When my father woke in the morning and saw that the television was on, he said to my siblings and me, “Turn off the idiot box! Get outside and do something!”

All three of us started to leave, but my father turned to my sister and said, “Not you.”

My brother and I went out to the back yard. We looked around until we saw a couple of baseball bats leaning against the house. We picked some stones from the ground, tossed them in the air, and swatted them toward the neighboring houses. The stones struck roofs and aluminum siding, but didn’t hit any windows.

When our arms got tired, we looked at our father’s vegetable garden. In one trench there was a row of yellow-green lettuce leaves. In a parallel groove, dark-green onion spikes stood. Next to the onions, beans were sprouting. Their cotyledons were curled where they were breaking through the ground.

“I want to show you something,” my brother said.

He led me to the outhouse, which my father had made into a toolshed. My brother opened the door and pointed to a motor-driven plow. The machine had handles, but instead of wheels it had rotary blades.

My brother dragged the contraption outside and pulled the starter cord, and the engine came to life. He guided the machine across the garden as the blades churned through the soil. “It’s a man-killer,” he said.

When we went back into the house, we found our sister watching television. Our father was not around.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“He went back to bed,” she said.

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“Listening to him talk,” my sister said.

“Was he upset?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “He made breakfast for me. Then he got tired.”

I walked alone to the schoolyard. The playing fields were empty, and the school building was dark. I tested an outdoor fountain by twisting the valve sprocket, but no water came out.

I walked around the building until I came to a parking lot. A couple dozen majorettes were practicing routines on the paved area. They were wearing sweaters, skirts, high socks and saddle shoes. They stepped in unison, twirling batons. Sometimes they threw the batons into the air and caught the flashing sticks as they spun downward. Occasionally, the twirlers missed, and their batons bounced on the ground.

I wanted to be a drum major. I wanted to wear a top hat and carry a brass staff as I led the corps. I spotted an umbrella in a trash can. I hooked the umbrella over my forearm and fell into step beside the majorettes. I held the accessory like a cane and tapped its tip on the pavement as I walked.

The lead majorette said to me, “Go home, little boy.”

“I’m not a little boy,” I said. “I’m a young man with an umbrella.”

At home, I walked quietly past my father’s workroom so as not to disturb him, but he saw me and called me in. He pointed at a sheet of paper with calligraphy on it and asked, “What’s that?”

I saw a couple of small red spots on the paper. “Is it ink?” I asked.

“It’s blood,” he said. “I was blowing on the page when I noticed I was spitting blood. I don’t know where it’s coming from.”

To show me, he huffed at the paper, and more red droplets soaked into the sheet.

At school, I had to run the 800 in gym class. Before the race began, the coach divided the runners into two teams: the Shirts and the Skins. Unfortunately, I was assigned to the Skins, and so I had to take off my T-shirt.

Bare-torsoed, I followed my herd for a quarter-mile around an oval-shaped track. Soon, my group moved out ahead of me. When I finished, I had to bend over and put my hands on my knees so I could breathe.

When I got back inside the school, one of the girls I had seen practicing her majorette moves said to me, “I saw you running out there. You were shirtless. You looked skinny, but wiry.”

Later, my father had surgery. When he came home from the hospital, he said, “They used a hammer and a chisel on my jaw. When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. So I told the nurses where to go. I don’t care what they thought. They don’t know what I’m about.”

A few days later, I heard my father yelling during the night. “The surgeons didn’t know what they were doing,” he said. “They left something in.”

“You didn’t take of yourself,” my mother said to him. “You were supposed to clean your mouth so you wouldn’t get an infection.”

“I have no time for that,” my father said.

“This is what happens then,” my mother said.

My father kept my family awake all night with his shouting.

In school, I went to a play rehearsal. I had been cast as a Greek soldier named Haemon. At one point I had to embrace a Greek noblewoman who was bigger than I was. I put my arms around her waist, stood on my toes, and brought my face to hers, but I couldn’t kiss her.

The director said to me, “Come on. Your name’s Haemon, but you act like Pocahontas.”

The student playing a Greek king said to me, “That was the most embarrassing kiss I’ve ever seen.”

I wanted to clasp Antigone with authority. I wanted to wrap my elbows around her neck and give her a lip smack. But the next time I went in for the smooch, all I could manage was a peck. Soon after that, another student replaced me in the role of Haemon.

At home, my father said to me, “You have a choice. You can wring your hands and become a fairy. Or you can do what I did. I found an Asian woman.”

When I didn’t say anything, my father said, “You’re dismissed.”

I went out to the toolshed and brought out the man-killer. I pulled the starter cord and gripped the handles tightly. The machine dragged me forward as it chewed into the ground.

I enlarged my father’s vegetable garden. I guided the plow around the perimeter and watched the motor-driven blades grind through the lawn grass.

Inside, I took a hardcover book off my father’s shelf and pulled an old letter from between the pages. The letter was from my father’s father. In it, he gave my father some advice about his upcoming wedding.

“Your mother and I were glad to meet your fiancée,” the letter read. “You both seem to love each other. But we can’t encourage you to go ahead with your plans. The marriage might be fine for you and your wife. But think of your children. They won’t belong with Asians, and they won’t belong with other people, either. Would that be fair to them?”

I climbed a ladder, opened a trapdoor, and stepped into the attic. The warm, still air smelled of dust. Near an air vent, wasps buzzed around a papery nest.

I lay down on the wood floor, which was unfinished and splintery. I spread out my arms and legs. After a while, I could feel my skin sweating. If I stayed this way long enough, I figured, I would die of thirst.

I stayed there for as long as I could, until the sun apparently moved and the heat faded. I climbed down the ladder and closed the trapdoor, so that no one would know where I had been.