In the beginning, little attention was paid to community space. The Levittowns were built on farms that were subdivided into sleepy plots of box houses with attached garages and symmetrical yards. There were no plans made for mini-parks and no land reserved for playing fields.

Cars didn’t have seatbelts, or padded dashboards, or traffic. It was 1950.

Post-war couples left the cities. They moved into the houses in the new suburbs, and they reproduced. Their oldest children watched the roll of development compound like a snowball; through the split rail fences in their backyards they saw the sprouting wood frames that became split-level ranch houses in any of three different floorplans.

Kids were born, and kids play. With no fields nearby they had games of baseball in the street. That was safe because every third road was a dead end (later called “cul de sac”), and its bulb made an adequate diamond.

A decade later, after communities created places for the ballgames, a lousy player would be stuck in the far outfield, like Lucy in the “Peanuts” cartoons. Abigail was a lousy player. In those dead end street games, the spot for someone like Abigail was immediately behind the batter. Her position was steady catcher. No matter who was up, that’s where she was.

It’s not like there was any trick to being catcher. No one bunted. The rules didn’t allow the batter to advance on an error. There was never a close call at home plate. She didn’t even have to squat. She stood behind home plate and tossed the unhit balls back in the direction of the pitcher.

Being steady catcher meant she didn’t have to bat or field the ball. That made everyone much more comfortable.

There was no referee in those games: no cheering squad or audience. She was the only nonplayer present. The steady catcher was a witness.

Abigail already had plenty of practice at witnessing. She was the firstborn of infantile parents, and she’d developed the idea at an early age that she’d better pay attention, because she couldn’t be sure her mom and dad were. It wasn’t that they were stupid or disadvantaged, either; it’s just that her parents were young, romantic, and without a clue about caring for kids. Both had been the youngest of large families, and neither ever babysat. Her father delegated most of the day-to-day parenting to her mother, and her mom was unconfident at the role, impatient to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and shop, and susceptible to anyone else’s advice about childrearing.

So Abigail knew, when she was two years old and her father gave her an enema, that her parents could do wrong. The penetration offended her so much that she remembered the insult as repeated, when in fact her parents, terrified by her reaction, only had the nerve to do it once. She’d been balky about toilet training, and they were advised to try controlling when she went, and therefore where. It was an ill-conceived idea, and young Abigail instinctively knew that; she was very angry at her parents, but they seemed as upset as she was, and she forgave them.

She knew again, when she was five and a half and dropped off at the hospital without explanation for a tonsillectomy. Much later, her parents informed her that the pediatricians really had advised them not to tell her anything about what was going to happen. She accepted that, although she never understood how anyone could have followed such clearly unsensible advice. But at the time, Abigail knew her parents should have told her what was coming, just like she knew the first nurse shouldn’t have called her Annabel and the other nurses, the ones around after she woke up from the horror and had to keep puking in the bowl by her head, shouldn’t have spoken about her so she could hear them. She forgave her parents, because she loved them and they loved her, and because she believed they needed her, but she didn’t trust hospitals or nurses after that.

By then her brother had arrived. Barry emerged when Abigail was three and a half, and as soon as he started talking, she became Biga. Her mother refused to call her Abby or Gail, so Barry made Biga from what he heard of Abigail. Her parents went along with it. They even made “biga-sister” jokes. Abigail never liked it and even protested against it, vehemently at times, but the nickname stuck, around home.

Mom and Dad and Biga and Barry. They made a magic square. Two old and two young: two female and two male. Except that three of them were babies, and then there was Biga. The others went along with the world as it was and seemed to have no trouble understanding its rules, and then there was Abigail.