In Coral Gables, where we lived for five months, five years ahead of the Jewish curve, my brother and I were shut out by the local kids, who said straightup that they could never be friends with dirty Jews from the North. We moved out so fast I had no time to get a story together, but I assumed my dead mother couldn’t be worth much in a town where they wouldn’t stand next to me in the lunch line. Now, of course, knowing more, I sometimes wonder if my offer of a dead Jew would have pleased them. At the school in Coral Gables, the teacher made us all go up to the blackboard and write the name of our favorite holiday. I wrote Chanukah, which drew mixed jeers of Eskimo! and Jewgirl! along with the teacher’s urging me to choose something “that everyone would understand.” At home my stepmother often cried after dinner, which was frequently Kraft macaroni and cheese. Coral Gables was a low point for the whole family, the only apartment where we had both roaches and ants, and the only place where I had no story.

We lived there just long enough to collect those few bad memories, and then moved back to the Great Lakes, into the second floor apartment of a two-flat on Route 41, a highway my father called “the royal road to Milwaukee.” Our building was the last in a raw new row; the fronts were smooth red brick or painted siding, but the rest of the construction was common brick and rough mortar. There was a tall wooden staircase with a landing outside the kitchen door that we called the back porch; that side wall could be seen all down the highway because the rest of our block was a vacant lot. Pheasants, which I had seen in books, lived there. Chicago bus lines ended at our block; there was no public transportation in Niles Township.

We stayed in that apartment five years, and our landlords, who lived downstairs, were the first to hear the tragic story of my young mother’s death in a ten car smashup in downtown Cleveland. Mr and Mrs Dellaringa and their three youngest kids, Shelly, Mona and Rick, along with all the married brothers and sisters who came every week for Sunday dinner, expressed genuine horror and sincere condolence for my loss at such a tender age. They admired my stepmother for her skill and adaptability. She’s good, just like a real one, they agreed, handing me a cannoli.

I still believed in god in that apartment. Downstairs at the Dellaringas, god was a boy in a purple gown and scarlet cape covered with golden stars, who stood on a doily on top of the TV set with his hand out, pointing up while Shelly, Mona and Rick watched Ed Sullivan. Upstairs, where god was an old man with a beard, I would lie in my bed crying when the alarm clock went off in the morning, immobilized by the thought that everything in my life had been determined before I was born. I tormented myself with the idea that even if I said no, I won’t do it, I won’t get up, won’t brush my teeth, won’t get dressed and go to school, no, I’ll do this other thing – then that rebellious change of mind was just what the old man had planned for me to do. Pulling clothes out of the closet for school at 6:30 in the morning, I’d suddenly stop, fold onto the floor and start to cry.

My stepmother would hear me and come into my room. She’d tell me I was too sensitive or, in another mood, she’d say that god had other things to do and wasn’t concentrating on what I was wearing to school that day. But I sniffled on: If I wear this, it’s only because I was supposed to, and if I switch from the plaid pleated skirt and red cardigan to the grey straight skirt and the apple green orlon sweater set, trying to thwart my high school destiny by not wearing the first thing I thought of, then still I am a pawn, because my attempt to swerve off-course was also preordained, as were these sniveling hiccups and this feeling of being numb and dumb. My foolishness too, I knew, was written, and at thirteen it had become more than I could bear. I want to know, I want to know, I’d whine, while she said over and over, No one knows, no one knows, no one can know.