hit me," said Babe.

"They create the new one while you're still on the operating table. They use your own love handles, can you believe it? The larger your love handles, the bigger the b.o.o.bs."

Georgie sounded tough over the phone, and Babe, scared and horrified, laughed with her. She remembered later how hard and loudly they laughed at how tough they were going to be.

THE BOUNDARY.

Scarface was obnoxious, but he had charisma. The first time I met him, he showed me a coffee can with dead tadpoles in the bottom. He offered to sell them-with the coffee can-for ten dollars. I drove him home from Madrigal to the rez. He asked if, when I bought my car, it came with the engine. I said the car came with the engine. Then he asked whether it came with the key.

I admired his directness. "Listen, you're a hippie," he said. "Can you get me some weed?"

"You want me to get you some weed."

"If you get me some weed, I can get you commodities. Peanut b.u.t.ter, apple juice, powdered eggs-whatever you want."

"Dream on," I said.

"If you get me weed, I'll make you breakfast, you know what I mean?" Scarface smiled benignly.

I didn't answer. How could I? He was only twelve. Just outside town, I turned up a stretch of road that ran through hills and gullies that bloomed with wild mustard and fennel and cow parsnip and the carca.s.ses of American-made cars named after wild horses. One end of this road opened at the rez, with its HUD houses and rosebushes, where Scarface lived. On the other end stood the a.s.sembly of G.o.d. In between, we pa.s.sed a ranch where a wealthy couple from Los Angeles had brought hundreds of rare wild birds. Immediately the turkey farm across the road sued them for bringing in exotic bird diseases, and someone shot their dogs.

"You saying I'm ugly?" Scarface shouted suddenly. "Huh? 'Cause I'm packing heat!" He pointed to his p.e.n.i.s.

This was a test. Sure, Scarface was ugly, as enormous and threatening as possible for a person his age, not yet full-grown. His face looked like a knife wound. But beautiful, too.

"I have to keep my eyes on the road," I lied.

"If you get me some weed, I'll forgive white people for all the injustices done to Indians," he said.

"Scarface," I said, "how can you forgive white people?"

He looked out the window at the dusty plain of the turkey farm and said, "If I didn't know how to forgive people, I wouldn't have no family or friends."

It was true. Scarface's own father had shot and killed two men in a state of such profound drunkenness that at the trial he could not recall the crime, the men or his reasons. He lived in prison-the worst one. Scarface's mother did odd jobs with men.

Scarface couldn't really read-he spelled his own name "Scrafac" on a piece of paper he gave me with his telephone number on it. I don't know what they did with him in fifth grade; he still held the pencil in his fist. I would have liked to take Scarface away and make him mine-but you can't do that. Whatever my reasons were for wanting Scarface, they were the wrong reasons. I bought him pickles and jerky and doughnut holes at the gas station, and loved him the way you might love someone for his money or his beauty.

AROUND THE TIME I started my gig with Artists in the Schools and got to know Scarface-the year of my messy and depressing separation-my sister, Carrie, called from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she'd been teaching in a private school. Her life, she said, had become worthwhile and exciting. She'd forgiven me for being one of the neglectful figures from her childhood. In fact, she invited me to come and visit. She spoke of the political situation; after the most recent eruptions, the State Department began to worry about all her "kids"-diplomats' children and children of the ruling families-being sitting ducks, but all they did, at the school, was to postpone a field trip to the capital, where rape and machetes were "of concern."

"That sounds dangerous," I said.

"We went to see the bon.o.bos instead," said Carrie.

A few weeks later, Carrie called again to say she'd been evacuated and had moved to another country in Africa, where she was doing important work with Doctors Without Borders, treating girls and women with fistulas, ruptures and internal damage from rape, long labors in childbirth, or babies too big for the child-size birth ca.n.a.ls of the youngest or most malnourished girls. This damage had rendered many incontinent; they'd lost the wall between v.a.g.i.n.a and a.n.u.s, and lived in shame.

"You should come," Carrie said. "Then you'd see."

