I never got the charm and I can’t remember who did. I never served a cake myself with a charm in it. But I was always pleased with the idea. Charmed, even. Like the concept of a cucumber stuffed with pearls, which I read about in one of the Arabian Nights tales. Useless but enchanting.

Many of my memories from that neighborhood are indistinct; my family moved away when I was barely ten, and Siesel left a year before that. But I have some true recollections – little scenes never captured by my father’s avid camera and therefore remembered as life instead of slides. The annual polio vaccines and the Halloween parties at Siesel’s are vivid points like moonbeams caught in a net.

The first year, the year of the yellow ballerina, Siesel’s mother outshone all the guests. I was in kindergarten; I had just begun to notice other people who weren’t family or kids, and I remember being fascinated with the bracelets and the melodic voice. Siesel was pretty and happy, but no one was as happy as her mother.

The second year Siesel wore a Southern belle costume. Her beautiful red hair was longer, and fashioned for that day into ringlets. I remember the amazing lace on her corseted gown. Gretel was a mature St. Bernard by then, but she trampled mud on Siesel’s hem, and I was surprised at how angry that made Siesel’s mom. I remember watching Siesel’s father lead her mother aside and talk to her, hug her, apparently calm her. I also remember learning that week that my own father wasn’t going to vote for the President. We had been visiting my grandparents, collecting the fallen maple leaves, and as we got ready to go my grandpa asked my father who he was going to vote for. My father answered with the question, “Have I ever voted Republican?” and that started a train of surprise and understanding in me.

The third Halloween party came at a tough time for me. I’d had a tonsillectomy early that month, and my throat was still sore. Worse than that, my spirit was sore from the ether and my attitude was sore from hospital treatment. Worse than those, my parents were fighting daily and my nights, already disturbed by a tender throat and anesthetic nightmares, were punctuated by the sounds of my parents’ quarrels and spiced with hallucinations about divorce.

I was not happy. I acted out in school, sassing my second-grade teacher, and my parents tried to discipline me with words and room arrest. They even said “Don’t do as I do; do as I say” and “Because I told you so.” They made me so angry that I scared them by coming home late, with my hair looking bloody because I had smeared wild berries in it in the field near my school. My mother yelled at me while she washed my hair, and didn’t seem to care when I got shampoo in my eyes. Not long after that, she took me to the beauty parlor and had my long hair cut.

I went as a hobo to the party that year. It was easy to fashion some raggedy clothes but I was jealous as a snake about Siesel’s fairy princess costume. She even had gossamer wings: glitter-spattered tissue over thin wire frames, made by her mother of course, who that year flitted from table to table in a belly-dancer outfit, purple, blue, and green, with yards of gold coins around her slim waist.

By the time of the fourth party, my mother was very pregnant. The baby that would be my second brother was only three weeks away from emerging. I would have rather had a dog. I really wanted a St. Bernard like Gretel, but I would have been happy with any shape of canine. I longed for a companion.

My parents weren’t quarreling at the time. In fact, my father appeared to be devoted to my mom, and my mother seemed reasonably content. They didn’t pay me much attention. My first brother made me seem more like a kid than a baby to them, and with a second infant on the way I took on relative maturity in my parents’ eyes.

The one time I remember doing anything with my father that season was the occasion he took to introduce me to opera. He loved Puccini, and he had me sit with him through an early television broadcast of Madame Butterfly.

Of course I didn’t “get” opera. I was accustomed to suspending my disbelief for “The Howdy Doody Show” or Crusader Rabbit cartoons, but those were for kids; they were supposed to be absurd. I knew opera was for grownups. I sat at my father’s right side on the green damask sofa, and I watched it very seriously. I thought the way the people sang so loudly at each other was silly. I found the story disturbingly, progressively, sad. But what stunned me, what smashed me like a board and flattened me like a falling piano, was the moment when the beautiful lady plunged the knife into her kimonoed breast. It didn’t matter to me whether the death made sense or not. I just couldn’t believe anyone would see such an act as any form of entertainment. It seemed to me, then and forever after, to be a poor choice for any performance. I’ve never understood the sad ending.

(to be concluded tomorrow)