Jamie started their sibling battle. For no reason that Lilah could ever determine, he snuck up behind her when he was two and she was five, and he bit her in the middle of her back. She was sitting on the red plush hassock at the time, engrossed in “The Howdie Doody Show” on the family’s big black-and-white console TV. She couldn’t even figure out how he sank his teeth into the concave part of her between her shoulder blades, but he bit hard and held on like a terrier; it really hurt.

Their squabbling started around then, and except for the times they became allies against elderly babysitters, they kept at it for the next decade. It was about a year later that Lilah got her first whiff of Jamie’s bare feet. He’d been running around outside in his shoes, and then he plopped down near her, newly barefoot, on the floor in front of the TV. “Oooh,” she squealed. “Stinky feet! Get away from me!” She wasn’t fooling. His small feet smelled like Kraft Parmesan cheese to her, and she was repulsed.

Jamie had excellent little brother skills. He learned early how to bait Lilah, and he carried his talents into his future, passively-aggressively taunting his sister, his mother, and finally his testy wife. He responded to Lilah’s complaint by alternately thrusting or sneaking his bare feet into her nasal environment and by accusing her of the same extreme malodor.

“Stinky feet! Stinky feet! Get your feet away from me!” It didn’t matter which of them said it or how far the accused feet were from the speaker’s nose. The livingroom was never big enough to separate them sufficiently, and the parental tolerance wasn’t big enough to ignore the battle. Jamie and Lilah were sent to their respective bedrooms more for the foot odor battle than any other argument, and only the passage of time, a lot of time, reduced the problem.

It went on for years. When Lilah was eight and Jamie was five and their baby brother Sam was just a few months old, the family moved from Long Island to southern California, and so did the foot odor argument. Suddenly they were surrounded by the bare feet of children. Everyone in the neighborhood ran around without shoes during the persistent warm weather, and most of the girls wore sandals to school. All of the fresh air must have dissipated the odor; the argument began to fade along with memories of snow holidays.

At first Lilah was shy about showing her feet. They looked pale to her even after weeks of exposure to sunlight, and her toes seemed longer than those of her new friends. She felt deformed, the way the fourth toe on her left foot turned under the third. But none of her friends commented; in time she began to relax about the subject. For a time.

But Lilah’s feet grew ahead of the rest of her. She’d be a taller-than-average adult, and her size 11 feet would eventually fit the rest of her frame, but her feet and nose grew before her legs and face in general; instead of becoming a coltish young teen, she thought of herself as a clown. Her father didn’t help.