SCARFACE KNEW about bon.o.bos from watching the Discovery Channel. Bon.o.bos were his favorite kind of ape. They could pick up a teacup with their toes and drink from it. They didn't force the females to have s.e.x with them-they f.u.c.ked equally and by agreement. Scarface put a bon.o.bo in the mural even though we'd agreed not to deviate too much from the sketches we'd made, or from our local history theme. We'd agreed to depict salmon and kelp, redwoods and round houses, Pomo women weaving baskets from redbud and willow and men dressed for dancing in flicker headbands and feather skirts. Painting the mural was supposed to help kids like Scarface reclaim their own narratives. (I'd written these words myself in several successful grant proposals.) The city had agreed that we could use the wall of the Lions Club for the mural, but then it immediately granted a permit for the medical center next door to expand into the parking lot.

A truck brought in three modular buildings in one day, creating an alley between the medical center and the mural. The public would never see our work; on the other hand, we had a county grant and artistic freedom.

I wanted to bring the mural into the present tense, break down some of the old romanticized imagery. There weren't even any redwoods on the rez; it was a floodplain. Scarface had probably seen more bon.o.bos on the Discovery Channel than salmon in the Rez River. I told the kids, "Paint what you see around you, not what people tell you is there." One of the kids put in his grandma on kidney dialysis, smoking a pipe. Another contributed a kitchen sink with brown water running out of it. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, we painted in the shadows. At night, kids sold drugs and drank beer around the mural. I think they were drawn by the liminal quality of the s.p.a.ce, and by the mural itself, which every day became more complicated, beautiful and hard to read.

Scarface didn't like to take the late bus-kids teased him about the men who climbed in through his mother's bedroom window-so after we worked on the mural, I drove him home. One time, we talked about the mural and the bon.o.bos; then Scarface shared some letters he said his girlfriend, Maria, had written to him. I probably shouldn't have let him go on, but his confidence and expression amazed me. Wasn't Scarface supposed to be illiterate?

"You read those well," I said finally, and he said, "Well, I already know what they say."

I pulled into his driveway. A dog stood on a car's roof in the yard, barking. A girl also stood in the yard, staring up into a pine tree. She had a round face and a round body and very long black hair that had been oiled for lice and pulled back into a bun. Her eyes were brown and deep. "My cousin," Scarface explained. "Maria."

"Scarface," the girl shouted, "your big brother threw my thong up in that tree."

"Why don't you climb up and get it?" he asked.

"You don't know what's been in that tree," Maria said, and grinned.

Scarface flashed me a beautiful smile from his ugly mug and slammed the car door behind him.

THE LAST TIME my sister came to visit, she rode my bicycle into town every day and leaned it up against a tree behind the coffeehouse where she spent her mornings writing e-mail and opening up her heart to the regulars. Carrie has always impressed people with her stories and with her resume, which she can recite like a villanelle. She suffered damage as a child from having been kissed and fondled by an uncle, which led to her radical identification with the oppressed. She worked at a rape crisis center and a suicide hot line, then put herself through nursing and business school, overcame asthma and anorexia, studied French, and became the crusader she is today. Carrie's lived and worked in seven countries, four of them in Africa. We've had different experiences, different lives, Carrie and I. Carrie says no, we just have different versions of reality.

I asked if she locked it-the bike-and she said, "The trouble with you is that you have no faith in people." When someone finally stole the bike, she called me for a ride home and refused to go back to my "low-life" town. Carrie's like that-rigid, unilateral.

Love is a degraded word. I love my coffee in the morning. I love sunsets and those arias from Handel's operas-Agrippina, Atalanta, Lotario, Samson-sung by Renee Fleming that my ex-husband turned me on to. I feel a complicated mix of ambivalent affections for my sister, but the truth is, I have never loved her, didn't even when we were children.

Our uncle Gene, a policeman, caused a scandal, statutory, which infected our whole family before my sister and I were born. He lost his job, and even did time in prison. When my sister was coming up, three years behind me, n.o.body wanted to open old wounds. Uncle Gene wasn't young or handsome or powerful anymore. Carrie was large and quick enough to defend herself-or, it was felt, she should have been. Even now the words my sister uses to describe her life-molested, abandoned, alone, exposed-sound exaggerated. My sister always seemed dull and literal to me; I loved intrigue and secrets.

