The Tale of Lucia Grandi, the Early Years

The Tale of Lucia Grandi

the Early Years

by

Susan Speranza

Published by Brook House Press at Smashwords

www.brookhousepress.org

brookhousepress@gmail.com

Copyright 2012 by Susan Speranza

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Speranza, Susan.

The Tale of Lucia Grandi, the early years/Susan Speranza.

1st edition.

Summary: An old woman tells of growing up in and surviving a troubled, warring, suburban family during the 1950s and ’60s.

ISBN: 978-0-944657-01-0 (paper);

ISBN: 978-0-944657-06-5 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-944657-05-8 (E-Book)

1. Family relations—fiction. 2. Problem families—fiction. 3.Mother-Daughter relationship—fiction. 4. Child abuse—fiction. 5.Coming of age—fiction.

[Fic] – dc22 2012946889

Cover photograph: Suburbia, Oil on canvas, 48x66, 2001, by Leonard Koscianski. Used with permission of Leonard Koscianski

For Red, because I never stopped asking why…

Let me think that there is one among those stars that guides my life through the dark unknown.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE—Stray Birds, CXLII

Table of Contents

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

Prologue

The world thinks me dead, but there is a lot of life left in these old bones yet. I’ve been absent from the world for a long time. But I’m here. Waiting.

Waiting.

I’m an old woman now. I spend my days looking out on a world where once I have had my play. I watch the seasons come and go and follow one another in an endless procession, an unbreakable cycle that knows no end. Round and round like some eternal carousel that I’ve failed to get off of I’ve outlived everyone and everything I knew. It’s all gone. The good and the bad. All of it. I, alone, remain.

Waiting.

So it was just after breakfast on this particular day in early June that I sat looking out the window as was my habit during the mid- morning lull, enveloped in the soft cushions of my familiar high- backed wing chair. I gazed out on a beautiful, clear and sun-filled morning. The lush grass spread out toward the horizon carpet-like, meeting the cloudless deep blue sky in a straight line that looked as if a steady hand had drawn it. The tall, plump trees that dotted the landscape at even intervals around the property swayed lightly in the soft breeze that blew in from the east. Patches of golden sunlight graced the fluttering leaves, dabbing bits of color on them as if Midas had laid his hand there.

I, therefore, didn’t notice when she had come.

But soon my attention was drawn from the window and the world beyond. As if sensing a strange presence, I turned toward the doorway which was behind me and I saw her. She stood like an angel, an innocent messenger, in the entrance of my room, lit from behind by the hall light that was still on. I could see that she was young, mid-twenties perhaps, and her golden red hair reminded me of both the sunset and the sunrise. It fell in waves to her waist like a blushing cascade. Her skin was so white and soft it looked like marble. For a moment I thought she was a painting. It was only when she smiled, that I knew she was real.

Or was she?

It had been a long time since I had had visitors. The world had all but forgotten me. Like some continuing drama from which I had been excused, the world went on without me. There were some years where I had lived at center stage. But those years were few and faded quickly. For these last decades now, I had been relegated to the wings and had even been gently, but persistently pushed out of the theater altogether. I had grown old childless and both my sister and my brother were long dead. Even some of their children had died in recent years. And to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren I was merely an unidentifiable photograph in the family album, an obscure name on the family tree, whose branch ended abruptly with me. The center of that tree and all the intertwining branches led elsewhere. No path ever led to me.

So I was confused that now, after all these years, I should have a visitor.

She smiled again, this angelic young woman as she brushed her hair from her face.

I hope I’m not disturbing you, she said tentatively, hovering uncertainly in the entryway.

I motioned for her to come in. Slowly she glided ghostlike toward me, her loose fitting, long white sundress billowing around her as she moved. Again, she smiled. This young woman intrigued me with her genteel manner and renaissance-like beauty. I wondered what she wanted with me.

I’m so sorry to disturb you, she reiterated softly, but they told me this would be a good time to see you.

I pointed to the wing chair opposite me; she slipped noiselessly and gracefully into it as if she were only spirit, unencumbered by her body. It had been years since I could do anything with such ease. For a long time now, I had an increasing awareness of my physical self as my body slowly ceased to function. My limbs grew stiff and heavy-laden with the years; movement was no longer instinctive and natural. Gone were the days when my body sliced through space, agile and unimpeded. Now in the evening of my life, as my body decayed around me like some worn and rusty armor, I was more aware of this flesh than ever. It lay round my spirit like a heavy chain that tied me down to earth.

