[In a story in Cakewalk], "Artists," a young girl finds herself faced with a choice of identities that is reflected in the two pitched camps her family forms near her grandfather's deathbed; when the girl's father brings the dying old man's mistress to sit by his side, the family divides into those who are loyal to the grandmother, ensconced in frozen decorum downstairs in her Florida room painting cardinals and doves, and those who respect the mistress, a beauty shop proprietor who had been the one light of the grandfather's life for twenty years. "The whole family had to take sides," Jennifer notes, yet she herself cannot….

Which road to follow—high art and waist-length hair, suffering and self-willed isolation from such "bestial" … desires as midnight excursions to the refrigerator, or the "beautician's" entrenchment in rumpled realities of the flesh, page-boy curls, and kissing cousins? How to balance...