In the tight moments that follow, I flash on something I haven’t thought about for years—a strange cardboard book I had as a child. The pages were cut into thirds—heads, outfits, and shoes, so that you could turn the parts independently of each other and put a clown’s head with a ballerina’s body and firefighter boots, for example. Or a clown head could have a suit and tie over ballerina shoes. I always hated that book. I hated that you could rearrange the clothes to lie about the person. I preferred to arrange it so that the correct heads went with the correct outfits.