All times are good to see me, I smiled, trying to put her at ease. I’m not a very busy person these days.

She looked down nervously, as if the reality of my static existence here at the end of my life embarrassed her. Then she cleared her throat, raised her head and looked directly at me, adopting a more formal stance. My name is Beatrice Cummings. I’m a doctoral student in Literature at the University and my dissertation is— she hesitated as if trying to find the right words —my dissertation examines the oral histories of living people, autobiographies, as it were, told by older people…

A silence fell over the room, as she turned her head and looked at me askance. She continued. I’d like to know if you would be willing to tell me your— and again she hesitated —your life’s story.

I hadn’t laughed so heartily in years. But suddenly, I found this strange request from this pretty and earnest young woman very amusing. I didn’t mean to mock her with my laughter, but she took it to be that way and she seemed hurt as if my amusement cut her in deep and secret places. Noting her pain, I took hold of myself and quickly apologized.

I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you. Or your request. It’s just that after all these years, why would anyone be interested in me?

I thought you would be a good subject for several reasons, she replied as if desperately trying to sell me on the idea. You’ve lived a long life—your still alive at a hundred and nine and—

One hundred ten, I corrected her. I just celebrated a birthday. I’m a Gemini, you know, born the first day of June.

Sorry, she said, then continued. One hundred ten... and unlike most people your age—

There aren’t too many left who are my age, I chuckled. Unlike most older people, she rephrased, "you seem to be, you

seem to have—" again, she hesitated as if she were afraid to really say what she was thinking.

I seem to still have my wits about me?

She looked down at her folded hands, and nodded.

Yes, I suppose that makes me a good subject. And I smiled. But I really have nothing very interesting to tell.

That’s for me to decide, she argued. I just want you to tell me everything or at least everything that was important to you.

I silently pondered her request. What would be the harm in telling this young woman my life’s story? She seemed almost desperate, and I remembered from my own graduate school days how hard it was to find a unique dissertation topic. If she needed help, then why shouldn’t I help her? And besides, I hadn’t had visitors in years and certainly, she would come regularly to hear this dying old woman reminisce about an unimportant and uneventful life. Time was endless for me now at the end of my life. Perhaps I could spare her what I had both so much and so little of.

Where would we begin? I asked.

At the beginning, of course. It was now her turn to laugh.

I didn’t think that was a silly question. Where does one’s beginning lie? David Copperfield began with his birth, but don’t all our beginnings reach farther back in time than we are even aware of? If the coachman hadn’t fallen in love with the cook, across an ocean far from their native lands, I would not be. If the fisherman hadn’t rebelled against his family and tradition, seeking fame and fortune in the land where the streets were paved with gold, I would never have existed. So how could I begin at the beginning, when I knew not where that beginning lay?

We can start now, if this is a good time, she said as if this had been firmly agreed to, the deal signed, the handshake given. She dug around in her bag and drew forth a recorder, placing it on the coffee table between us.

I turned and picked up the glass of water that was on the table next to me. I took a long drink, as if I had been so out of the practice of talking that the act made me thirsty. I put the glass carefully down and turned to her, but she was gone. The only thing that lingered was her perfumed scent that hung in the air around the chair where she sat. I wondered then if I only imagined her. I didn’t notice when she first came, nor did I see her leave. I wondered if she would return, full bodied and substantial, a living, breathing creature, or if she were just some figment of this dying woman’s imagination.

I turned and picked up the glass of water again. After another long drink, I laid it carefully down on the table. When I looked up again, I saw Beatrice gliding back into the chair opposite me, her white sundress fluttering around her. The sun streaming in from the window fell over her like an aura, turning her golden hair to fire and bathing her in a brilliant light.

I wondered again if she were real. Perhaps she was the one I had waited for since I was a child, I thought with a shudder. Was this the moment I had dreaded my whole life?

Silence was all around us broken only by the almost inaudible hum of the recorder.

Of one thing I was certain. Whether she was simply a graduate student or some harbinger of life’s end, I knew that so long as I spoke, I could extend this moment forever. For in this one moment I was still alive, I was still safe. And even though I was old, I wanted to stay alive. I wanted to be safe.

But what was I going to talk about? My past seemed like a long, tedious and poorly travelled road that disappeared from the horizon the moment I looked back at it. How was I going to keep her here with me in this moment where I still lived and breathed if I couldn’t even remember such an unremarkable life as mine?

