“I mean sexually. Do you know that puberty begins an average of three years earlier than it did a century ago? Do you realize what that means?”

“For a belly dancer, you’ve got a dirty mind.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

“You keep her out of school and you teach her languages and you take her to the zoo and drag her around to nut group meetings and it’s all very sweet and cute, and one of these days you’re going to take a good look at her and not be able to decide whether to change her diaper or take her to bed, and when that happens-”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“If you had children of your own-”

“I do. In Macedonia. Two boys. Todor and Benno.”

“Oh, Evan, don’t you see how chaotic this is? Don’t you see-”

“Let’s talk about something else, Kitty.”

And we talked about something else, something more cheerful, like an earthquake or a tidal wave or an epidemic. Now, while Minna read Humpfe Dumpfe’s speech about a word meaning precisely what one wants it to mean, neither more nor less, I thought about Minna and puberty, visualizing the little golden-haired angel against a background montage of Tampax and Clearasil ads.

I had found her three years before in a windowless basement in Lithuania. She was the sole living descendant of Mindaugas, the first and last king of independent Lithuania, and someday, according to her guardians, she would be queen. I took her out of that basement and brought her home with me, and ever since then my life had never been the same.

She would reach puberty at about the same time that I reached forty. Both prospects were unendurably upsetting. I started to put my arm around her, and for the first time I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t put my arm around her, and I winced, and she read about Alice while I thought first of Lewis Carroll and then of Vladimir Nabokov and finally of auto-defenestration.