I was six, maybe seven months old, and I had a babysitter named Eva. She was from somewhere in the West Indies and spoke with, my parents always said, the most charming singsong accent you could imagine. My father called her the governess. That night my parents were at the opera. It was February. This is when we lived on Lincoln and Webster, near Oz Park. The heat went out in our building and it got so cold that Eva wrapped me in a towel and put me in the oven. My parents came home from Rigoletto and found Eva jumping in place in the kitchen. On her head was a large furry Russianish hat of my father’s. My mother, essentially unalarmable in any circumstances, didn’t scream when she realized what was in the oven, though at first she wasn’t entirely sure what she was seeing. My father, too, he just took it in. He may have been equally astonished that the governess was wearing his favorite hat. Me? Nobody asked, but had I been able to talk I would have said I was comfortable as hell and that my removal from this new womb was as unwelcome as my previous abduction from the original. Eva had the right idea. The minute I get settled you people come and yank me out–

CHICAGO, 1969