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was the most important part, the interpretation. Mimi and Fee just liked Seeing. Me? I’d like to be free of it sometimes.
    Don’t get me wrong; knowing a bit of the future could be useful in a large family. We knew when so-and-so would be late for dinner, or how to stop a sister from tripping on the church steps moments before social suicide.
    But, to keep us sane, we all had things about us that helped keep us apart. Things that gave us space in our brains where we could be alone, even as our bodies were squished together. Most times we couldn’t even hide in our brains because all you’d have to do is brush up against someone and know all of their secrets, their desires. Wow, were my brothers hot for Carole Lombard. I guess it only made sense. Everyone around them was dark. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin. Carole Lombard was like the sun. Like the ladies on the Far Rockaway beaches in the summertime.
    Summers in the city were hot. I suppose if we’d lived in a different time we could have had fancy AC units. But really, even if that had been invented, we wouldn’t have used it. Mama didn’t like anything that wasn’t true. Air conditioning lies to you. Makes you think that it isn’t hot outside, when it is. “If you fool your body your body fools you,” she would say.
    If it’s hot, you’re supposed to be hot. You can cool down enough with fans. Fans over bowls of ice cubes worked well. But sometimes we needed to swim, and for that we had the house in Far Rockaway.
    Not so much a house as a cottage, really. One in a row of many lovely cottages. Mama and Papa owned it. Well, Mama owned it. She was Irish. Something we didn’t talk much about. Papa made her swear off most things not Italian when they married. Mama grew up in Massachusetts, in a town called Fairview. And before her own mother went crazy, she spent her summers at their vacation house on Far Rockaway. It was her stomping ground. And the summers, all throughout my childhood, we spent wrapped up in Mama’s history, and sand, and sea.
    Papa stayed in the city and kept up the accounts for his clients. Papa was good with numbers and kept the books for almost every business in Little Italy stretching from Arthur Avenue to Claremont Park. He took the train in on the weekends. And my older brothers, they stayed, too, and worked when they got older, and when we returned to the apartment building in late August, Mama would always throw open the windows and say, “Gotta get that man smell out of this place!” And it was true, the apartment always smelled different when we’d been gone. Me and Mimi, Bunny and Fee … and George. Georgie had his problems. He stayed in Mama’s skirts. He didn’t stay with Papa or the boys. He stayed with us.
    He was the baby, anyway, even though we were twins. I was born first. He didn’t come until two whole days later.
    I can still remember us girls running down the beach and Georgie following us. We always raced ahead until he cried. And I’d always stop. Not my sisters. They ran faster, farther away laughing, always laughing. I’d stop though. Do a few cartwheels back his way and then hold him tight. He belonged to me. He’d reach up and wrap his hands in my curls. He’d straighten the bow in my hair with a shaking hand. “You look a fine mess,” he’d say. I’d take him by his hand and drag him back to Mama, who’d have lunch all laid out for us in the shade of the front porch.
    “You’re a good sister,” she’d say.
    I was. Then. And then I wasn’t anymore.

 
    4
    Eleanor
     
    When Eleanor woke up, it was quiet. And, in those fleeting moments between sleep and awake, she was absolutely comfortable. The heaviness of the blankets felt just right against her skin. The heat was clanging up from the basement and toasting the dust particles on the radiators, making the heat smell pop around in the air. The bed was pushed against a window and there was the tiniest draft trying to make its way in and have it