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Frank lurched through the lobby, struggling with a trunk full of Junior Jones's winter clothes; he couldn't seem to navigate successfully past Bitty Tuck's luggage, at the foot of the stairs, and so he dropped the trunk there -- startling Lilly, who was sitting on the bottom step, watching Sabrina Jones.

'This is my sister Lilly,' I said to Sabrina, 'and that was Frank,' I said, pointing to Frank's back as he slunk away. We could hear Franny and Bitty Tuck shrieking somewhere, and I knew that Junior Jones would be speaking to my father -- offering his condolences for Coach Bob.

'Hello, Lilly,' Sabrina said.

'I'm a dwarf,' Lilly said. 'I'm not ever going to grow any bigger.'

This information must have seemed, to Sabrina Jones, to fit rather perfectly with her disappointment at discovering my age; Sabrina did not appear shocked.

'Well, that's interesting,' she said to Lilly.

'You are going to grow, Lilly,' I said, 'At least, you're going to grow a little, and you're not a dwarf.'

Lilly shrugged. 'I don't mind,' she said.

A figure passed swiftly across the landing at the turn of the staircase -- he had a tomahawk, he wore war paint and little else (a black loincloth with coloured beads decorating the hips).

'That was Egg,' I said, watching the dazzled eyes of Sabrina Jones, her pretty mouth parted -- as if attempting speech.

'That was a little Indian boy,' she said. 'Why's he called Egg?'

'I know why!' Lilly volunteered; sitting on the stairs, she raised her hand -- as if she were in class, waiting to be called on. I was glad she was there; I never liked explaining Egg's name. Egg had been Egg from the beginning, dating from Mother's pregnancy, when Franny had asked her what the name of the new baby was going to be. 'Right now it's just an egg,' Frank had said, darkly -- his wisdom of biology was always shocking, to us all. And so, as Mother grew and grew, the egg was called Egg with increasing conviction. Mother and Father were hoping for a third girl, only because it was going to be an April baby and they both liked the name April for a girl; they were undecided about a boy's name, Father not caring for his own name, Win, and Mother -- despite her fondness for Iowa Bob -- not really liking the idea of a Robert, Jr. By the time it was clear that the egg was a boy, he was -- in our family -- already an Egg, and the name (as they say) stuck. Egg had no other name.

'He began as an egg, and he's still an egg,' Lilly explained to Sabrina Jones.

'Holy cow,' Sabrina said,

and I wished that something powerfully distracting would happen in the Hotel New Hampshire . . . to distract me from my embarrassment at how (it always struck me) our family must appear to outsiders.

'You see,' Franny would explain, years later, 'we aren't eccentric, we're not bizarre. To each other,' Franny would say, 'we're as common as rain.' And she was right: to each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family, even exaggerations make perfect sense; they are always logical exaggerations, nothing more.

But my embarrassment with Sabrina Jones made me embarrassed for us all. My embarrassment even included people beyond my family. I was embarrassed for Harold Swallow every time I spoke with him; I was always afraid someone would make fun of him and hurt his feelings. And on New Year's Eve at the Hotel New Hampshire, I was embarrassed for Ronda Ray, wearing the dress Franny bought for Mother; I was even embarrassed for the almost live band, the terrible rock group called Hurricane Doris.

I recognized Sleazy Wales as a punk who had threatened me, years ago, in the Saturday matinee. He had wadded up a ball of bread, grey with the oil and grime from his auto-mechanic life; he'd stuck the wad of bread under my nose.

'Wanna eat that, kid?' he asked.

'No thanks,' I said. Frank leaped up and ran into the aisle, but Sleazy Wales gripped my arm and held me in my seat. 'Don't move,' he said. I promised I wouldn't, and he took a long nail out of his pocket and drove it through the wad of bread. Then he made a fist around the bread with the nail protruding savagely between his middle and ring fingers.

'Wanna get your fucking eyes poked out?' he asked me.

'No thanks,' I said.

'Then get the fuck out of here!' he said; even then I was embarrassed for him. I went to find Frank -- who, whenever he was frightened at the movies, always stood by the water cooler. Frank frequently embarrassed me, too.

At the Hotel New Hampshire, on New Year's Eve, 1 saw at once that Sleazy Wales didn't recognize me. Too many miles, too much weight lifting, too many bananas had come between us; if he threatened me with bread and nails again, I could simply hug him to death. He didn't seem to have grown since the Saturday matinee. Scrawny and grey-skinned, his whole face the tone of a dirty ashtray, he hunched his shoulders forward in his GULF shirt and tried to walk as if each arm weighed one hundred pounds. I estimated that his whole body, plus wrenches and a few other heavy tools, couldn't weigh more than 130.1 could have bench-pressed him an easy half-dozen times.

Hurricane Doris didn't seem especially disappointed at the absence of a crowd; and perhaps the boys were even grateful to have fewer people staring at them, as they dragged their bright, cheap equipment from outlet to outlet, plugging in.

The first thing I heard Doris Wales say was, 'Move the mike back, Jake, and don't be an asshole.' The acoustic bass (called Jake), another greasy splinter in a GULF shirt, cringed over the microphone as if he lived in terror of electrical shock -- and of being an asshole. Sleazy Wales gave the other boy in the band a lovable punch in the kidneys; a fat drummer named Danny, the boy absorbed the punch with dignity -- but with obvious pain.

Doris Wales was a woman with straw-blonde hair whose body appeared to have been dipped in corn oil; then she must have put her dress on, wet. The dress grabbed at all her parts, and plunged and sagged over the gaps in her body; a lover's line of hickeys, or love bites -- 'lovesucks,' Franny called them -- dotted Doris's chest and throat like a violent rash; the welts were like wounds from a whip. She wore plum-coloured lipstick, some of which was on her teeth, and she said, to Sabrina Jones and me, 'You want hot-dancin' music, or slow-neckin' music? Or both?'

'Both,' said Sabrina Jones, without missing a beat, but I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would still be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.

Doris Wales, some months after the hurricane that was her namesake, first heard Elvis Presley's 'Heartbreak Hotel' when she was actually in a hotel. She told Sabrina and me that this had been a religious experience.

'You understand?' Doris said. 'I was shacked up with this guy, in an actual hotel, when this song comes over the radio. That song told me how to feel,' Doris explained. "That was about half a year ago,' she said. 'I haven't been the same since.'