I raised my eyes from my folded hands and met her insistent gaze.

I wanted her to stay. I wanted this moment to last. Forever.

I sighed and cleared my throat. Maybe I’d just make it all up.

1

There is one moment in all our lives where, like a door opening, we see for the first time. That event becomes our first memory. We have seen and experienced things before, but because we don’t remember them, they hold no meaning for us.

Often first memories are quite profound. A friend of mine remembered her newborn sister being placed in her arms when she was two. So powerful was this experience for her, with all its future implications of sibling rivalry, family bonds, herself one day as a mother holding her own infant daughter in her arms, that this was the event that awakened her.

The event that awakened me, however, was as horrifying as it was profound. It set the mood and the tone of my life. It was on Easter Sunday, just prior to my third birthday when my father, Leonard and my mother, Ruth, along with me and my older sister, Lynn, were walking toward my grandparents’ apartment in Brooklyn. We had just arrived, parked the car nearby and were hurrying, because my grandparents were awaiting us with one of my grandmother’s elaborate and bountiful holiday meals. We had just approached the corner where Knickerbocker and Myrtle Avenues meet, and began crossing the avenue under the El. This was a part of the world that time seemed to have forgotten. Made dark and shadowy even at high noon by the Elevator train, which cast the whole neighborhood into darkness, it was redeemed only by the century old cobblestone street, where people and cars tripped and skidded over the uneven stones.

Above us, people scurried through the upper station. Trains stopped here and this is where you could buy a ticket, embark or disembark by lurching up and down the long metal and stone stairs. Often in years to come, my grandfather and I would chase each other up one staircase, across the platform and down the other on the opposite side of the avenue. So we were used to the sound of trains grinding to a halt above us.

But on this particular day, as the train approached the station, we heard above us an ungodly screeching of the wheels as if the train were not only braking frantically, but was actually seeking to reverse itself. The squealing, grinding sound of clashing metal went on, it seemed, forever like some beast that had been mortally wounded and whose death was slow and torturous.

And when it was over there was a brief moment of silence before the commotion began. People around us froze, their heads thrown back, their eyes lifted to the heavens. Some clasped their hands over their mouths as if suppressing a scream, others clutched their heads between their hands, their mouths hanging open in disbelief.

A few feet in front of me it began: a dark, thick liquid splattered to the ground in large drops that quickly merged into puddles. Before my mother could stop me, I looked up and saw a man’s leg dangling precariously through the tracks as his shoe plummeted to the ground where the drops were now forming a lake on top of the cobblestones. His pants were soaked through with blood.

Then chaos broke out. I was thrust out of the street and onto the sidewalk with a ferocity I still remember. Women cried, men shouted. My father, a policeman by profession, began to order everyone around. There were sounds of sirens in the distance. My sister became hysterical; my mother left me standing alone on the sidewalk as she went to comfort the distraught girl. My father ordered my mother to take us to the apartment. He left us, running frantically up the stairs, disappearing into the darkness of the station, where he then presided over the crowd and the commotion that ensued.

My mother, never an obedient wife, at this moment did what she was told, and hustled us immediately upstairs to the third floor apartment, where my grandmother’s fragrant cooking permeated the place with warmth and comfort. My grandfather, who had been waiting expectantly for us, had just glanced out the window which was level with the tracks hoping to catch a glimpse of us. Instead, he saw a man dressed in a dark business suit and carrying a briefcase jump from the platform onto the tracks into the path of the oncoming train. The man stood erect, facing the train calmly as if looking toward a friend. As it approached, he spread out his arms as if ready to embrace a lover.

When I arrived at the apartment, my first instinct was to find my grandfather, to whom I was very close. I saw him standing by the window with his back to me. Agitated and frightened, I ran to him and to the window. I arrived there just in time to see the man’s severed leg break free from the tracks and fall to the street below. When he realized I was there, he cried, No, don’t look! and scooped me up, covering my eyes protectively with his hand as he turned and left the room with me.

But it was too late. I had seen, and seeing then became a habit of my life. Never again was I able to avert my eyes, or leave the veil that covers so many truths untouched. So it was on this beautiful Easter Sunday that I awakened to life and to the sad tragedy that is human existence.

2

What can I say about my beginnings that would illuminate the twists and turns of my life? What could I possibly tell that would explain how and why I arrived here at this dark moment at the end of my journey?

