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withdrawing a free prize, a plastic yellow dinosaur, which he graciously handed over to me.
    So by the time I was four years old it was just my mother and me. And I became friends with Britton, spending my days in his bedroom, lolling about, watching cartoons.
    Then one day my sister magically returned to us, just like that, saying she had been unhappy with my father, saying she didn’t like his girlfriend, and giving me the impression that things had reversed themselves and soon my brother would return as well. The single memory of my sister trying to untie my shoelaces now became many memories. There we are in the morning, walking to school together. There we are in the afternoon, returning home. There we are at night, my sister tucking me into bed, kissing me, and then, inexplicably, plucking a single hair from her head, which I place inside my security blanket so it tickles my face as I sleep.
    One afternoon while playing outside in the playground, I tumbled from my tricycle and was knocked unconscious. When I awoke from my daze, my sister was sitting beside me.
    “It’s going to be okay,” she said, and she bent down and picked up me in one arm and my tricycle in the other.
    At the entrance to our building, a strange man saw the dilemma and came to our aid. “Let me carry your brother,” he offered.
    “No,” my sister said,
“I’ll
carry my brother.
You
carry the tricycle.”
    Shortly after that incident, she went to visit my father for the weekend and upon her return to us made a careless remark about what a good time she had had. My mother abruptly flew into a rage. “Which one of us do you want to live with?” she screamed from across the dinner table.
    “I want to live with you, Ma!”
    “Decide tonight! Once and for all!”
    “I said I want to live with you, Ma!”
    My mother’s fury escalated and then raged on like a storm. I followed along, watching from the outskirts, as it moved from room to room. My sister stayed silent throughout, her face an expression of blankness. An hour into the ordeal, my mother, in order to emphasize a point she was making, picked up a dozen of my sister’s coloring markers that were near at hand and flung them across the room. They skidded over the floor and under the furniture, each and every one in its own direction. Instantly I fell to my hands and knees and set about retrieving them, happy to work toward a fruitful end. When I had gathered them all up, I presented them to my sister. Even in the midst of my mother’s rampage, she had the presence of mind to turn and thank me.
    “Thank you,” she said.
    “You’re welcome,” I said.
    “Decide! Decide!”
    Later that night, near midnight, in the quiet of the apartment, I watched from the bedroom doorway as my sister packed a small bag of her belongings.
    “Will you be coming back again?” I asked her.
    “No,” she said. And she never did.
    During the long days at Oberlin while everyone, including my brother and sister, was sequestered behind closed doors for their meetings and plenums, I passed the time by playing with the other dozen or so children of comrades. My favorite was Frankie Halstead, son of Fred Halstead—a leading member of the party, presidential candidate in 1968, and something like four hundred pounds. Frankie was just a few years older than me, and he was not so big as his father; in fact, he was short and skinny, but he carried himself with an outsize bravado that I admired. Once I had watched him argue with a pompous thirteen-year-old from the Young Socialist Alliance and then resolve it by pushing him clear over the hedges. He was also excellent at baseball and seemed to have every statistic committed to memory. He had baseball cards, and baseball programs, and a foul ball that he had caught at a Dodger game. “You can have it,” he told me, “I catch thirty of them a year.”
    With Frankie in the lead, us dozen children would move like cattle over the campus, going from one grassy