ALTHOUGH THE THREAT of atomic warfare hung over us constantly when I was a boy in Babbington, New York, clam capital of America, we didn’t think about annihilation all the time. Sometimes we worried about war and rumors of war, it’s true, but at other times we had other thoughts: we fell in love, pondered the meaning of life, and went about the mundane business of living it, and grown-ups tried to calm the fears of their children by living ordinary lives and doing ordinary things—going to work and dusting the furniture and making us eat our peas.
    The peas favored in my family throughout my childhood and adolescence were the Troubled Titan brand, the same brand served in the cafeteria of the Purlieu Street School. They were gray-green, smoothly spherical‚ without the dimples or wrinkles of, say, raisins, and so uniform in size that they might have been an artificial foodstuff manufactured at the Troubled Titan’s factory—replicas of a single master, an archetypal pea—rather than something that sprang from dirt and formed in pods. They arrived at the school already cooked, in enormous cans, each can wrapped in a sleeve of silver paper, imprinted with a picture of the Troubled Titan. They were what was called a “heat ’n’ eat” type of food. Behind the scenes, in the kitchen of the cafeteria, someone opened the cans and poured the contents into one of the large rectangular warming trays that fitted into the steam table. Ready in a jiffy!

ONE DAY I was in the cafeteria at the new junior high school, making my way along the steam table in a line with the other scholars, collecting the various components of my lunch: half a pint of milk in a waxed cardboard container shaped like a cabin in the woods; two slices of white bread; a square pat of butter on a square of white cardboard with the edges bent up to make a little tray, with a square of thin translucent waxed paper stuck to the top; one slice of roast beef as thick as a nickel, marbled like a topographic map, gray as the sheet of cardboard around which Spotless Cleaners folded my father’s Sunday shirts, with gravy; mashed potatoes, also with gravy; and those Troubled Titan peas. A woman in a hair net dished the peas out onto my plate lukewarm and wet. The pea water, gray-green like the peas themselves, spread instantly, making an island of the mashed potatoes, mingling with the gravy.
    Of the many things that puzzled me about school, one was that the common sense so prized in society at large in those days never seemed to penetrate the doors of the school building. Watching the pea water and the gravy interswirl, I wondered why the divided plates that my family used on picnics were not used here in the school cafeteria, where they were really needed. Finding myself wondering along those lines, I thought of suggesting the use of divided plates to one of the ladies in the hair nets, but I decided against it, because the time that I’m recalling was a time when young people generally kept their mouths shut.
Occupied by my thoughts, I took a seat at a table that was otherwise unoccupied and set my tray on the table. I was observing the spread of the pea water when Margot and Martha Glynn arrived and sat on either side of me, Margot on my right and Martha on my left.
    “Are you right- or left-handed, Peter?” asked Margot without preamble.
    “Well,” I said, “I write with my right hand but I throw a ball with my left, so you could say I’m—”
    I paused slightly, because I enjoyed the word I was about to say and was proud of the skill it summarized.
    “—ambidextrous.”
    “That’s good. Ambidextrous is good,” said Margot.
    “But those are useless skills,” said Martha.
    “Yes,” said Margot. “What about rolling peas?”
    “Rolling peas?” I had the feeling that a joke was coming.
    “Try it,” said Martha. She picked a pea from her plate with the tip of her spoon and let it roll onto the table between us. Margot did the same with one of hers.
    “Now rest your finger on that pea,” said Margot. “Martha’s, too.”
    I put my index fingers on the peas.
    “This one,” said Martha, taking the middle finger of my hand and placing it on her pea. Margot made the same change on her side.
    “Just rest your finger there lightly,” Margot cautioned. “Don’t squash the little thing.”
    I did as she said.
    “The same over here,” said Martha.
    “Good,” said Margot. “Now let’s see you roll the peas around a little.”
    Cautiously, I began to move my fingers on the peas.
    “Close your eyes,” said Martha.
    I closed my eyes, and I found that that helped. The peas seemed larger, more easily manipulated. I had a better sensation of the feeling of each pea against the finger pad that rested on it. I seemed to acquire a sense of the difference between the skin of the pea and the mush it contained, to understand the tensile limits of the skin, the edge of the danger of rupturing it, and the resistant resilience of the ball of mush within. I became a little bolder, rolling the peas a little farther, a little faster—and the right one got away from me.
    “Don’t get cocky,” said Margot. “Just move them around a little. Don’t try to impress us.”
    “You’ve got to walk before you can fly,” said Martha. “Try again.” Humbled, I moved the peas gingerly, maintaining control, moving them ever so slightly, just keeping each pea on the central ridge of my finger pad, never rolling so far that the pea would slip away. . . .

    “Faster over here,” said Margot.
    “And slower over here,” said Martha, “but with longer strokes.”
    “Okay, let me see. I—oops—I—”
    “He squashed mine,” said Martha. There was in her voice a note that I wouldn’t have expected. I might have expected her to be annoyed with me, or I might have expected her to be amused, but she was—and this was unmistakable—disappointed.
    “What do you think?” she asked Margot.
    “He can do it if he concentrates,” she said. “I really think he can.”
    “Practice at home.”
    “Practice at home?” I asked.
    “You have peas at home, don’t you?”
    “Sure, but—” I had intended to say that I wasn’t allowed to play with my food, but when I looked into Margot’s doubting, inquisitive eyes, I saw that such an objection was inappropriate. I looked at Martha and saw the same thing in her eyes.
    “But?” she asked.
    “Well—why?”
    They looked at each other. They looked at me.
    “Just to please us,” said Martha.