It was an inauspicious beginning. I was conceived in a moment of reconciliation amid one of my parents’ many violent disputes, created not out of love, for love was not the thing that bound Ruth and Leonard together. What cemented their union to death was the eternal struggle for power and dominance at its most fundamental level: the need to be right at all costs because to be wrong meant certain death. Death of one’s self, death of the illusions that sustained that self. It was a struggle to shape the vagaries of life and the inconsistencies of the human heart into the picture that each thought and hoped should exist. For them, the war was about keeping truth at bay, tucked safely behind the veil of illusion, about beating life and one another into a form that would fit the illusion.

It was a cold November day in 1950, when Ruth caught a chill while walking down Junction Boulevard in Queens where they, along with three-year-old Lynn, had recently moved. Shortly thereafter, she came down with pneumonia and barely able to breathe, her temperature rising to deadly levels, she cursed Leonard from what everyone assumed would be her death bed. He had brought this upon her, she raged and gagged and coughed, because he was too cheap to buy her a warm coat. Indeed, Leonard was a child of the Great Depression. He constantly worried about money; the salary of a New York City cop was small, and he always hated spending any of it, even on the necessities of life.

The doctors were intent on saving this young mother just twenty- four-years-old. They were horrified to learn she was pregnant, not more than two or three months along. They gently told her that she would miscarry because every drug known at that time had been given to her to save her life. No fetus so newly formed and vulnerable could survive such an attack.

But she slowly beat back the virus; after lying near death for several weeks she won the battle. And much to everyone’s surprise and horror, she remained pregnant.

Even then, before I knew my name or was conscious of life and the world, my battle began, my endless war with existence and its cruel, arbitrary nature. Before I knew the word no or could say or think or feel the word no, I uttered it in some silent and long forgotten language: no, I will not submit; no, I will not accept this; no, it will not be. I will not let it be...So I clung to life with a tenacity that would define me, and that awful, continuous struggle with existence would shape every aspect of my life to this end.

Ruth and Leonard awaited the arrival of their second child with some trepidation. The doctors warned that the child might be deformed or compromised in some way due to its unfavorable beginnings. But Leonard, always one to strike a deal that could get him what he wanted, launched a campaign to get from God what he felt was justly his, a healthy son. So every morning before he showed up at the Canal Street precinct in lower Manhattan or after work, if he were working his 4 to 12 shift, he stopped in at nearby St. Paul’s and made endless pacts with God. If you give me this, I will do this or that or behave this way or that way. He was certain that he had the ear of the Lord, that in the vast universe, this one God on high was listening closely to Leonard making note of his earthly, human wants.

Three days before my birth Ruth’s water broke and Leonard, who was off that day, rushed his wife to Bellevue hospital in downtown Manhattan from their home in Jackson Heights. There the terrible wait began. Lynn was given over to the care of my grandparents, who doted on the girl. Lynn loved them and often looked forward to their visits, but Brooklyn always scared her, especially the roaring of the trains passed the apartment, the murky daylight darkness of Myrtle Avenue. She simply didn’t want to be there. She became inconsolable even though my grandparents tried to distract her. And she began to hate the thing that forced her to be where she didn’t want to be, the very thing that took her parents away from her.

A day before my birth, Leonard came to visit Ruth and found her sobbing uncontrollably. When he asked what the matter was, she pulled back the blanket and cried Look!

In place of her round, fat, protruding belly, there was something that made Leonard queasy, almost fainting dead away. Her belly had flattened to a near pre-pregnancy level, but on her right side up near her waist was a bulging form of a very discernible head, and on her left side near her hip, was an equally disturbing bulge that wiggled like a pair of tiny feet. The doctor came upon them at that moment, and trying to console them, called the baby breech. He ordered Ruth to push whenever she felt a contraction so that the muscles might force the baby back into position again.

Leonard, never really good in emergencies for all his police training, ran from the room, ran right out of the hospital and like a convict seeking sanctuary, ran into the first church he came across. What he prayed for that night or what part of his life, salary, or soul he bartered with his God is unknown to me now, but his prayers were only partially answered, because on June 1, 1951 after three terrible days of labor, Ruth called forth a healthy 5lb 2oz baby girl. Ruth survived, and so did the baby. But the boy both Ruth and Leonard had desired was for them still only a hope and a dream.

The doctors beamed; the child was unharmed and normal. They couldn’t understand Ruth and Leonard’s profound disappointment. I already have a daughter, he remarked when the nurse rushed out to the waiting room to tell him he was the proud father of a baby girl. I already have a daughter, Ruth mumbled when upon coming out of sedation she was told what it was she had given birth to.

