I told him I didn’t see why not, and that I would certainly consider myself to be so bound.

The tavern we went to, a busy place in the evening, was dark and quiet of an afternoon. We sat off by ourselves, and Bill told me his story.

He grew up in another city on the other side of the country. He had an older sister-Carolyn, of course, but that revelation was to come later-and lived with her and his mother and father in a pre-war brick house in one of the older suburbs. He and his sister took after their mother, who was tall and blond. Their father was tall, too, but dark-complected, and heavily built.

His sister taught him to dance, took him shopping, and clued him in on all the things a young boy was supposed to learn. She comforted him, too, when he got a beating from their father. The man was a drinker, he said, and sometimes when he drank Bill would piss him off without knowing what he’d done wrong. Then he’d catch it.

One night when he was thirteen years old he said or did something to upset the man and got a few whacks with a belt as punishment. Afterward, his sister came to his room. He had been crying, and he was a little ashamed of that, too, and she told him he’d had a punishment he hadn’t deserved, so now he was going to get a reward. Just as she’d taught him how to dance, now she would teach him how to kiss.

“ So you’ll know what to do when you’re out with a girl,” she said.

She sat next to him on his bed and they kissed. They’d kissed each other before, of course, but this was entirely different. Do you know how an unexciting activity may be said to be “like kissing your sister”? This was not like kissing your sister.