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Collecting myself, I removed the hat from her head and put it in like manner on mine—partly, I admit, out of jealousy, and partly in order to demonstrate to her what someone looked like underneath the object, which produced similar fits of laughter in her. We passed the hat back and forth in this way many times, by turns reducing one another to helpless jellies of giggling. Unfortunately this show we were creating attracted the attention of Cookie, my mangy philistine of an older brother, my bully, the big hairy Esau to my crafty little Jacob, three years my senior and already nearly as big as an adult, who lumbered up to us and snatched the hat from our young hands. Céleste and I howled our protestations. He would not give it back, would not play along. He bore the thing no special love, nor even curiosity: he did not wish us to have it merely because he saw that it gave us joy. Yes, he touched it, too, he too put it on his head, but I am certain that the subtleties of its beauty were lost on him. He scoffed at the femininity of the article. I tried to seize it from him; he pushed me down. This enraged me. He ran away with the hat and we immediately gave chase, she first and I clambering to my feet and hands to follow. In this way the squabble erupted into a full-on disruptive spectacle, with all three of us stumbling and raging pell-mell and helter-skelter over the logs and trees and rope-swings and other primitive furnishings of our habitat, hooting and shrieking, a whirlwind of hairy brown limbs, an ecstasy of fumbling, one body fleeing and two in pursuit. The humans may have thought we were “playing.” Maybe Cookie was, but Céleste and I were in dead fucking earnest. The chase ended only when Rotpeter—the Alpha Male and sole gubernative power over our pitifully tiny civilization, our sovereign, our lawgiver and enforcer, our Draco, Solon, Hammurabi and Caesar, oh you Leviathan, you, Rotpeter, you petty patriarch—dropped down from a tree and interpolated himself between us. And what did this microcosmic Ozymandias do? First he snatched the hat away from his eldest son, who, trembling before the greater authority, fell back. Then Rotpeter briefly and unceremoniously examined the hat, snorted his disapproval, and, determining that he could neither smoke it nor fuck it and therefore had little reason to tolerate its continuing to exist, with feet, fists, fingers, and teeth he beat, ripped, tore, and chewed it, right before our eyes, to shreds. We, the children, wept in anguish.

Rotpeter decimated that hat and disseminated the loose scraps of straw until they were indistinguishable from the rest of the offal strewn about the floor of our habitat, and the hatband of diaphanous silk, bespangled with blue and red and purple flowers, he spent the rest of the day munching and sucking on until it disappeared inside him, though tattered remnants of it later reappeared in his black and steaming globes of stool.

But I promised to speak of sex.

So then, damn the torpedoes and full Freud ahead: my mother. The same people who would later claim responsibility for my case—even though it was actually only Lydia, all Lydia, and me, just us, all the others really had very little to do with it (but these are outrages and injustices I will discuss in greater detail later)—these same people, the researchers at the Behavioral Biology Laboratory at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Mind and Biology, once tried to teach my poor stupid mother a little sign language. It was a bust, a miserable failure. The spirit of language thrived not in her. They were able to trick her, through some elementary-level Skinnerian operant conditioning, into making a few signs of ASL; her entire active vocabulary made possible but a single mandative sentence, which, feebly enacted on her part and loosely interpreted on theirs, amounted to: “Give [me] that!” (The second word being implied and the last a vigorous waving in the general direction of the coveted object.) It was impressive that they were able to teach her