I went back to Minnesota the summer after eighth grade with the secret resolve that I was going to stay. I didn’t tell my mother, of course, or she would never have let me leave. I didn’t even tell my brother, though he might have wanted to be included in the plan.

But when my father met us at the bus station, the first thing he told us was how sick he was and how disabled he’d become. That night, in the tiny back bedroom of his latest apartment, I cried myself to sleep, feeling my last hope blasted.

My father complained of a fiery pain throughout his body whenever he exerted himself—his doctors had diagnosed arthritis. He was now an invalid—bedridden except for the few hours he still taught at the university; he’d had to cut back on his classes and relied heavily on his TA’s.

When I think of that summer, I don’t remember any real contact with him at all—he sequestered himself in his bedroom, as distant as my mother had been in the two years after the divorce—but even colder. It was as though he’d walled himself off from my brother and me so he could never be hurt again. (Years later he would tell me that the day we’d left for California was the bitterest day of his life.)

I remember trying to engage him in intellectual conversation, asking on one occasion if time could exist without movement, but he dismissed my question, saying a discussion of time would be beyond my comprehension.

Another time I told him about a program I’d seen on mountain lions. “When they’re cubs—even when they’re nearly full-grown—the animals that will become their prey aren’t afraid and will play with them,” I said. “But when they start hunting for themselves, the same animals flee, knowing that they’re dangerous now.” At which point my father laughed scornfully at me. “Your statement is absurd,” he said. “You don’t have the slightest idea of the philosophical complexities of the word ‘know.’ To claim that animals can ‘know’ anything is preposterous.” That’s when I began to feel there were hidden booby traps in language and that I had to be careful of every word I spoke.

In the meantime, my brother and I were left to fend for ourselves; we bought the groceries, cooked the meals, cleaned house—I wound up doing the lion’s share—and played with our cousins, who lived a few blocks away. Sometimes we took the bus to St. Anthony Park to see our old friends. But to me, there was even a sadness about that—they’d gone on with their lives, I felt, and left me far behind.

At the end of the summer, I decided to go back to California, after all. I wouldn’t have been able to go to Murray High with my friends, anyway, since my father now lived in another part of the Twin Cities. I’d fantasized that he would be willing to move back to St. Anthony Park, but now I realized he wouldn’t. I suppose I was proof of the tenet that children will choose negative attention over no attention at all.

Years later I wrote:

“By the end of eighth grade, three years after my parents’ divorce, I felt I’d lost everything: St. Anthony Park, which would always be home to me, as well as all the people I loved—first Wolfy through distance and circumstance, then Kathy, who rejected me, my father, who withdrew emotionally, and my mother, who turned on me. I lost my belief in myself—in my own goodness, intelligence, talent, and ability to cope, as well as a childish belief in my own indestructibility. And I lost my faith in people—their goodness, constancy, and their ability to triumph over adversity. I lost my belief in love itself.”

In California, my mother became someone I didn’t recognize. She was alternately hysterical and wrathful, haranguing and disparaging and blaming both Doug and me, though most of what she accused us of, I eventually came to realize, were things she mistakenly thought we’d done or imagined we were going to do.

In Minnesota, my father had always been the disciplinarian in the family, and I can honestly say I don’t remember, in all the years before the move, my mother ever even scolding me. In the first place, I was a well-behaved child who naively believed that it was possible for a person to be perfect—and that’s what we all should aspire to be.

On the rare occasions my dad “disciplined” me when I was younger—for what, I no longer remember—he stripped me, put me in our old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub, and using a hose, showered me with cold water. Years later, when I heard about how Estelle had stripped his brother Ray and put him in the bathtub, where she beat him with an iron cord, it occurred to me that my father was repeating what he’d seen as a child, but since he wasn’t beating me, he imagined there was nothing abusive about what he was doing. Actually, I think there was—because I came to associate nakedness with shame. And I think for a father to strip a female child to punish her is a violation that borders on the incestuous. (My brother he spanked with a belt.)

