My weak spot, apparently, is an Achilles tendon.

Not that my mother was a demi-goddess, except perhaps in her mind and my father’s (at least at first). Not that I was ever dipped. I’m Jewish. Jewish babies are not dipped.

I was supposed to be sweet and precious but I grew big feet and thick ankles, big face and stubborn brain. “Simplicity is class,” my father said when he gave me a single cultured pearl on a thin gold chain, but delicate jewelry was lost on my frame. I thought delicacy and subtlety, and even class, were wasted on me.

I grew thick ankles, and I consoled myself with the idea that they would never turn on me.

Hah!

It’s true I don’t sprain them. You never see me on crutches after some city stumble. But I who ice skated at age seven on the sidewalks of my Long Island neighborhood was quite surprised, in a disappointed way, when the family rented skates in Blue Jay, California, when I was 14, and I discovered that I couldn’t keep the blades beneath me. My ankles just weren’t strong enough. I didn’t try to ice skate after that.

Four decades passed. After three of them, I forsook my sedentary ways and discovered the joy of physical activity. I learned that body work is mind work; I am in fact connected through the isthmus of my neck. It came to pass that I thought I was fit.

Hah!

Two years ago my brother and sister-in-law and I, with our three dogs, rented an SUV and made a long-weekend trip to Mendocino.

We’d traveled together before, and well, but then events occurred that strained the relationship between Beth and me. I had introduced her to my brother – we’d been work colleagues and friends when she made a serious suicide attempt, and ended up living for a month with me and my then-husband because her mother was too busy (narcissistic, childish, creepy) to take care of her. That’s when Beth met Sam; that’s how Beth became my sister-in-law.

We continued working together after they married – she had such a toxic relationship with her mother that Beth decided not to have kids of her own and so she never interrupted her career with a pregnancy. Soon we moved together from the consulting office where we met to the new firm which I established, and a year after that I gave her some stock. I thought that would make her act like an owner, hoist her out of the supportive secretarial role she’d filled for so long, because I hadn’t yet realized that ownership has nothing to do with a certificate. And when she quit the job, a year before the Mendocino trip, five years after the stock award, in the throes of another bout of clinical depression that she chose to blame on me (I didn’t show her enough appreciation), she harassed me for buyout money, funds I didn’t have because I’d instead always paid her more than her job was worth, and our relationship ruptured every way it could.

Poor Sam. My baby brother has always been driven to try to make people happy. He frets about facial expressions; he apologizes for heavy traffic and bad weather. He couldn’t stand Beth’s complaints about me and he hated to hear my bitter comments. He kept trying to make it right.

He suggested several vacations before this one took. I was always agreeable as long as I didn’t have to leave my dog. Corky was beyond normal large-breed life expectancy, allergic to dozens of irritants and plagued with some other imperfections too, but she was my sole mammalian companion, the dog with whom I’d lived longest, and I was determined to continue to take care of her. I’d decided when she was one year old and began to present her medical problems that I’d do whatever was necessary. I like to think that when I take on a dependent it’s for the full ride.

No, till then Beth had been the balker. She wouldn’t agree to go anywhere warm, lest she have to reveal her body (Beth is obese and ashamed of it. She tries to hide her girth in tunics and shapeless dresses, apparently oblivious to the fact that her five-foot height and humongous tits tell the story no matter how she is appareled). Or circumstances in her new job made it impossible to leave. Or she let plans proceed to a week before departure and then got too ill to go.