Uncle Gene died of a gangrenous leg in Aunt Bea's living room. Aunt Bea was much older than she had expected to be when he died-but still relieved. Within a month, though, she stopped breathing fluently and had to drag around a small oxygen tank. She said, "I know it sounds pathetic, but all I really want is a cigarette."

From Aunt Bea I learned that you could hate your life and still love life.

As far as I know, Uncle Gene never forced anybody to do anything. But he was persuasive. He made girls feel something, and when they were really feeling it, Uncle Gene was there with his avuncular touch. He was, of course, a bad man. But just as great individuals are sometimes scarred by flaws, can't a bad man be varnished by qualities?

Because of my experiences with Uncle Gene (the playful banter, the pressure and push-back, the tickling, the touching, the lap-sits, the terrible, interesting frankness of his desire), I understand boundaries and enjoy controlling them. Because of him, I'm not afraid of red zones in human relations, just as my sister is drawn to her African hot spots.

In the mural, I gave Uncle Gene a cameo, a little piece of the action, even though he isn't part of local history. I painted him lying on his back with his arms spread out, very flat and stylized, completely open. I could have emphasized his vulnerability, or punished him in some way, had his liver pecked at by ravens. But what interests me about this uncle is not his amorality-it's his freedom.

SCARFACE HAD BEEN ASKING since September what I was going to buy him for Christmas. "Jews don't celebrate Christmas," I told him.

"But I celebrate Christmas," Scarface said. "And what I'd really like is a bag of weed."

Just before winter break, I arranged to take my students to the city for a day-a two-plus hour drive-to see the murals in the library, city hall, and a mosque. It turned out everyone had a grant for a mural; everyone had a narrative they needed to reclaim.

No one showed up except Scarface, so we drove down together. At the library, we walked through a detecting machine. "It's to make sure you aren't walking away with a book that isn't checked out," I explained.

Scarface looked incredulous. "Who'd jack a book?" he asked.

At city hall, he walked confidently up to the metal detector, and when it went off, he levitated three feet, turned in midair and bolted. I found him out front, sitting on the rear b.u.mper of a black limousine with emba.s.sy plates.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"You said they checked you for books."

"That one's a metal detector. To check you for guns."

"Or knives," Scarface said, brandishing his.

We watched together as a beautiful woman walked down the staircase, wearing a long dress of cream-colored satin and carrying a bouquet of roses.

"b.i.t.c.h looks like an angel," Scarface said.

We strolled through alleyways in the Mission, observing the iconography of the murals. Scarface peppered me with questions about urban life. When you bought coffee in a restaurant, did you get all the milk and the sugar you wanted? When you bought a house, did it come with electricity? When you bought life insurance, could you kill yourself? When you bought stocks, like c.o.ke, did you get c.o.ke for free? If one of those johns paid you to lie down, could you get your nut off, too?

I thought, This must be what it is like to have a child. Not that I wanted a child, but it was nice, walking around with a kid asking question after question, expressing curiosity.

In the mosque, we ran into a stampede of empty shoes on the mint green rug. Men prostrated themselves, or leaned up against the walls, or knelt before the Imam, who spoke rapidly in Arabic about moderation, modesty and patience. Scarface and I sat in back with an interpreter, who wore a headset and translated what the Imam said. Men came and went freely, clasping the hands of their brothers as they pa.s.sed while putting the other hand over their heart-a formal yet intimate gesture.

I joined the women in a separate, closed-off room where we could hear the Imam but not distract or be seen by him. Handwritten flyers pasted to the walls admonished us in English not to whisper during prayers. Nevertheless, the women introduced themselves in whispers. One was an Austrian who had converted; another was Apache from the Southwest. The Apache woman had just converted last Thursday, and she wished everyone in the world the same happiness she had found in Islam. A high school senior said Islam gave her a beautiful privacy. She was not oppressed or forced to choose.