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delivery to our doorstep, and I never mentioned it to Joe. Though I am ashamed to say so now, I just wanted that unpleasantness to go away.
    Once we nixed the idea of surgery, I expected Dawn to rebel against the vision therapy Joe wanted her to do instead. But she was too good a girl; if we told her to do something, she did it. Sometimes I wished she would put up a fight, the same way when she was a child I wished she would rip off the patch and refuse to wear it, because it would have been easier to feel angry than sorry for her.
    So once a week I took her to Dr. Diamond’s office in Schenectady, where she repeated the exercises designed to help her eyes align. Her eyes hurt at the end of every session, so early on, I decided to take her for a treat after each visit. I thought she deserved a reward for working so hard, and I felt guilty. I knew I should have realized something was wrong even before the amblyopia got diagnosed in a test her teacher recommended because she noticed Dawn squinting all the time. Even though I was a nurse, I hadn’t seen a problem in my own daughter. Well, I didn’t want to.
    If Iris had been the one to develop a lazy eye in grade school, she would still have been as popular as she always was—I have no doubt of that. Either she would have found some way to laugh at herself, or her classmates would have felt sympathy for her. Knowing Iris, I’m sure she would have turned a lazy eye into something cool.
    But even without the eye problem, Dawn would not have been a pretty girl like her sister. It hurt me to acknowledge this because I knew she was all too aware of it, and because she looked like me: we both had mouths that were too small, noses that were too flat, and hair too thin for us to be called anything but “nice-looking” at our best. Though I knew like any other parent that I wasn’t supposed to have favorites, and that if I were going to have a favorite it would make sense for it to be the attractive, more promising child (as it clearly was Joe’s, even though he tried not to show it), Dawn had my heart because as a kid I had also been nervous, not cute, and insecure.
    When she began wearing the eye patch in second grade and kids called her Squint and Fish Face, her normal expression became one of defensiveness, almost a scowl. She walked around looking as if she expected to be made fun of, as if she hated people already because she knew they were laughing at her.
    Even though when Joe and I discussed our younger daughter’s unhappiness it was always in the context of the eye condition, I’m pretty sure that separately we both understood it was more than that. I know I did. Even in kindergarten, before we were told about the amblyopia, she didn’t seem to fit in with the other kids. When I’d go to birthday parties to pick her up, I’d find her sitting in a corner, staring across the room where everyone else took a whack at the piñata or played musical chairs. When I asked her why, she said those things weren’t fun for her. What is fun for you? I asked, but she always shrugged and said she didn’t know. As she grew older, and especially after her diagnosis, she made more of an effort to join in, which Joe and I were glad to see because we thought it meant she was finally “coming out of her shell,” as we put it to each other. Maybe she’d just felt overwhelmed before, we theorized, being in Iris’s shadow. Maybe now she’ll find out what shelikes to do, and she’ll get some confidence, and the other kids will come around.
    But it didn’t happen that way. She didn’t enjoy any of the classes we signed her up for—since Iris took tennis and violin, we tried karate and the recorder with Dawn, but she couldn’t have cared less about either—and Joe and I figured it was probably worse to force her to continue when she had no interest. The only thing she wanted to do was use her crayons in coloring books; it seemed to give her pleasure to show us how well she could