Ruth never had much use for girls; she had never been close to her sister, Helen. She resented her mother, Lillian, for making it clear that Helen was her favorite child, and she resented Helen for being that favorite child. Ruth had the misfortune of resembling in looks, in gesture and even in temperament, the handsome, dark, but irresponsible father who had abandoned the family in the midst of the Great Depression and left his wife and three daughters to starve. She paid for that resemblance all her life; her mother often contemptuously reminded her that she was her father’s daughter. Raymond Parker was a name we heard much of throughout our childhoods. It symbolized evil and betrayal, darkness and duplicity. He was the breathtakingly handsome man who seduced my beautiful, but naïve grandmother. In a fit of rebellion against her strict, brutal and austere German parents, she ran away with the first man who showed her any attention; a man who stole her gentle, trusting heart. The consequences of her unabashed love and misguided loyalty to that love (we were often reminded) was that by the time she was twenty-six, she was alone, impoverished and the beauty that had so defined her was fading as she struggled to care for her three small daughters, the youngest of whom eventually succumbed to malnutrition at the age of two.

So Ruth, having a troubled relationship with both her mother and her sister, desired only sons.

Leonard didn’t dislike girls as Ruth clearly did. He merely grew up in a very traditional Italian family where a son was the physical affirmation of a man’s masculinity, a son who could be shaped and molded into his own image, a son who could carry on the family name, who would take care of him in his old age. To him, girls were simply insignificant.

So it was on that early June morning, I fell with a thud into this unwelcoming family as if the Stork had played a perverse joke on me and on them—and dropped me into the wrong nest.

Thus I began my life.

3

Even when Ruth and Leonard didn’t intend it, they indulged in irony. So they named me Lucia, which means light, yet it was always the darkness that informed my life. And they named their eldest child Jocelynn which means joy. Yet never was there a child so joyless or so melancholy. It wasn’t really her fault; she was merely a female version of Leonard who was serious and grim by nature. Humor and wit escaped him; I don’t recall ever seeing him really laugh in all the years I knew him. So, too, was Lynn serious by nature. Laughter came unnaturally to her and her eyes often had the look of a hunted, haunted animal.

Our family life didn’t help. My parents’ constant war with one another took its toll on all of us. What little love they felt for us, was meted out in miserly portions and wrapped with conditions that were impossible for even a saint to fulfill. Leonard saw in Lynn’s dismal features some reflection of his own self; so he actually liked Lynn as much as he could like a daughter.

His love and approval, therefore, became extremely important to her; it motivated all her endeavors. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for it. She lapped up his sparse praise like a starving puppy. All it took to elevate her spirits for days was for Leonard to nod approvingly. So she fought to become the daughter he wanted: the obedient child, the straight A student, the successful athlete.

Her efforts worked; both Ruth and Leonard came to approve of her and often held her up as an example for me to emulate, the picture of perfection to strive for. It was just a fact in our family that Lynn was the perfect child and I was the imperfect, errant one.

But perfection didn’t come naturally or easily to Lynn. It was something she had to work very hard at constantly. She spent many hours honing herself to our parents desire and in exchange for this she received what she wanted—the few crumbs of love they could spare. She became extremely competitive at a young age. Playing a game of Chutes and Ladders or Monopoly became a life and death struggle, to the point where I didn’t want to play with her and none of her friends wanted to play with her either. When Leonard told us inflated tales of how he was a star basketball player in high school, Lynn began to show interest in basketball, becoming obsessive about it. She begged Leonard to install a hoop over the garage of our suburban Long Island home where we moved when I was four. She practiced relentlessly and when she made her school’s team by sheer will rather than natural talent, she played ruthlessly and won at all costs. Leonard, who still longed for a son, accepted her as a temporary substitute. He taught her how to perfect her technique, accompanied her to games, advised her on court strategies, showed her how to play within the rules, but play dirty and underhanded.

When Leonard told us tall tales of how he ran marathon-like runs while training for his stint in the Navy during World War II, Lynn began to take an interest in track at school. She pounded her thick body and short, stubby legs into the pavement until she was unable to walk in order to attain the speed and agility she needed to be on the tract team. She endured any physical hardship or misery just to have Leonard sitting in the stands, cheering her on.

