There's a bad odor about a man who's been betrayed.

If he hadn't been my father I would have loved the spectacle he created-one performance following quickly upon another-like a versatile old vaudevil-lian with his audience (wife and children) in the palm of his hand.

I have often caught sight of myself, my spine humped over, defining my hollowness, my head too heavy for my body, swinging like the oversized blossom of some cruelly bred plant; admiration for the world spread for the world to see on my gullible face-unlike my other face with the sour look of a starved peasant.

The Golden Arches of McDonald's rise, glorious across the landscape, contempo-monolithic, simple in concept as Stonehenge if we could but see it.

The Catholic Church with its foreshortened American history and tangled puritanical roots was as inviolate to my mother and father as it was to the last-ditch aristocrats of Evelyn Waugh.

To urgent unknown music she danced for them, danced against them. Her strong small body became a force: the sequence of leaps, back falls, contractions, spun from her endlessly, like magic scarves.

When I go home my mother and I play a cannibal game; we eat each other over the years, tender morsel by morsel until there is nothing left but dry bone and wig. She is winning-needless to say she has had so much more experience.

The dread ballet classes of former years had been an ordeal-all the little daughters of doctors and dentists, socialites from Fairfield in squirrel coats and Tyrolean skirts, the heiress of a girdle empire escorted by a black maid.

Once I knew a dumb girl in the office at the zipper factory who filled in all the four letter words of the easy home-town puzzle. SHIT she wrote when she could not guess the answer.

To say a thing simply: I am my history, but the story of my life is always guarded, self-conscious. It is finally the only story we give to someone we love.