Dad was warm and affectionate and easy to be with, and he always seemed glad to me. It’s a bit jarring for me to hear how unhappy he then was. I can’t exactly argue about it, since he agrees with Mom that he was miserable during those years, but I keep wanting to tell my parents it isn’t as simple as they describe. There’s no way he could have given me so many genuine-seeming smiles and never meant any of them.

Then he got married. He found his new wife on the other side of the country, where he often went on business trips, and he brought her west with him when I was eleven and a half.

My stepmother and I were not congenial. Maybe it was our different cultures; she was from a poor white Southern family and my heritage is antsy Jew mixed with diligent Mormon. Maybe it was the sexual competition I’ve heard about, between mother and daughter types; it didn’t feel that way to me, but I guess it wouldn’t feel that way, if that were what was happening. I don’t know how to count all the ways of our mutual contempt, but looking back I see unremitting quiet enmity. She greeted me with some kind of spiel about how, where she came from, children addressed their elders as “sir” and “ma’am.” I hadn’t done anything to merit that talk. I hadn’t shown any disrespect, yet. She no sooner moved in than she rearranged the kitchen where Dad and I had run all our “blue food” experiments with tuna and pasta and milk and food coloring. She pulled down the muslin curtains I’d worked so hard to hem, and she hung gross bright printed things in their place (“café curtains,” I learned they were called, with their scalloped tops riding on loud brass rings).

I had a room of my own in the old apartment, and I started with a bedroom when they moved to the house, but then my stepsister showed up. Candy is three years older than I am, and she was having trouble in school back east, where she lived with her dad, so she moved out here. She shared my room, but she was there all the time and I was only around every other weekend, so before long it was her room, and I was the trespasser.

I remember feeling like Cinderella. Dad was totally oblivious. He was happy then, so he walked around hunched over, not hearing us.

Mom tells a story about choosing a husband. She dated another guy during college but maintained some kind of relationship with Dad, and there came a time when she had to choose between Tim (the other guy) and my own father. She says she can even remember pacing around a circular drive on the kibbutz where she stayed in Israel, mentally listing the respective strengths and weaknesses of Tim and Dad. But that exercise didn’t help her decide.

She says she had to return home first. She had to actually spend some time with each of them. It was only after those visits, when she found herself considering how she loved Tim but didn’t want to be with him, and how she didn’t really love Dad but wanted to spend every second in his company and making plans together, it was only then, she says, that she got in touch with her own feelings. More like: got hit over the head with her own emotional reality, she asserts, but Mom is the first to admit that she always knows what she thinks and seldom has a clue about how she feels (her body sneaks up on her and tells her sometimes, by making her cry at silly love songs or sad ads, or making her stub her toe so bad she has to sit down for awhile, or making her downright ill).

Somehow, Mom figured out who she loved at 23, but Dad never seemed to figure out when he was happy. (It’s not that simple. I wonder if Mom agrees now that she figured it out correctly then?)