But if my dad had shamed me physically, it was my mom who resorted to shaming me verbally. I was thirteen years old and, never having been treated this way before, I knew that I didn’t deserve her vitriol, and I felt outraged by it. She verbally abused my brother too, calling us both “selfish,” “manipulative,” and “exploitative.”

What’s more, she flew into violent rages and would chase one or the other of us up the stairs of our little apartment, so frenzied that she could only make grunting noises like a wild animal, and try to claw at us with fingers like talons. Fortunately, we were old enough to outrun her and would lock ourselves in the bathroom until she calmed down. Later she would weep and apologize.

The last time I saw my father, he told me he’d seen this rage in my mother once during their marriage and never felt the same way about her again. But I’d never so much as glimpsed this side of my mom before. If I had, as miserable as I’d become in Minnesota, I would never have agreed to move to California. In fact, it wasn’t long before I’d made up my mind that when my brother and I went to visit my dad the following summer, I would stay on and live with him permanently. I kept this resolve a secret, even from my brother, for fear he would let the cat out of the bag. Even a father who intimidated me was better than a mom who used her children as scapegoats.

And perhaps I should mention before I go any further that in California my mom had become a marriage and family therapist.

What I remember most about the two years after the divorce is my loneliness.

When I was in seventh grade, Mom was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She had a partial hysterectomy—they’d removed her uterus but left her ovaries—and her cancer was never mentioned again. But by then, she’d already become a shadow figure in my life. First Jane, a friend of hers, had moved in, along with her husband and son, to help pay the rent. The only two things I recall about them was that Jane’s husband put up a calendar of obese “pin-up” girls—drawings, not photos—wearing things like daisies on the their nipples as pasties, a new concept to me. And one day their little boy, Davy, knocked the butterfly case with the magnificent luna moth off the wall, breaking the glass and shattering the moth’s wings.

When they moved out, Mom took in two boarders—college girls who had the upstairs bedrooms across from my brother and me. My mom would often talk to them behind closed doors—about their problems, apparently—and I remember thinking wistfully, “she spends more time with them than she does with me.” The one conversation I remember with my mother during this time was when I got my first period. “You’ve become a woman now,” she said. But all I felt about it was a kind of bleakness.

I also recollect having a bladder infection that I never told anyone about. Sometimes, when I walked home from school, I had to stop to twist and tighten my legs, trying to stop myself from “urinating,” as my dad would say. He always used formal terms like “defecate” and “feces.” If memory serves, I had the infection—not that I knew what it was—for most of the winter, and eventually it cleared up on its own.

Out of sequence, I’m also remembering my new little striped kitten dying of distemper on the day he was supposed to get his second distemper shot. We laid him on the door of the stove and turned the oven on low to keep him warm. I called him Archie, short for Archimedes, which was my father’s idea. But that happened before my dad left.

Doug and I did see our dad some weekends. The routine was he’d pick us up in the late afternoon, we’d play cribbage and have popcorn, go to a movie, then spend the night. But there was an empty perfunctoriness to these evenings together. One of my father’s apartments was near a railroad track, and I’d hear the lonely, mournful sound of train whistles throughout the night. Once, when our dad took us up to a northern lake, he stayed up playing the harmonica after Doug and I went to bed—and his playing reminded me of those whistles; I ached with sadness for him, feeling that he’d been forced into a kind of exile by the divorce, pushed out into the cold.

Sometime during that first year in the Doswell house, I started wrapping one arm around myself in bed at night, trying to find comfort in the fantasy that someone was holding me, something I would do for years to come.

So when my mom started talking about moving to California, she painted such a rosy picture that I got caught up in the idea of a fresh start, surrounded by affectionate relatives that I’d only seen on the few trips we made, and maybe even, eventually, with a stepfather nicer than my own father. Naively, I imagined I could leave my failures behind—the humiliations I’d suffered, the loss of friends, of prestige and self-respect, as well as a sense of belonging. In my new life, I decided, I would tell everyone that my nickname was “Sunny.”