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gotten!”
    I was more of a periodic, occasionally-falling-in-to-a-book-I-just-couldn’t-find-my-way-out-of reader, but Katharine was a daily reader. She didn’t read to please Dad; she was just a genuinely passionate reader.
    She read while doing other things, multitasking back when it was called rudeness. Since our father forbade any activity during dinner other than conversation—no music, no reading, and definitely no television—my sister would pick up ketchup bottles or turn over a fork to read the inscription on the back of it.
    She was the good kid of all of us, the good student, the friend to us all. She remains the only person on speaking terms with everyone, the rest of us have a speaking-to percentage of about forty-five. While Eleanor, Julia and I were ripping each other’s arms off while going in for the last bunch of asparagus slathered in hollandaise, Katharine was bringing the empty platter into the kitchen on the philanthropic errand of fetching more. Once in the kitchen, she fell into the expectant pages of a Craig Claiborne cookbook on the table until my mother would call for her and the remaining asparagus. Some people can’t live in the moment. Katharine couldn’t get out of the moment.
    She read while you were reading to her. I’d stand in her bedroom doorway reading her the part in The Crucible where Giles Corey defends himself from Thomas Putnam’s witchy accusations with “A fart on Thomas Putnam!” which filled me with hope that good literature and fart jokes were not mutually exclusive, until I realized she was dropping her eyes down to a copy of Pride and Prejudice balanced on her stomach — a book that could have used a little farting to liven it up, in my opinion.
    She loved the book as object. I remember the shame I felt, more than once, when Katharine caught me placing a book on its spine or dog-earing pages. “Jeanne, you can’t do that to books! Look what you did,” and she would pick up the victimized text, hold it up for me to consider its plight. “You can’t treat books this way!” she would say, as if you had just stubbed out your cigarette between Lassie’s eyes.
    Even though she chose reading over a word or two with me time and time again, I wanted to be her confidante in a way that knows no discouragement. She had something I did not, an escape hatch, and I wanted her to show it to me.
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    AS THE OLDEST, Eleanor always had to take care of us and it seemed like from a very early age, Eleanor did not want to be like Mom and Dad in any way. When Mom became a serious cook in Bronxville, Eleanor had to have a dinner different from what everyone else was having, as if she were a VIP ordering off the menu. “I’ll have a cube steak, Mom.” Always the same thing. Cube steak and a chunk of iceberg lettuce with Green Goddess dressing. She loved any kind of convenience food, preferred it to fresh food. She thought we were all awfully silly with our roasted potatoes and rosemary roast chicken. If the packaged version of some food was available, she’d always choose that over its natural state and eat it as if it was just the most luxurious thing in the world. Eleanor was a theater person at Bronxville High School, but her real love was television. She defied Dad by being blatantly middlebrow. She did not even pretend to care about books. She’d simply say, “I don’t like reading unless I have to,” or something equally mind-blowing to my father. If she could have gotten away with it she might have said, “Dad, I don’t care about books anymore. I’m on to new stuff now. The whole world’s on to new stuff now.”
    One night, shortly after we had moved to Bronxville, my parents went out to dinner in the city and Eleanor, as usual, was in charge of everybody. She heated up some pot pies and announced we would be watching The Ordeal of Patty Hearst on