Lilah’s dad was in general wonderful. He wasn’t sexist like her mom; he encouraged her at various times to aspire to philosopher or doctor or scientist instead of secretary or nurse or elementary school teacher. But he like Jamie was a younger brother: an expert at baiting the ambient emotional females. He should have been sensitive to the fact that Lilah wouldn’t go bowling once she discovered the sizes were blazoned on the backs of the rented shoes. But no: he began to make comments about how she could go snowshoeing without the snowshoes.

His taunts made no sense to her. She had inherited her big feet from him! The whole family had sturdy pedal extremities; even her mother, the smallest mature foot among them, wore size 8½. It was the illogic of his statements that made Lilah react so strongly. But reaction of course was what the taunter sought; her father and Jamie and finally Sam kept making crazy infuriating statements about her big feet.

Fortunately, in Lilah’s opinion, Jamie had sons. He moved away from the rest of the family and only had his wife Laura to tease. Jamie and Laura raised their kids out of the country because Laura had a career State Department job.

On one of their early home visits, though, Laura shared some intimate details of their marriage. Laura tends to drink a lot, and she’s a small person (shoe size 6) so the Jack Daniels hits her hard enough to make her often tell more than Lilah wants to hear. She let it slip that one of her favorite foreplays was to have her toes sucked, forcing Lilah to envision Jamie performing that service (“TMI,” as Lilah’s daughter later taught her, when Cass was a teenager and her world was so full of three-letter acronyms that she even created the war cry “Down with TLAs!”). Too much information.

Lilah has looked back at her early childhood a lot over the years. She pretty much concluded that the early battle over foot odor must have been some anti-incest protection. After all, even with the sibling tussles she always found her brother Jamie to be an attractive, nice guy – certainly deserving of a better life partner than Laura made – and Jamie liked Lilah, too. She conjectured that the foot odor thing acted as some sort of barrier against them even fantasizing.

But recently Jamie and family came home on leave. They stayed at Sam’s and Beth’s house for the week; there’s more room there and the brothers were always close. After they left, Sam spoke about their visit. It went pretty well, he said, except that Laura ran through an amazing amount of sour mash whisky and presented a few snit-like problems after drinking. But Sam and everyone else in the family are used to that. Sam’s surprising complaint was about the evening time they all spent around his new projection TV set in the livingroom. “I couldn’t believe it, Li,” he said as they ate lunch in their favorite bistro. “Jamie and both of the boys kept taking their shoes off, and suddenly the room reeked! I couldn’t figure it out. It’s not like they don’t shower or wash their socks. But the odor was so bad my eyes watered! Beth’s too. I’ve never experienced anything like it.”