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and went no further. I wanted everyone in my family to get along and nothing to change; but suddenly, after Tom ran away, it was as if the five of us looked around, asked why we should be spending time together, and failed to come up with many good answers.
    For the first time, in the months that followed, my parents’ conflicts became audible. My father came home on cool nights to complain about the house’s “chill.” My mother countered that the house wasn’t cold if you were doing housework all day . My father marched into the dining room to adjust the thermostat and dramatically point to its “Comfort Zone,” a pale-blue arc between 72 and 78 degrees. My mother said that she was so hot . And I decided, as always, not to voice my suspicion that the Comfort Zone referred to air-conditioning in the summer rather than heat in the winter. My father set the temperature at 72 and retreated to the den, which was situated directly above the furnace. There was then a lull, and then big explosions. No matter what corner of the house I hid myself in, I could hear my father bellowing, “LEAVE THE GOD-DAMNED THERMOSTAT ALONE!”
    â€œEarl, I didn’t touch it!”
    â€œYou did! Again!”
    â€œI didn’t think I even moved it, I just looked at it, I didn’t mean to change it.”
    â€œAgain! You monkeyed with it again! I had it set where I wanted it. And you moved it down to seventy!”
    â€œWell, if I did somehow change it, I’m sure I didn’t mean to. You’d be hot, too, if you worked all day in the kitchen.”
    â€œAll I ask at the end of a long day at work is that the temperature be set in the Comfort Zone.”
    â€œEarl, it is so hot in the kitchen. You don’t know, because you’re never in here, but it is so hot.”
    â€œThe low end of the Comfort Zone! Not even the middle! The low end! It is not too much to ask!”
    And I wonder why “cartoonish” remains such a pejorative. It took me half my life to achieve seeing my parents as cartoons. And to become more perfectly a cartoon myself: what a victory that would be.
    My father eventually applied technology to the problem of temperature. He bought a space heater to put behind his chair in the dining room, where he was bothered in winter by drafts from the bay window behind him. Like so many of his appliance purchases, the heater was a pathetically cheap little thing, a wattage hog with a stertorous fan and a grinning orange mouth which dimmed the lights and drowned out conversation and produced a burning smell every time it cycled on. When I was in high school, he bought a quieter, more expensive model. One evening my mother and I started reminiscing about the old model, caricaturing my father’s temperature sensitivities, doing cartoons of the little heater’s faults, the smoke and the buzzing, and my father got mad and left the table. He thought we were ganging up on him. He thought I was being cruel, and I was, but I was also forgiving him.

T HEN J OY B REAKS T HROUGH
    WE MET ON Sundays at five-thirty. We chose partners and blindfolded them and led them down empty corridors at break-neck speeds, as an experiment in trust. We made collages about protecting the environment. We did skits about navigating the emotional crises of seventh and eighth grade. We sang along while advisors played songs by Cat Stevens. We wrote haikus on the theme of friendship and read them aloud:
    A friend stands by you
    Even when you’re in trouble
    So it’s not so bad.
    A friend is a person
    You think you can depend on
    And usually trust.
    My own contribution to this exercise—
    You get a haircut
    Ordinary people laugh
    Do friends? No, they don’t.
    â€”referred to certain realities at my junior high, not in the group. People in the group, even the people I didn’t considerfriends, weren’t allowed to laugh at you that way. This was one reason I’d joined in