Our Saturday gig was at a music store called Diamond Records. The owner, a stout Pakistani in stained dress pants and flip-flops, seemed totally unprepared for our invasion of his store, which was too small for a live band. He looked on, chagrined, as we set up our speakers and untangled our cords. Mom had likely convinced him over the phone what a great “promotional opportunity” this would be. I had heard her make many such calls in the breakfast nook off our kitchen, charming the owners of pizzerias, roller rinks, and shopping centers. Her pitch made “live music” seem like the ultimate business panacea. “Don’t you think some live music would be a great draw?” she would say. “Wouldn’t your customers love a little live music?”

I set up the amps, speakers, and monitors in a tight space between the register and the back door; then I helped Caroline with her drum kit while Ken fussed over the unfamiliar mixer. Mom arranged her pyramidal wooden stand with her maracas, wood blocks, castanets, tambourine, flute, and piccolo, all suspended from stainless-steel hooks. My father had made the stand for her years before in his basement workshop. It was ingeniously designed and rotated 360 degrees on its base, putting everything precisely within her reach. My mother had viewed my father’s skill at building such contraptions less as an art and more as some idiot-savant trick.

Mom had a cardboard display of albums by Essentials, her old gigging band, and she placed it prominently before us at each show beside a poster-sized image of her in a diaphanous gown, standing on a circular rock in a pond. It was meant to look like some sylvan glade, but I knew it had been shot in the drainage ditch behind her drummer’s apartment building. Our band, the Poplars, had no product of its own, though Mom promised the audience at each show that our debut album was imminent, “as soon as we get some studio time.” She kept a half-page log of advance orders for it. She also kept a standard contract, just in case some vacationing record exec caught our act and wanted to sign us on the spot.   I waited for Ken to finish sullenly tuning the borrowed acoustic so he could tune my bass. He had perfect pitch, and my inability to tune my instrument struck him as some inexplicable handicap. My musical ability didn’t impress him either. He had originally written simplified bass lines for me with the promise that he would come up with more-sophisticated ones later. He’d never bothered to, and I’d never reminded him.

Mom led us through a lengthy sound check, though the owner kept repeating, “Sounds good. Begin. Please begin.” Then she stepped to the microphone and faced the tiny group of shoppers who’d watched us set up. Over the past couple of weeks, her introduction had lengthened incrementally with each gig: by a phrase, a joke, a musing. It was now so long that I felt, by the end, as if someone were slowly driving a knife into my gut.

“Hello, all. I’m Glynn Poplar. We’ve come up here from Toronto to entertain you for the next hour or two. Now, some of you might recognize me from my former musical group, Essentials.” She always paused here for recognition, never showing any sign of discouragement when there was none. “But this is, I must say, my favorite project.” A fond glance over her shoulder now. “We call ourselves the Poplars, and we’re not the Partridge Family, but we do hope you will ‘c’mon, get happy.’ ”

I winced. I had pleaded with Mom dozens of times to remove that stale tv-show reference.

She went on. “This is my husband, Ken, on guitar, and on drums my daughter, Caroline Anne Poplar. And last but not at all least, our most recent addition: my son, Thomas Bertrand Poplar, who eagerly took up the bass this year to help us out.”

I always kept track of the inaccuracies in Mom’s introduction; today there were three: First, we were not from Toronto but from Mississauga, a suburb far removed from downtown. Second, Ken was not her husband, though she had campaigned for them to set a date for some time. They’d had two near misses: an announcement at Christmas that had gone nowhere, and more plans around Valentine’s Day that also had never materialized.

But it was the last inaccuracy that pricked me most. I hadn’t taken up the bass with any enthusiasm but rather had been forced into it through a combination of guilt-tripping, goading, flattery, bullying, and unkept promises. They’d begun the band with just my mother, Ken, and Caroline, but the sound was too thin; it had no bottom end. Ken’s meandering solos sounded stranded, suspended like kites caught in telephone wires. I was a conscript, like Caroline before me, drafted shortly after her fourteenth birthday when Mom first came up with the idea for a family band. Caroline and I knew better than to reveal the true circumstances of our participation, though I suspected people sensed the truth. I’d seen a documentary about American pows in Hanoi who’d blinked Morse-code distress signals to the camera, and I sometimes imagined the audience could read the same message of resistance in our faces.

When Mom had finally finished, she invited the audience to “share this time with us,” which was our cue to begin.

For a half dozen record shoppers, we played our usual first set: “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Photographs and Memories,” “Desperado,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” “Stardust,” a treacly Essentials ballad called “The Promise of My Love,” and a white-bread funk number co-written by Mom and Ken called “She’s Got That Look Again,” whose bass line I’d yet to master.

