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death right there at Thanksgiving dinner, with a banquet of food in front of him.
    I escaped the ensuing Thanksgiving preparations and took a breather in the downstairs den. I sat on the sectional sofa underneath a recent family photo that I had reluctantly consented to. In it, my family stands stiffly on a patch of grass in the backyard. The white pool deck hovers behind us like a flying saucer and the harsh light of the sun flattens us into two-dimensional blocks of color. Incongruously spindly legs support my father’s porcine torso. He squints into the sun, his crow’s-feet an etching of dissatisfaction.
    My mother’s skin is shiny and stretched and still young looking but she stands like someone just poked her sharply in the sternum. My brother, Johnny, wears a gorgon’s head of unkempt dreadlocks and I balance beside him with an innocuous white T-shirt and a strained smile, the same smile that appeared whenever I was in my parents’ house, an involuntary reflex as dependable as a leg twitch following a rubber mallet to the kneecap.
    Sean was with Johnny in his room listening to Pink Floyd. They hung their heads out the window and Johnny shared the joint that was usually glued to his bottom lip.
    My parents adopted Johnny when I was four years old. I waited on tiptoe for his arrival, dangling my pigtails over the white iron railing that ran across the top of the staircase. My mother walked up the stairs holding a blanket-wrapped burrito of a baby with a prune face and black hair that swirled like cupcake icing. I loved this tiny, warm person immediately. He was a living doll for me, with his baby smell, his fat, soft arms, and his wide blue eyes. I liked to cradle him on the couch for what felt like hours, to tickle his ears and kiss his miniature nose.
    Johnny wasn’t an easy baby. He wasn’t as quick or funny or eager to please as I was. Whether or not this was true initially, it’s difficult to deviate from such a script once it’s written for you. Johnny was troubled from the very start, my father says, the implication being that it’s not his fault how Johnny turned out—the Obsessive Compulsive episodes, the ruinous acid trips, the religious extremism.
    For the first few years of his life, Johnny clung unceasingly to my mother’s leg, while I slept in the T-shirts from my father’s company softball team. We had chosen sides. I loved Johnny, but I loved being my father’s favorite even more.
    Now Johnny is Hasidic and lives in Jerusalem. He spends his days davening at the shul and occasionally works as a migrant olive picker or a seller of organic herbal tonics. He dreams of a small plot of land, a herd of goats, and some olive trees of his own. In his world, men and women eat in separate rooms. It is a world with its own logic, but it’s not a world with much of a place for me. We still talk on the phone once in a while. When I can remember, I send his son birthday presents.
    I like to blame Johnny for the distance between us. He’s the one with the wide-brimmed black hat and the archaic belief system, not I. But the truth is that when things took a bad turn, I ran from our house and I left him. I promised him I would come back for him and I never did. That Thanksgiving, I went downstairs and sat by myself on the couch and didn’t listen when he tried to tell me that my father had hit him over the head with the telephone the night before.
    My mother bustled between the dining room and the kitchen, engaged in the mysterious arts of table setting and perfectly timed food preparation. In the living room, my father played his prized Steinway baby grand. He tirelessly progressed through a medley of show tunes played halfway through at three times their intended speed. He always played as if there were a more important song somewhere on a constantly receding horizon, which he never quite reached. It was to that same off-tempo music that I first started belting out the songs from South Pacific and twirling