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On Mother’s side of the family, Granpa Joe built a successful shoe manufacturing company, which my uncle took over and managed. Mother was the silent partner and the reason people said we were rich.

An elderly lady, Mrs. Brenwald, lived next door. She never went outside. Every Saturday a boy from the town market delivered grocery bags to her front porch. When I had nothing to do, I crouched by the living room window and waited for her to appear behind a curtain at night. Did she have a secret? An ugly past? My younger brother, Robert, said she was a witch but I believed that she floated in a world between earth and heaven—a harmless ghost, a lost angel.

The only evidence that Mrs. Brenwald once had an existence outside her house sat in her driveway. An antique Ford covered in a sheet was anchored to tires profoundly out of breath, squashed by endless seasons passing. More than once, Father called the police to take the car away. “A pile of crap,” he called it, but the car remained impervious even to him.

This proved to me that Mrs. Brenwald made a pivotal decision many years ago, and that she had willed her life into its present shape. I found this idea both mystifying and attractive. To form one’s destiny seemed monumental, like exploding holes through a mountain to get to the other side. But, in fact, that’s what I wanted to do.

I’d like to believe that Mother had wanted that too. Or, if, indeed, she had chosen an alternate path, she didn’t share it. She kept that decision to herself.

What started the course that caused her to fade away?

I turn to the past for answers, skipping as it is easy to do in my mind from one year to the next, to a place that is no longer there: our home. Yet, at sixteen years old, I can’t help myself. It’s like going toward forever, only backwards.

Chapter Two

“Sarah, bring me The Complete Works, will you?” Father said. He waved his fork like a sword, stabbing it in the air while he chewed.

I dashed through the rooms, across carpeting green as the fairways at the country club where we belonged. In the den with its built-in bar and bookshelves, I found the book of Shakespeare housed behind a picture of Father dressed in toddler’s clothes. His thick hair fell in ringlets to his shoulders, his white apron—a popular outfit of the period—rimmed his ankles.

My great grandmother, Sarah Davina, was there too, on the shelf, staring out from her tiny village in Russia. Her name, which I inherited, meant “beloved princess” in Hebrew. She wanted to become an opera star but that was an absurd dream for a poor, Jewish farm girl. Instead, she milked cows and married a teacher from the old country, a quiet, studious man who peered over the Torah. I stared at her picture and wondered what it must have felt like to give up a dream, to stand before the mountainside, the beautiful sky beyond, and realize that she had to turn away and go back down into a small, grimy town. I didn’t want that to be my fate.

She sang at shul. She sang to lighten her chores, she sang to her five children before bed at night; and through those children, she transported her musical seeds and they grew inside me.

Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high--

Judy Garland’s voice bubbled in my mind as I scanned the family line-up. Further down the shelf, my other grandmother looked square-faced. Tired. She died when I was too young to know her, a cold turned to pneumonia. Father told us she had blue periods, dark phases signaled by closed shades. In their Brooklyn apartment, his mother drank tea on a couch “the color of Flamingos!” On better days, something would shift in her, he said—the sun warming the kitchen table in the morning—and soon the house filled with her friends from the sisterhood, temple organizers, and bake sale fundraisers. The smell of cinnamon and coffee meant good times at home. Maybe this is what Father saw in Mother when they met: a darkness familiar to him in his childhood.

“Sarah? Are you lost? We’re waiting for you!” Father called to me.

I carried the book back to the table and sat down. By then, Luanne had cleared away the plates for dessert. She was a shy, comely woman with walnut brown skin who spoke in hushed, guarded tones around my parents. She became another person when my parents went out.

“Please, sing me that bridge song again,” I asked when I found her dusting a lamp in the den. I sat on the couch and squeezed my knees to my chest to show her I meant it. Please? She held a dust rag in her hand. The smell of lemon polish made my nose itch. It opened the pores in my brain.

She looked out the bay windows and opened her mouth in a wide O—Oh, lord, show me that bridge. I’m standing at the water, and I can’t see that bridge.”

It surprised me how she talked in a whisper yet sang solid and penetrating as an oboe.

continued . . .