More customers entered but avoided eye contact with us, as if afraid they might unwittingly commit to something. One man hovered in the doorway a moment, then headed right back out.

During the break between sets, I sat in a folding chair against a wall and listened to Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast on my Walkman. I watched a group of kids my age in concert t-shirts peruse the new releases, including the Judas Priest album Screaming for Vengeance, which I’d coveted for weeks. A few girls were among them, plastic combs in the back pockets of their jeans. I half hoped they’d seen the first set, half hoped they hadn’t.

Caroline sat next to me, a sheen of sweat on her throat, her bangs combed down to conceal the acne on her forehead. She was eyeing a blond boy across the record racks, but he seemed too timid to approach. I might have been frightened of Caroline too. She wore a pink halter top and a short black skirt with a slit partway up the thigh — a stage uniform Mom had approved. Caroline ran the bead of her drumstick along her cheekbone, crossed her legs, and stared at the boy with a cool expectancy that he had no answer for. I wondered where she’d learned this new talent. She’d changed over the past year. Not long ago we’d actually talked, schemed, and joked, even slid notes underneath each other’s doors when we were supposed to be sleeping. Lately her few communications to me had been either criticisms or threats.

Mom spent the break hustling, as usual, holding up an Essentials lp to a middle-aged man in a tweed driving cap who kept his hands folded across his chest and far from his wallet as he stared appreciatively at her. Mom’s blond Lady Godiva hair reached the small of her back, and she looked ten years younger than thirty-eight.

After a precise fifteen minutes she motioned for us to start the second set.

“Do you take requests?” the tweed-capped man asked, grinning. “I’d love to hear a little Carly Simon.”

Though the man was just a few feet from her, Mom answered into the microphone. “I’m sorry, sir, but Carly and I are having a little disagreement. She refuses to sing my songs, and I refuse to sing hers.” She laughed her bright laugh, but no one joined in. I pretended to adjust my volume knob. The tweed-capped man edged away.

My mind roamed during our second set, returning only in the middle of Ken’s frenetic, jazzy outro to “Touch Me”: I always enjoyed watching his pained expression, as if the guitar were an immense weight he had lifted incorrectly. I also tuned back in during my mother’s flute solo on “Summer Wine,” which I liked for its graceful runs and its finish, where she played a fluttering trill and gradually drew back from the microphone, eyes shut. Aside from those moments, I was thinking of the girls who were shopping. I imagined playing for them: not here but on a real stage, and not this music but something incredible and majestic of my own composition. I imagined this until I saw a smirk on one teenager’s face, and then I stared at my feet, furious to be playing a Glen Campbell cover in my mother’s band. I flubbed a few changes, and Ken’s eyes lit on me. I felt sulky and chastened for the rest of the set.

To make Caroline and me view our performances more professionally, Mom and Ken had instituted a policy of fines. Our normal wage was five dollars per show, but for each obvious mistake we were docked fifty cents. If we were “caught napping” or made a serious screw-up, we were fined a full dollar. Other minor offenses included frowning, rudeness, gum chewing, giggling, and improper stage attire. I averaged three dollars per show, after penalties. Caroline did slightly better. She was more skillful and had a genuine feel for her instrument that I never had. Mom and Caroline joked that I played bass like my father would have: as if I were trying to wrestle it into submission.

After the record-store gig, I received $2.50 from Mom — until Ken corrected her and revised it to $2.00.

Caroline complained when she got only three dollars.

“You spaced out twice when that blond boy walked by,” my mother admonished. “We turn their heads, not the other way around.”

Caroline stomped away, her body tight with fury. My sister looked dangerous, with her bony shoulders and gunmetal braces. She seemed to have some coiled menace within her to which our mother was oblivious. Sometimes I thought I should warn Mom.

On our way out of the store I picked up a Screaming for Vengeance cassette and surreptitiously made my way to the counter. Mom intercepted me at the register. “I thought you were saving your money for that nice hard-shell case at Steve’s Music.” I hesitated, nodded, then placed the tape back on the shelf.

“What if he doesn’t want a nice hard-shell case?” said Caroline, who had returned and was leaning in the doorway. “Isn’t it his money? Why can’t he spend it how he wants?”

Mom studied her coolly. “Ken is giving both of you lessons for free,” she said. “What if he charged you what he charges his students: twenty dollars an hour? Would you want to pay that? Would you be able to?”

“But we don’t want lessons,” Caroline said. “You can’t force somebody to do something, then make them pay for it.”

Mom laughed and said, “Welcome to the real world.” This was a favorite expression of hers, though she often substituted the “grown-up world” or the “big, bad world.” Whenever she said this, I imagined her standing at the gates to some joyless wasteland.

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