One

SO NOW IT’S 1979. Year of the Goat. The Earth Goat.

Here are some things you might remember. Margaret Thatcher had just been elected prime minister. Idi Amin had fled Uganda. Jimmy Carter would soon be facing the Iran hostage crisis. In the meantime, he was the first and last president ever to be attacked by a swamp rabbit. That man could not catch a break.

Here are some things you maybe didn’t notice at the time. The same year Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty, it snowed for half an hour in the Sahara Desert. The Animal Defense League was formed. Up on the Magdalen Islands, eight crew members from the Sea Shepherd sprayed more than a thousand seal pups with a harmless but permanent red dye. This dye was designed to ruin their pelts and save the pups from hunters. The activists were arrested and, in pitch-perfect Orwellian double-speak, charged with violating the Seal Protection Act.

Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” was on the radio, The Dukes of Hazzard on the TV. Breaking Away was in the theaters and Bloomington, Indiana, was ready for its close-up.

The only part of this I was aware of at the time was the Breaking Away part. In 1979, I was five years old, and I had problems of my own. But that’s how excited Bloomington was—even the suffering children could not miss the white-hot heat of Hollywood.

•   •   •

MY FATHER WOULD surely want me to point out that, at five, I was still in Jean Piaget’s preoperational phase with regard to cognitive thinking and emotional development. He would want you to understand that I am undoubtedly, from my more mature perspective, imposing a logical framework on my understanding of events that didn’t exist at the time. Emotions in the preoperational stage are dichotomous and extreme.

Consider it said.

Not that there aren’t times when dichotomous and extreme are exactly what’s warranted. Let’s simplify matters and just agree that, at this point in my story, my whole family, all of us, young and old, was really really really upset.

The day after my cross-capital trek from trampoline to little blue house, my father appeared. My grandparents had called him to come fetch me, but no one told me that part. I still thought I was being given away, only not to my grandparents, who’d turned out not to want me. Where next? Who would love me now? I sobbed in as decorous a manner as possible, because my father didn’t like it when I cried and I still had hopes. But no one admired my heroic restraint and my father didn’t even seem to notice my tears. He had obviously washed his hands of me.

I was sent out of the room, where a good deal of hushed and ominous talking happened, and even when my bag was packed and I was in the backseat and the car was moving, I still didn’t know I was being taken home. Which was just as well, because I wasn’t.

As a child, I chose to escape unhappy situations by sleeping through them. I did so now, and when I woke I was in a strange room. In many ways, the strangest things about this room were the bits that weren’t strange. My chest of drawers was by the window. The bed I was in was my bed, the quilt over me was my quilt—hand-sewn by Grandma Fredericka back when she’d loved me, appliquéd with sunflowers that stretched from the foot to the pillow. But the drawers were all empty and, under that quilt, the mattress was bare to the buttons.

There was a fort made of boxes by the window, one of them a carry-all for beer cans, and through the handholds I could see the cover of my own Where the Wild Things Are, with its egg-shaped stain of smeared Hershey’s Kiss. I climbed onto a box to look outside and found no apple tree, no barn, no dusty fields. Instead some stranger’s backyard, with a barbecue, a rusted swing-set, and a well-kept vegetable garden—tomatoes reddening, pea pods popping—swam mistily behind the double-paned glass. In the farmhouse where I lived such vegetables would have been picked, eaten, or thrown long before they’d ripened on the vine.

The farmhouse where I lived grumbled and whistled and shrieked; there was always someone pounding on the piano or running the washing machine or jumping on the beds or tub-thumping the pans or shouting for everyone to be quiet because they were trying to talk on the phone. This house lay in an oneiric hush.

I’m not sure what I thought then, perhaps that I was to live here alone now. Whatever it was, it sent me sobbing back to bed and back to sleep. In spite of my best hopes, I woke up in the same place in the same tears, calling despairingly for my mother.

My father came instead, picking me up and holding me. “Shh,” he said. “Your mother is sleeping in the next room. Were you scared? I’m sorry. This is our new house. This is your new room.”

“Everyone lives here with me?” I asked, still too cautious to be hopeful, and I felt my father flinch as if I’d pinched him.

He put me down. “See how much bigger your new room is? I think we’re going to be very happy here. You should look around, kiddo. Explore. Just not into your mother’s room,” pointing out their door, which was right next to mine.

The floors of our old house were a bruised wood or linoleum, anything that could be cleaned in a hurry with a mop and a bucket of water. This house had a scratchy silver carpet extending from my new bedroom into the hall with no break. I wouldn’t be skating in my socks here. I wouldn’t be riding my scooter on this rug.

The new upstairs consisted of my bedroom, my parents’ bedroom, my father’s study with its blackboard already propped against the wall, and one bathroom with a blue tub and no shower curtain. My new room may have been bigger than the bright little nook I’d had in the farmhouse, but I could see that the house itself was smaller. Or maybe I couldn’t see that when I was five. Ask Piaget.

