I could tell when I was a girl that other people lived by different rules. My cousins, whom I saw once a year, used to laugh knowingly at my words and actions. Once they said, "We brought you a present today." "Oh," I said. "Don't you want to know what it is?" they asked. "It's sewing." When I said, "What's sewing?" they laughed hard. It was a box of cards with pictures on them, and there were holes in the pictures and colored strings to put through them. I didn't see how this constituted sewing; but I kept my thought to myself.

My cousins were two blond boys who posed for Boys' Clothing in the Sears catalogue and an older girl who was nice but small and quiet. Once the two boys took me into the back bedroom at my grandparents' house and shut the door. I had my white stuffed lamb there in the bed, and they asked me questions about her. "Can we see it?" they said. They kept calling her "it," and finally they grabbed her out of my hands by the leg and started throwing her around the room. I lunged for her over and over, and when I finally started crying, they looked at me in disgust, dropped my lamb on the floor and left the room.

* * *

When we came back from living in Stuttgart the second time, I made friends with Lena Freyberg, a new girl living across the street who knew all the slang I'd missed while I was away. Whenever I asked her a question, she put her finger in her mouth and said "DUH!" Or she'd say it while rolling her eyes. She was very talented at rolling her eyes, which were dark blue and protuberant like my mother's but not beautiful. She could make her irises spin. We used to sit in her parents' livingroom on a thick purple carpet and Lena would spin her eyes, and whatever I said, she would laugh splurtingly or say DUH! When she splurted it was because I'd said something sexual without knowing it, and she'd say DUH! when I asked her to explain.

Lena's spinning eyes scared me because they made her look crazed and ugly; but I was also envious. She was ahead of me in everything, and one day when I called in the afternoon and asked, "Can you play today?" as we did almost every day, she said no, and wouldn't say why. I asked if she could play tomorrow and she said no, and not the next day either, or ever again. And the next morning she and all our other friends walked to school without stopping at my house. In school they ignored me and passed notes and laughed when I spoke up. This went on for the rest of the year, and I came home every afternoon and cried. My parents were furious, but there was nothing they could do. I was religious around that time, and I used to pray every night before bed for something bad to happen to Lena Freyberg. One day it did, but it's a story I can't tell.

When she was 20 years old and had lived in America for six years, my mother went to the career office at the university where she'd worked hard for perfect grades, and told the man behind the desk she was interested in becoming a lawyer. He looked her over slowly, cleared his throat length, and told her that only a tiny percentage of the American bar was female; and only a tiny fraction of those women were successful; and no woman who spoke such accented, albeit perfect, indeed beautifully-enunciated, English could expect to succeed in such a career. But with her face, and . . .

* * *

My mother and I used to lie talking and giggling in my parents' king-sized bed. My mother tickled me and bit my ears, and we'd play the game of her opening her mouth, me sticking in my finger, and her trying to bite the finger before I pulled it away. Or we'd do it the other way around. We used to tell each other stories: she would describe her childhood in Lithuania, fleeing the Germans and then the Russians, on trains with illegal papers or in horsecarts with bombs falling around. In return, I told her secrets about my closest imaginary friend whose name was Gaga, and whom she knew about from overhearing my conversations with him.

When my father came home from work, we'd hear him in the front hall downstairs and hide beneath the covers cuddling and smothering our laughs. He'd come upstairs and pretend he couldn't find us, while we lay wrapped in each other like mice squeaking into each others' furry necks-until my mother would lift the cover and the game was over.

* * *

When she was 36 years old, and I was eight, my mother bought an easel and a set of oil paints and put them up at her desk in the study she shared with my father. She started a small painting, and when he came home he complained of the smell of turpentine. My mother went out to the side of the house where lilies of the valley grew wild in the dirt by the basement windows. When she'd pulled herself together, she came back and cooked dinner for my father and me. For two days she worked on her picture despite my father's complaints about the smell. On the third day I came home from school and heard her crying and talking to herself. Down in our dank basement, with the dead spiders and the mouldering clothes, my mother had sprayed her painting with water from the hose until it was all purple mud. There was still a yellow spot where she'd made the moon in her night sky, but the little face in the lower corner was disfigured by black rivulets. She turned around to look at me with her swollen eyes and said:

"It was only a little picture."

The first year we lived in Stuttgart, my father took me to the synagogue on Friday evenings. It was a beautiful building, gray stone on the outside but lit by a golden lamp inside, built on the ruins of the old synagogue. There were pictures of the old building in the lobby that showed how much finer it had been, but that meant nothing to me. I liked going with my father and sitting beneath the golden lamp, sitting next to him in the men's section because I was still a small child, and hearing the sad resonant voices of the old ones around me.

