My father was the only son in a Jewish clutch of eight. His parents had been fruitful five times before he arrived, producing a pair of twin girls and four individual daughters. My grandmother permitted one more pregnancy after my dad, which became his closest sibling my Aunt Sadie, but family lore has it that Grandma called it quits after seven daughters and a boy, and underwent at least two back-alley abortions, and that surgical history may in fact be why I never met her. She died young and of something vascular, a year before I was born.

But her babies survived. (That’s not exactly true. I learned lately that she had an eighth daughter, because the twins were actually rare triplets, but that baby, named Ida, lived only five weeks.) All of the others lived and reproduced. I have more than a dozen cousins.

I remember it took me a long time to get my aunts’ names and birth order straight. My parents seemed to expect that I was born with the knowledge, but I must have been ten or eleven before I could recite them like the catechism my then-friend Norah knew. They aren’t important in this narrative, but I can still reel them off like a rosary: Lillian, Audrey, Esther, Elizabeth, Pauline and Dorothy (the twins Polly and Dolly) and Sarah (called Sadie). My father Leon arrived in 1925, two years after the twins and two years before Sadie.

They were all born in New York, of Eastern European immigrant parents. I guess their home language was Yiddish but none of them spoke it when I knew them; instead, they seemed to use it for proverbs (mitten d’rinnen) or to be incomprehensible around us kids (like us with Pig Latin) or to pepper their indignation and gossip with delicious “F” words like “f-schleppena” or “f-schtoonkena” or “f-krimpt.”

I was born in New York, too, but by then all but one of my aunts had transcontinented over to LA, and she (Aunt Audrey) was to move West in three years. My own nuclear family – my parents, myself, and my younger brother – migrated to California when I was five. We settled down in Bonita, an unincorporated area south of San Diego and north of Tijuana, which put us about three freeway hours from my aunts in the Valley, so we managed to make the trek to visit them about every month.

Six of my aunts had two sons, and one had one. I have thirteen boy cousins. Only Polly and Lillian had daughters, one each; we were a clan with alternating gender-heavy generations. Our get-togethers tended to reflect that composition, so the adults were always involved in the gentler arts, with women cooking and talking and shopping and tending while the menfolk read the paper or watched sports, and the generation of kid cousins were active, rambunctious, boyish.

My brother and I were more unlike our cousins than they were unlike each other. I’m sure part of the difference was that we didn’t live close and see them often, but mostly I think it was about parents. We had a relatively strange mother. Our father was as unlike his sisters as a single male after a long line of females is likely to be. He was the only one who went to college. He served in the army. He got away.

Our mother wasn’t strange compared to the family that reared her. But she was an alien among my father’s sisters. She had shorter legs, wider hips, and smaller breasts. She wore less jewelry and simpler clothes. She moved faster, darting around and always busy compared to my sedentary aunts. And she was never, even remotely, blonde.

I guess my aunts were born with light hair. They had paler skin than my mother and me. Especially after they moved to the LA area and started sunbathing and planning Vegas getaways, all seven of them got into the peroxide.