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cottage’s floors, squeaked as my mother and Vivie descended, towels and bathing caps in hand. My eyes still heavy, I didn’t have to actually see them to know what was under way. At the base of the stairs Vivie and Ada stopped, leaning over the banister to check on Nina and me. At the same time, Bec, also carrying a towel and cap, emerged once again from her porch. The sisters paused briefly in the dining room to greet each other, whispering a hushed but audible “morning” before they scurried out the back door and began making their way, their legs and arms, chests and backs exposed, as they strutted forth in their bathing suits, which, at this time of day and this time of day only, went uncovered. If you were to stare out a window you could see that they were nearly the same height, though Bec was a little taller than the others, and that Vivie had noticeably wider hips, and that my mother’s waist was the trimmest, despite her having borne the most children. You would see each of them holding her head high, her posture straight, her near-black mane still braided from the night before and falling past her bare shoulders onto the skin of her upper back. You would see they were lovely, the three of them, as they walked silently through the misty grayness of the early morning air.
    But at six thirty a.m. who was up to see? Thus the exposed swimwear and skin, the goose bumps rising on their arms, the determined pace. For this was business, this dunking, this daily reminder of Maks and Risel, this morning prayer—a form of Kaddish, really, except the practice, silent, was wholly physical—and a moment later the sisters dropped their towels, tipped their heads, and began the synchronized stuffing of those thick manes of hair inside their snug rubber caps.
      
     
    But that synchronicity—a kind of peace—wasn’t always the case. My mother was seventeen when she betrayed Vivie, who then didn’t speak to her for the next five years. The undoing began when Vivie, who was twenty at the time, was laid low with the flu. This was during the winter of 1926, and Vivie was incapacitated for a good three weeks. Bec, too, was sick. But my mother had a hardiness to her and never took ill. Instead, she acted as house nurse, a role she enjoyed, carrying pitchers of juice and water to her sisters’ bedside tables, taking their temperature, buttering their slices of toast, rushing to answer their throaty calls.
    Her mother, Risel, couldn’t have been more grateful for this invincible girl, her darling Ada, the middle child who happened to also have the most charming face and a lively, headstrong personality. During those long weeks Risel’s thankful adoration was a kind of pampering, as steady as the pampering Ada offered her sisters. The approval bolstered what was already in Ada, due to those striking looks and that outgoing disposition: a healthy dose of self-confidence. And so my mother was grander than usual, as well as more purposeful than usual in her role as nurse. High school, which she’d been missing those weeks while her sisters needed her, already seemed a thing of the past, despite the four months of it still looming. But with the business at home Ada began to see beyond her school days, when she’d be expected to take a job, a caring job, much like the house nurse position she’d stumbled into, and then, soon enough, find a husband and start a family—which, as everyone knew, was any woman’s real job, her future permanent position. Vivie, who upon graduating from high school had taken a part-time post at Leibritsky’s, in downtown Middletown, was certainly on the same path, just a bit ahead of Ada. And every other young woman Ada knew, or knew of, also trekked that very path. It was at Leibritsky’s that Vivie had met Mort, the owner’s eldest son, who worked there with his father. For the last three months, on Saturday nights following Shabbos, Mort had come by to court Vivie. Twice they’d sat