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chance to be agreeable. I would be the easy-going daughter. I didn’t need to look into mirrors; I wasn’t vain or girly. I liked trucks, and I ate my eggs.
    Lisa went on until she’d worked herself up into tears. When she was sure of the dead end before her, she screamed, “I hate you!” at both of them. But, from the smoke-filled bedroom, which was heavy now with slow guitar music and a man’s singing, neither of them responded.
    Lisa always seemed to be pulling her standards from some higher place, apparent only to herself. If I had to guess now where her resistance to being shortchanged came from, I’d say it had something to do with the year before I was born.
    When she was pregnant with me, Ma had what she called a nervous breakdown. With Daddy in prison, Ma had trouble managing her mental health while caring for Lisa at the same time, and Lisa was placed with a foster family for nearly eight months.
    The couple who cared for Lisa were wealthy and could not conceive children of their own, so they treated Lisa as a permanent fixture in their family. They lavished so much attention and care on her that when Ma got well and came to get Lisa, she protested by locking herself in the closet and refusing to leave. Ma had to pry Lisa out of the house and drag her back to University Avenue, both of them in tears—which, it seemed, Lisa never got over. From then on, Ma said Lisa was tough to please. It appeared she had developed a sharp sense of what was owed to her, and she was quick to put her foot down whenever she was presented with less—which was nearly all the time.
    Lisa screamed a final “I hate you” from the table, folding her arms over her chest, staring back at the TV. “And, I’m not poor— my daddy’s Donald Trump!” she shouted.
    “Well then, go ask Daddy Trump for some chicken, why don’t you?” Daddy said. Ma buried her laughter as Daddy howled at his own joke openly, clapping his palm over his knee.
    Abruptly, Lisa clanked her plate into mine, which tipped, scooting my eggs into a pile. She stomped off and slammed her door, hard. The noise faded into the blare of pop music from her distorted speakers. Ma and Daddy had taken over the living room, two tired bodies sprawled over the cushions, limp as cooked noodles.
    “I ate all my eggs,” I said, but no one was listening.
    Grandma, my mother’s mother, lived in Riverdale, across the street from Van Cortlandt Park, in a sixties-style old-age home where she smoked, prayed, and made pay-phone calls to our apartment daily. Apart from us four, she was the only family we really connected with. Daddy’s mom sometimes sent gifts from Long Island, but by falling into drugs, he’d become the black sheep of his middle-class family. My whole life, they never once visited; they never came to see how we lived in the Bronx. Although Ma had run away from home at the age of thirteen, she and her mother reconciled later in life. By the time Lisa and I were born, Grandma would visit once a week, on Saturdays, when she boarded the number 9 bus using her senior citizens’ half-fare card to travel to University Avenue.
    Before her visits, Ma sped across the apartment tucking sheets into the corners of beds and gathering plates into the sink and running hot water over them. She swept dust into a pile under the couch and sprayed air freshener over our heads minutes before Grandma was due to arrive.
    From the couch, Lisa shooed Ma away each time the vacuuming blocked her view of Video Music Box , a show that appeared in snowy grains on our TV only if Lisa turned the UHF dial around and around.
    On one hot summer afternoon, Grandma was expected to arrive at twelve sharp, but Ma—as always—waited until the last minute to do anything. The mist from the aerosol spray was settling over me in cold drizzles when Grandma arrived, dressed too warmly for the weather. She was wheezing heavily from her brief walk up the two flights of stairs, and the strong reek of