My brother Artie and I got the chicken pox together when we lived in Milwaukee, so the bedroom with twin beds became a ward. We lay there for two weeks in dim light, feverish, too weak to pick on each other, picking instead at the pox, despite being told that this would scar us forever. On the walls of that room were wedding pictures of my father’s sisters and brothers and an empty rectangle of bright wallpaper where my parents had been removed so my stepmother would not have to see my mother in a long white satin dress, its lacy train swirling around her feet and my father’s, wrapping them up together.

Artie was old enough when our mother died that he was allowed to go the funeral, where people said things to him when he stood by the coffin with our father. That was when he started to have the Sorry dream; in it he’s walking down a long hall of doors, and he’s scared. He sees two men in grey suits running toward him from the far end of the hall; when they get to where he is, they run past him, screaming, “It’s Sorry! It’s Sorry!” Then there’s a crackling sound, and he sees Sorry – a huge square creature of curled and twisted glowing metal wires like the inside of a toaster. Sorry fills up the whole hallway and lumbers toward him, burning. But just before it gets to him, Artie wakes up.

I never had anything like that happen to me, awake or asleep. In Gary, probably influenced by the Pennsylvania Railroad switch yard behind our building, I used the train wreck.  My mother was traveling to New York to visit her cousins. It was a birthday present. The trip, I said, was a birthday present from my four uncles, her brothers. Her body was pulled from the flaming wreck by the conductor, who came to the funeral and told my father she’d been such a nice lady, sharing her breaded chicken and peaches with him and the other passengers in her coach.

Gary was where I walked across the street, climbed the wire fence and wandered into the woods, trying to find where the sign was, the big sign that said BUDD. We knew what everybody called the BUDD plant must be in there, but we could only see the sign above the trees from our window on the third floor; we never saw where the bottom was, where it touched the ground. Because I was little, and because there were trees, I thought there really was a plant, not a factory – you know, a plant like grass or flowers, something that grew in the ground.

Artie came over after me, yelling, Get out of here! Are you crazy? We can’t be in here! So we both climbed out and went back across the street, where our building was shaped like a big square U, its arms going out to the front sidewalk, pointing toward the BUDD plant fence. There was a big tree there at the sidewalk, centered in the open U. All the kids from the building dodged around it when we played roller tag, racing our metal skates in jerky circles, and we stuck sparklers into its trunk on the fourth of July. We’d light their thick ends and gingerly roll them to be sure they’d caught. Then we’d spin and run, leaving spiral arcs of orange fire burning the length of the sidewalk through the dusk. We lit and swirled them as fast as we could, so the tree soon held at least a dozen, their sharp tips jammed into the thick bark, fizzing and flashing all at once while dusk turned invisibly into true night.