I sit by myself in the back of the car, among the suitcases and the cardboard boxes of food and the coats, and the gassy, dry-cleaning smell of the car upholstery. My brother Stephen sits in the front seat, beside the partly open window. He smells of peppermint LifeSavers; underneath that is his ordinary smell, of cedarwood lead pencils and wet sand. Sometimes he throws up into paper bags, or beside the road if my father can stop the car in time. He gets carsick and I do not, which is why he has to sit in the front. It’s his only weakness that I know of.

From my cramped vantage point in the back I have a good view of my family’s ears. My father’s, which stick out from under the brim of the old felt hat he wears to keep twigs and tree sap and caterpillars out of his hair, are large and soft-looking, with long lobes; they’re like the ears of gnomes, or those of the flesh-colored, doglike minor characters in Mickey Mouse comic books. My mother wears her hair pinned back at the sides with bobby pins, so her ears are visible from the back. They’re narrow, with fragile upper edges, like the handles of china cups, although she herself is not fragile. My brother’s ears are round, like dried apricots, or like the ears of the green-tinged, oval-headed aliens from outer space he draws with his colored pencils. Around and over his round ears and down the back of his neck his hair, dark blond and straight, grows in thick wisps. He resists haircuts. It’s difficult for me to whisper into my brother’s round ears when we’re in the car. In any case he can’t whisper back, because he has to look straight ahead at the horizon, or at the white lines of the road that washes toward us, wave after slowly undulating wave.

The roads are mostly empty, because it’s the war, though once in a while there’s a truck loaded with cut tree trunks or fresh lumber, trailing its perfume of sawdust. At lunchtime we stop by the roadside and spread a groundsheet among the white papery everlasting and the purple fireweed and eat the lunch our mother makes, bread and sardines or bread and cheese, or bread and molasses or bread and jam if we can’t get anything else. Meat and cheese are scarce, they are rationed. That means you have a ration book with colored stamps in it.