This evening it was the Brasserie Ruhlmann. One foxhole, one manger in which she might bray and spit or crouch in watchfulness, with others similar enough that she herself was unremarkable. There was a side-route into the world that doesn’t exist. Several. But the one she preferred was drinking. If she were drunk, or on the way there she could overlook the fact that indeed she was appearing before others. For a while. And then she noticed. The stares and the slights wounded her excessively since she was fast on the way to becoming powerless. The only recourse available to her (and one that was hardly effective) was to huff , to refuse eye contact and to speak to them, those fellows who had recently been her camarades were now all satyrs, all eunuchs, all snobs.

She worked for a stable of luxury-lifestyle magazines. She suspected rightly that these worked in concert with the PR teams of their subjects, that the boutiques and brasseries were advertsing in exchange for the glossy articles that featured them.

She surveyed the scene. Here we have a fresh-faced young man, slicked back hair, auditioning with a young woman’s mother for the position of boyfriend or fiance. At a glance, she took him to be a law or less likely a medical student. She would have bet he had been coached on his outfit by the woman. Possibly he was wearing a new shirt. The proposed mother-in-law in a turtleneck and wool suit despite the 70 degree temperature. She was instructing him in the art of dining, or at least he was attempting to follow her movements in every degree.

The Youth Center is a place where middle aged and elderly men take up their daily posts by prearrangement, surveiling the streets with a thoroughness that comprehends foot and vehicular traffic, retail activity. These men are endlessly entertained by residents’  purchasing habits, family dynamics and telephone communication.

The Thrift Shop is a place to buy light bulbs and paper towels.

A Lounge is a sort-of meeting hall, available for rent for a birthday or anniversary party. BYO DJ, cake and decorations.

Pillar located us physically in a two-mile square bordered by Lindbergh and Warson, Clayton and Conway.  Socially and in terms of wealth, or so we pretended, it situated us slightly beneath the congregation of Annunciata and Immacolata, but infinitely above the unfortunate denizens of Mary Magdalene, Christ Prince of Peace and St. Clement’s.

We were fortunate, from my father’s point of view, to have secured a newly built house in the colonial-contemporary style in what had been an unincorporated tangle of ailanthus and cotton wood trees shouldering the I-40, an east-west artery traveling from Downtown St. Louis (a place outside of my experience, save for a couple of pilgrimages to the arch for the benefit of out-of-town visitors) to West County, and presumably beyond.

Brynnwood Drive, an abbreviated street of a dozen houses, was desirable because of its zip code. We lived in Ladue, a well-to-do area with shoppes and plazas instead of stores and malls, Le Chateau (pronounced Lushuhtoe) and Pappagallo, Monograms For You and Mister Guy.

The houses were numbered at random, a developer’s whimsy , so we didn’t speak or think in terms of blocks. Once on vacation, I calculated a potential playmate’s motel room at the far end of the pool to be fifty or so blocks away, this in terms of the number of the wooden cubes in my sister’s toy box it would take to span the distance.  I was stymied when my parents rejected my proposed destination as being impossibly far away.

Everything worth doing, it seemed, was too far for my mother to attempt in her fire-engine-red Country Squire station wagon. Playdates, swimming lessons, Fashion Gal—where I longed to spend my babysitting money on bright outfits made from sweatshirt jersey. Manchester Road was the absolute limit of our universe. I was stunned upon gaining my driver’s license to discover it to be less than two miles up Lindbergh, but in the wrong direction.

Outside of the parish boundaries, Manchester Road was commercial. There were drive-thru restaurants, exterminators, taverns and even buses. A dizzying and dangerous landscape. I suspect our zip code would have meant little to the teenager at the Taco Bell window.  One of my father’s buddies from his days as an army reservist lived in the area and we had heard that his son had left high school to work at Target.

I hated the confines of our world, exclusive as it was of fast food and affordable fashions, but there were ways in which my parents’ myopia benefitted me. The day I turned 16 I drove my grandmother’s cast-off LeMans a quarter-mile to St. Joseph’s Academy. Prior to my birthday, I walked home exactly once and reported to my mother having been vaguely menaced by some kitchen workers loitering in the parking lot of Schneithorst’s beer garden, across the street from the Ladue Bank. After that my mother gritted her teeth, dressed herself an hour earlier than was her habit and collected me from school.

I can tell you that we lived three miles from my grandparents and that my father’s brothers also lived within this sphere. I know this because my father mentioned it whenever the subject of his family arose. No doubt he had noted the mileage on the speedometer of his boatlike Bonneville, perhaps while figuring its nine miles to the gallon.

I believe he liked to repeat the fact because the geographic proximity of what family remained after the suicides of two other brothers suggested an intimacy they didn’t actually share. All of us gathered to eat dinner at my grandparents’ house on Sundays. Afterward, the Bonneville pitched and rolled in a way, as young children, we found exciting. If he was in a tolerable mood, my father led us in the singing of “Show Me the Way to Go Home” as though we were making a long trip.