Once the fight got going Jimmy felt relieved, because he’d known then that he wouldn’t be punished. All he had to do was say nothing and pretty soon they’d forget why they’d started arguing in the first place. But he also felt guilty, because look what he’d made them do. He knew it would end with a door being slammed. He scrunched down lower and lower in his chair with the words whizzing back and forth over his head, and finally there was the bang of the door—his mother this time—and the wind that came with it. There was always a wind when the door got slammed, a small puff—whuff!—right in his ears.

“Never mind, old buddy,” said his father. “Women always get hot under the collar. She’ll cool down. Let’s have some ice cream.” So that’s what they did, they had Raspberry Ripple in the cereal bowls with the blue and red birds on them that were handmade in Mexico so you shouldn’t put them in the dishwasher, and Jimmy ate his all up to show his father that everything was okay.

Women, and what went on under their collars. Hotness and coldness, coming and going in the strange musky flowery variable-weather country inside their clothes—mysterious, important, uncontrollable. That was his father’s take on things. But men’s body temperatures were never dealt with; they were never even mentioned, not when he was little, except when his dad said, “Chill out.” Why weren’t they? Why nothing about the hot collars of men? Those smooth, sharp-edged collars with their dark, sulphurous, bristling undersides. He could have used a few theories on that.

The next day his father took him to a haircut place where there was a picture of a pretty girl in the window with pouty lips and a black T-shirt pulled down off one shoulder, glaring out through smudgy charcoal eyes with a mean stare and her hair standing up stiff like quills.