that was kept crisply clipped on my aunt’s instructions to the gardener shared by both families. The front door was framed by stone urns, and the central flowerbed was anchored with a matching gray stone cherub because every garden needs a classic figure to set the atmosphere just so. Most of the flowers, those daisies included, were white.
Inside the house almost all the furniture and pictures had been chosen by my grandmother and my aunt, who had sent over containers from Yurp or otherwise outfitted the rooms with discoveries made during their Saturday excursions or castoffs from their own homes. The furniture was arranged in the rigid, formal groupings my aunt favored. She and my grandmother would often come over at the end of their Saturdays, and even, maybe especially, if my mother wasn’t home they would introduce a new table or print or vase, readjust or rearrange several other pieces, and sometimes rehang the pictures, with the result that our house looked like a somewhat sparser cross between my grandmother’s apartment and my aunt’s house.
My mother, while raising three young boys and at the same time helping to take care of her mother, did not have so much time for interior decoration. In these early years she appeared to tolerate these ferpitzings of her in-laws. Sometimes she would walk in and say, opaquely, “Ah, I see they’ve been here again”; sometimes she was so busy that it took her a day or two to notice that there had been a change. I was not like her. I noticed the most minute shift in any interior anywhere.
Upstairs alone in the quiet of my room I took special pleasure in unwrapping my new treasures. It was like receiving them all over again. Methodically I laid out on my desk my new art book, my pencil box and bookends, the copy of How Green Was My Valley that my aunt decided, after all, might be a better choice for me to borrow from my grandmother’s library, and the set of colored pencils that she stopped to buy me at an art supply store on our way up the hill that morning, since mine, she had noted critically, were used practically down to the nub.
I put the diary that Grandma Huffy gave me in the drawer of the table by my bed and soon became so absorbed in Famous Paintings, which was my favorite of all the gifts my aunt gave me that weekend, that I was unaware of the door to my room cracking open to allow eyes, two sets of them—my brothers’ two sets—to observe me.
The door cracked, then creaked. I looked up. It opened wider, and first Danny, then Steve, stepped in.
The three of us were graduated in size. I was the tallest and, in these years before adolescence hit, had thick, silky hair that I had recently begun wearing longer over my ears. I had a version of my aunt’s botched nose, though I had been born with mine, which angled off slightly to the left; my eyes were green and often, even then, set within dark black circles that my mother said I had inherited from her father, my rabbi grandfather, but my aunt said were a sign of having an active, curious mind that was difficult to slow down even in sleep. Danny came next in line. His hair, also longer now, had a reddish tinge, and his face looked as if someone had taken an enormous pepper shaker and sprinkled freckles across it. His eyes were not circled in black; instead they went in and out of focus, as if he were intermittently listening to some piece of private music or following a conversation that he had no intention of sharing with anyone, ever. Steve was the “little one”; compact, wiry, athletic (as my aunt often said), he had a sly sense of humor and agate-like gray-green eyes that, even from the doorway, took rapid inventory of the new things on my desk.
“What’re you doing, Mike?” asked Danny.
“Reading,” I said.
“Is that book new?”
I nodded. “It’s a book about art.”
He approached my desk. Steve followed.
“You went to a bookstore without me?” Danny loved bookstores. The books he loved were simply different from the ones I loved. The ones my aunt and uncle and I loved.
I shook my head. “It’s something Auntie Hankie bought for me.”
He shrugged, too casually. “What’s that one?”
“I’m borrowing it from Grandma’s house. It’s a novel. Auntie Hankie read it when she was about my age. It’s for grown-up kids,” I added.
“You’re a grown-up kid?”
When I didn’t answer, Danny moved closer.
“I read novels too, you know.”
“You read science fiction. That’s different.”
“It’s still made-up. It’s still a story,” Danny said.
He picked up the pencil box and asked what it was for. I explained its purpose. I used the words artist, tool of an artist. Patina. Fragile. I said it wasn’t anything he would be interested in. He was the scientist in the family, I reminded him.
The phrase was so expertly parroted I didn’t realize I hadn’t thought it up by myself.
Steve reached over and picked up the box Danny had put down.
“Be careful,” I told him as he opened and closed the lid. “It’s old. It’s not a toy.”
The hinges on the pencil box were fragile. The lid snapped off.
“Sorry,” Steve said. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Sure you didn’t,” I said impatiently.
“I just wanted to see what was inside.”
“I’ll fix it,” I said, grabbing it away from him.
There was another set of eyes at the door now. My mother’s. She took in the scene as much through her pores as through her eyes.
She came in and made her own inventory. Then she looked out the window at the fold of canyon that enclosed our house in a green and brown ravine. The sky overhead was bright and nearly leached of all its color.
“Boys,” she said to my brothers more than to me, “I’ve told you before, I know I have, that things aren’t always equal, with siblings. They can’t be.”
She might not have always looked so carefully at the rest of our house, but in my room just then she was tracking sharply.
“Sometimes it might feel like it’s more unequal than others, but …”
The books, the bookends. The now-damaged pencil box. The pencils. The paper wrapping and bags left from the day’s loot in a hillock on the floor.
“But it all evens out in the end,” she said without much conviction. Without, from what I could tell, much accuracy either.
I found her later in the kitchen before dinner. She was pricking potatoes before putting them into the oven to bake—stabbing them was more accurate.
At dusk, when the lights were on in our kitchen, the window over the sink turned into a mirror. Our eyes met there.
“It’s not my fault if Auntie Hankie likes to buy me things,” I said.
My mother did not turn around to face me. She spoke to the window instead. “I know that,” she said.
She put the potatoes in the oven.
“Or