Downstairs was a living room with a tiled fireplace, the kitchen with our breakfast table in it, another bathroom, smaller, with a shower but no tub, and next to that my brother’s room, only my brother’s bed had no blankets, because, I found out later that night, he’d refused to set foot in the new house, and had gone instead to stay with his best friend Marco for as long as they’d have him.

And that right there is the difference between me and my brother—I was always afraid of being made to leave and he was always leaving.

All the rooms had boxes in them and almost none of the boxes had been opened. There was nothing on the walls, nothing on the shelves. A few dishes in the kitchen, but no sign of our blender, toaster, bread-maker.

As I made my way for the first time through the house I would live in until I was eighteen, I began to suspect what had happened. I could find no place where the graduate students would work. I looked and looked, back upstairs and then down again, but could find only three bedrooms. One of them was my brother’s. One of them was our mother and father’s. One of them was mine. I hadn’t been given away.

Someone else had.

•   •   •

AS PART OF leaving Bloomington for college and my brand-new start, I’d made a careful decision to never ever tell anyone about my sister, Fern. Back in those college days, I never spoke of her and seldom thought of her. If anyone asked about my family, I admitted to two parents, still married, and one brother, older, who traveled a lot. Not mentioning Fern was first a decision, and later a habit, hard and painful even now to break. Even now, way off in 2012, I can’t abide someone else bringing her up. I have to ease into it. I have to choose my moment.

Though I was only five when she disappeared from my life, I do remember her. I remember her sharply—her smell and touch, scattered images of her face, her ears, her chin, her eyes. Her arms, her feet, her fingers. But I don’t remember her fully, not the way Lowell does.

Lowell is my brother’s real name. Our parents met at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona at a high school summer science camp. “I’d come to see the heavens,” our father always said. “But the stars were in her eyes,” a line that used to please and embarrass me in equal measure. Young geeks in love.

I would think better of myself now if, like Lowell, I’d been angry about Fern’s disappearance, but it seemed too dangerous just then to be mad at our parents and I was frightened instead. There was also a part of me relieved, and powerfully, shamefully so, to be the one kept and not the one given away. Whenever I remember this, I try to also remember that I was only five years old. I’d like to be fair here, even to myself. It would be nice to get all the way to forgiveness, though I haven’t managed it yet and don’t know that I ever will. Or ever should.

Those weeks I spent with our grandparents in Indianapolis still serve as the most extreme demarcation in my life, my personal Rubicon. Before, I had a sister. After, none.

Before, the more I talked the happier our parents seemed. After, they joined the rest of the world in asking me to be quiet. I finally became so. (But not for quite some time and not because I was asked.)

Before, my brother was part of the family. After, he was just killing time until he could be shed of us.

Before, many things that happened are missing in my memory or else stripped down, condensed to their essentials like fairy tales. Once upon a time there was a house with an apple tree in the yard and a creek and a moon-eyed cat. After, for a period of several months, I seem to remember a lot and much of it with a suspiciously well-lit clarity. Take any memory from my early childhood and I can tell you instantly whether it happened while we still had Fern or after she’d gone. I can do this because I remember which me was there. The me with Fern or the me without? Two entirely different people.

Still, there are reasons for suspicion. I was only five. How is it possible that I remember, as I seem to, a handful of conversations word for word, the exact song on the radio, the particular clothes I was wearing? Why are there so many scenes I remember from impossible vantage points, so many things I picture from above, as if I’d climbed the curtains and was looking down on my family? And why is there one thing that I remember distinctly, living color and surround-sound, but believe with all my heart never occurred? Bookmark that thought. We’ll come back to it later.

I remember often being told to be quiet, but I seldom remember what I was saying at the time. As I recount things, this lacuna may give you the erroneous impression that I already wasn’t talking much. Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I’m not.

Our parents, on the other hand, had shut their mouths and the rest of my childhood took place in that odd silence. They never reminisced about the time they had to drive halfway back to Indianapolis because I’d left Dexter Poindexter, my terry-cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love—as who amongst us is not) in a gas station restroom, although they often talk about the time our friend Marjorie Weaver left her mother-in-law in the exact same place. Better story, I grant you.

I know from Grandma Fredericka, and not our parents, that I once went missing for long enough that the police were called, and it turned out I’d tailed Santa Claus out of a department store and into a tobacco shop where he was buying cigars, and he gave me the ring off one, so the police being called was just an added bonus on what must have already been a pretty good day.

I know from Grandma Donna, and not our parents, that I once buried a dime in some cake batter as a surprise, and one of the graduate students chipped her tooth on it, and everybody thought Fern had done it, until I spoke up, so brave and honest. Not to mention generous, since the dime had been my own.

So who knows what revelries, what romps my memories have taken with so little corroboration to restrain them? If you don’t count the taunting at school, then the only people who talked much about Fern were my grandma Donna, until Mom made her stop, and my brother Lowell, until he left us. Each had too obvious an agenda to be reliable: Grandma Donna wishing to shield our mother from any share of blame, Lowell stropping his stories into knives.

Once upon a time, there was a family with two daughters, and a mother and father who’d promised to love them both exactly the same.