Babette said to me in bed one night, "Isn't it great having all these kids around?"'There'll be one more soon.""Who?""Bee is coming in a couple of days.""Good. Who else can we get?"The next day Denise decided to confront her mother directly about the medication she was or was not taking, hopingto trick Babette into a confession, an admission or some minimal kind of flustered response. This was not a tactic thegirl and I had discussed but I couldn't help admiring the boldness of her timing. All six of us were jammed into thecar on our way to the Mid-Village Mall and Denise simply waited for a natural break in the conversation, directingher question toward the back of Babette's head, in a voice drained of inference.

　　"What do you know about Dylar?""Is that the black girl who's staying with the Stovers?""That's Dakar," Steffie said.

　　"Dakar isn't her name, it's where she's from," Denise said. "It's a country on the ivory coast of Africa.""The capital is Lagos," Babette said. "I know that because of a surfer movie I saw once where they travel all over theworld.""The Perfect Wave" Heinrich said. "I saw it on TV.""But what's the girl's name?" Steffie said.

　　"I don't know," Babette said, "but the movie wasn't called The Perfect Wave. The perfect wave is what they werelooking for."'They go to Hawaii," Denise told Steffie, "and wait for these tidal waves to come from Japan. They're calledorigamis.""And the movie was called The Long Hot Summer," her mother said.

　　"The Long Hot Summer," Heinrich said, "happens to be a play by Tennessee Ernie Williams.""It doesn't matter," Babette said, "because you can't copyright titles anyway.""If she's an African," Steffie said, "I wonder if she ever rode a camel."'Try an Audi Turbo.""Try a Toyota Supra.""What is it camels store in their humps?" Babette said. "Food or water? I could never get that straight.""There are one-hump camels and two-hump camels," Heinrich told her. "So it depends which kind you're talkingabout.""Are you telling me a two-hump camel stores food in one hump and water in the other?""The important thing about camels," he said, "is that camel meat is considered a delicacy.""I thought that was alligator meat," Denise said.

　　"Who introduced the camel to America?" Babette said. "They had them out west for a while to carry supplies tocoolies who were building the great railroads that met at Ogden, Utah. I remember my history exams.""Are you sure you're not talking about llamas?" Heinrich said.

　　"The llama stayed in Peru," Denise said. "Peru has the llama, the vicu.a and one other animal. Bolivia has tin. Chilehas copper and iron.""I'll give anyone in this car five dollars," Heinrich said, "if they can name the population of Bolivia.""Bolivians," my daughter said.

　　The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factualerror. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive. Murraysays we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. Thedeeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process workstoward sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusioncan't possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why thestrongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic andsuperstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objectivereality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it's true.

　　In a huge hardware store at the mall I saw Eric Massingale, a former microchip sales engineer who changed his lifeby coming out here to join the teaching staff of the computer center at the Hill. He was slim and pale, with adangerous grin.

　　"You're not wearing dark glasses, Jack.""I only wear them on campus.""I get it."We went our separate ways into the store's deep interior. A great echoing din, as of the extinction of a species of beast,filled the vast space. People bought twenty-two-foot ladders, six kinds of sandpaper, power saws that could fell trees.

　　The aisles were long and bright, filled with oversized brooms, massive sacks of peat and dung, huge Rubbermaidgarbage cans. Rope ............