In front of us sat a man named SYssmann, whose name made him sweet despite his tired eyes and his jowls. He had "lost his wife." I didn't understand this. I felt it was sad, but I didn't care, because I liked having him to ourselves. He kept a special book in his pew whose cover said "Pentateuch." I had never seen that word before and I wondered what it meant. It looked strange and impressive like the name of a disease; I used to stare at that word "Pentateuch" when I got at bored during the service and try out different ways of pronouncing it, and I thought Mr. SYssmann had secret.knowledge because of it.

When they sang the beautiful song welcoming the bride Sabbath into the synagogue, we all turned to face the door where she would enter if she ever really arrived. And when the rabbi lit candles and poured wine, he called me up to the front, bent down with his white beard, and gave me the silver cup to drink from. The wine tasted sweet and a little bitter, the men smiled indulgently as I sipped it, and I felt proud and shy walking back to my father in our pew.

After services, we went through the quiet streets that used to be the Jewish part of town, to the city center that was filled with neon and car horns. In the quiet streets we walked behind the Jewish widowers; they walked with their hands clasped behind their backs in a way that struck my father, and sometimes he would walk that way, too, with his shoulders a little bent like theirs, honoring their sadness.

* * *

When I was 11 and we lived in Stuttgart again, my father thought that because I was older, I should sit with the women.

I didn't like the women-they seemed old and disapproving, they wore doilies on their heads and looked stern-and I didn't like being so far away from the light and the wine and MrSYssmann and the door that the bride would come through. The men always opened the door of the synagogue before they sang for her, and a sweet dusky breeze came in from the courtyard, but up in the balcony you couldn't feel the breeze and it was stuffy. So I stopped going to synagogue with my father, even though he said I could sit with him again if I wanted to. I felt I was too old to sit with him and too young to sit in the balcony, so from then on I stayed home on Friday nights.

From the time I was 12, my father went back to Germany every three years for several months, and my mother and I stayed home. We amused ourselves without him by embarking on projects. First we drove out to the country and bought a gray rabbit. We built him a large rickety hutch in my bedroom, but he chewed at the door, so we let him hop freely in my room. He ate all my shoe soles and munched through electrical wires and bit us when we tried to pet him. He left his droppings everywhere and made yellow soupy puddles on the floorboards. Finally we took him back to the farm where he was born. I found one of his turds at the back of the closet a while ago, still intact after almost 20 years.

After wazzu our rabbit failure, we bought a parakeet who languished and died of a mysterious brown rot that started in the head feathers and worked its way downward. When we found the corpse one morning, we felt guilty because we hadn't tried hard enough to identify the illness-for that matter, we'd never even found out the bird's sex, and had named it HeShe. We buried HeShe in a shoe box in the backyard, remorseful and relieved.

* * *

Sometimes we drove out of town just to get away from home. We'd leave our bleak town and coast through the landscape of cornstalks and brown fields. We talked. Some days we'd drive past a collapsing gray barn that said "Ma ouch obacc" in faded letters (on a good day you could make out the "il" and "p"). A boy I was in love with lived on the same road as the Ma ouch barn. His father was an air-traffic controller and his mother a Korean war bride, and Phil was a pimply beautiful boy with a sad face who trapped animals on the weekend and shot them. When I looked at him in the school hallway, I felt that he was meant for some other destiny, and I dreamed of rescuing him from his life of dreariness and violence.

On weekends my mother and I listened to the Metropolitan opera on the radio. We'd turn it on in the car and continue listening when we got home. We were avid for every minute, even the quizzes and synopses between acts. My mother remembered going to the opera in Vienna with my father before I was born, and how he wouldn't buy schilling seats and insisted they stand. They'd come out into the cold night after standing for hours while Mimi died of tuberculosis, and old men were selling roasted chestnuts in the street. But my father kept a tight hold on the money, and my mother never got to taste the chestnuts that scented the winter air and filled her with need.

I remember the applause at the end, the shouts and howls of "Bravo!" and the announcer saying, "Now Dame Sutherland has picked up a bouquet of roses. Smiling radiantly, she holds her arms out to the adoring audience." The applause roared like a great dark sea. My mother and I were excited, and we turned up the radio just for the applause; we were still crying for the gorgeous, long-suffering lady who had died, who had gone down singing, her very sobs exquisite music, and now we wept for the singer, and the audience's ecstasy. That utter satiation: soprano and listeners, glutted with one another, their voices rising to the roof, filled our hollow living room on gray Ohio Saturdays.