When Ruth told us often (in a very superior way) how she graduated from high school when she was only sixteen because she was such a good student that she was skipped not once but twice, Lynn decided to attain all A’s in every subject. She was determined to be smart, so she studied compulsively. She became obsessed with memorizing everything. She memorized license plates on cars as they whizzed by us on the parkways. She memorized book titles on the shelves as we walked down the aisles of our local library. She memorized every product in the supermarket and every price of every product. In this way memorization became a habit, a learned skill that served her well. For all that was required of her at the Catholic school we were forced to attend was to recite back what the nuns told us or what we read in our books. It was no surprise then that Lynn rose easily to the head of her class, and became the darling of her teachers and our parents.

But all this rote learning took its toll. Lynn was never happy or content with any achievement. The idea of failure haunted her from a young age and she deeply feared the concomitant loss of her parents’ love. On some fundamental level she must have known that while she could memorize and recite anything, push her body to achieve things it wasn’t built for, she had no real understanding of life and the world around her. She, therefore, lived in fear of the moment when she would be called upon to give an answer or solve a problem or use a skill that required something other than rote memory or sheer force. So she had panic attacks at a young age, and she hated anything and anyone she couldn’t control either through force or memory.

It was fitting then that she hated me, for I was quite the opposite, with acute perceptions, an agile mind and a quick tongue that sliced through everyone’s illusions like a deadly sword. I flitted and ran through life; I evaporated and reappeared in front of everyone’s eyes like an insubstantial being. As hard as they tried to grasp me, I always slipped like water through everyone’s controlling hands.

So Lynn’s hatred of me was deep and unrelenting. She never forgave me for existing. From the moment I was born, her goal was to kill me. Me, the usurper, her ultimate rival for the small quantity of love our parents held out to us. Leonard, especially, perpetuated this war between us; he played us well against each other, and delighted in our fierce disputes. Having grown up in a household that dispensed love in this fashion, he followed the pattern of his childhood and threw his love and approval down between us, like a bone to starving dogs. There he would watch on the sidelines as we fought bloody, deadly battles. I was not as competitive as Lynn, and being younger by four years, I was not as physically strong as she was, but I was more stubborn and more fearless and when incensed, would not back down. When pushed too far, an uncontrollable anger would boil up from within me and rage like a wild fire across the placid landscape, destroying everything in its path. But I was also more sensitive by nature; I preferred peace to conflict, happiness to sorrow. There were some things I was willing to let go; some things not worth expending the energy to fight over. Any fight, I felt, was merely a means to an end. I learned to choose my battles carefully and when I controlled my anger, I managed to fight only the important ones. But Lynn, like Leonard, loved the idea of battle; the fight became the thing itself. Everything was to be fought over; she saw in every action and every event a potential conflict to be won or lost, whether it was over a pencil, how many books we each read during the summer, where to sit at dinner, what TV program to watch. My stubbornness and fearlessness, my anger and my refusal to back down helped me win as many battles as I lost. But I hated the almost constant battle that left no time for other things. And I learned that open and direct conflict could be costly and deadly, especially when I lost. So when faced with the prospect of battle, there were many times when I simply retreated to bide my time and wait.

It was not to say that Lynn and I fought all the time. We were children and as children we had many moments of closeness and affection. During the holidays when our grandparents would visit and stay over, we would be relegated to sleeping in the partially finished dormered attic. There in the big double bed we snuggled under the maroon flowered comforter that smelled of cedar from the cedar chest where it was stored when not in use. Lynn and I would lay in the dark, talking about children’s things in our own children’s way, holding hands and looking at the stars as they twinkled in at us through the large picture window of the dormer.

But it seemed that whenever we showed kindness or affection to one another, either Ruth or Leonard interfered. Leonard interfered because of his divide and conquer philosophy. Ruth, however, had other motivations. She had grown up feeling that she always had to be her sister’s keeper, her sister who was sickly as a child and psychically fragile and sensitive as an adult. So she was intent on preventing us from being so dependent on one another. There were times when Lynn and I just wanted to be with one another and Ruth would separate us, terrified that any camaraderie signaled the end of our individual selves and our individual lives.

I remember a time when Lynn was eight and I was four. She mounted her bicycle and was going to visit a friend. I didn’t want her to go. I ran after her, crying and begging her not to leave. Lynn hesitated, turned back and looked at me with sad and dismal eyes. No, Ruth admonished, You go. Lynn, who never disobeyed our parents under any circumstances, reluctantly did as she