Lucky

THREE

Paoli, Pennsylvania, is an actual town. It has a center and a train line named after it, the Paoli Local. It was where I told people I was from. I wasn't. I was from Malvern. Or at least that was my mailing address. But actually I was from Frazer. I grew up in an amorphous valley of converted farmland that had been divided into treeless lots and sold off to developers. Our development, Spring Mill Farms, was one of the first to have been built in the area. For many years it was as if the fifteen or so original houses had landed in the midst of an ancient site of a meteor crash. There was nothing, save the equally new and treeless high school, for miles around. New families like mine moved into the two-story houses and bought sod or small, whirring seed spreaders that the fathers walked back and forth across the dirt lots as if they were the most disciplined of pets. Heartsick at her inability to grow anything resembling the lawns in magazines, my mother opened her arms wide to the advent of crabgrass. "To hell with it," she said. "At least it's green!"

The houses came in two options: garage sticking out in front, garage tucked to the side. There were two or three color options for the shingles and shutters. It was, to my teenage mind, a wasteland that involved endless trimming, mowing, planting, weeding, and keeping up with the neighbors on either side. We even had a white picket fence. I knew every picket, as it was my sister's and my job to crawl around on our hands and knees and use manual clippers on the grass that the mower couldn't reach.

Eventually other developments cropped up around us. Only the original residents of Spring Mill Farms could distinguish where our development ended and the others began. It was back to this collapsing Chinese fan of suburbia that I went after I was raped.

The old mill, for which my neighborhood was named, had not yet been restored when I was a teenager and the mill owner's house across the street was one of the few old homes in the area. Someone had torched it and the big white house now had black holes for windows and a green wooden railing that was charred and falling-in in places.

Driving by with my mother, as I did every time we went out of the development, I was fascinated by it-its age, the overgrown weeds and grass, and the marks of the fire-how the flames had licked out of the windows and left black ash scars above their rims like crowns.

Fires are something that seemed part of my childhood, and they beckoned to me that there was another side to life I hadn't seen. Fires were horrible, no doubt, but what I became obsessed with was how they seemed, inevitably, to mark a change. A girl I had known down the block, whose house was struck by lightning, moved. I never saw her again. And there was an aura of evil and mystery around the burning of the mill house that gave flight to my imagination every time I passed.

When I was five, I walked into a house near the old Zook graveyard out on Flat Road. I was with my father and grandmother. The house had been ravaged by fire and was set far off from the road. I was frightened but my father was intrigued. He thought that we might scavenge things inside that would add to the boxlike home he and my mother had just moved into. My grandmother agreed.

In the front yard some distance from the house was a half-charred Raggedy Andy doll. I went to pick it up and my father said, "No! We only want salvageable things, not some child's toy." I think that was when it struck me, that we were walking into a place where people like me-children-had lived, but didn't anymore. Couldn't.

Once inside, my grandmother and father got down to business. Most of the house was ruined; what was any good was so blackened by smoke as to be unsalvageable. There was furniture, still, and rugs and things on the wall, but they were black and abandoned.

So they decided to take the banisters from the stairs. "Good old wood," my grandmother said.

"What about upstairs?" my father asked.

My grandmother attempted to dissuade him. "It's black as night up there; besides, I wouldn't trust those stairs."

I'm a good stair tester. I always watch for this in movies where there is a fire and heroes rush in. Do they test the stairs first? If not, the critic in me cries, "Fake!"

My father decided that since I was little I could risk it best. He sent me up the stairs as he and my grandmother worked to dislodge the railings. "Call out what you see!" he said. "Any furniture or such."

What I remember is a child's room strewn with toys, most specifically Matchboxes, which I collected. They lay on their sides and backs on a braided rug, the die-cast metal bright in yellows and blues and greens in the dark, burned house. There were children's clothes in the open closet, singed along all their hems; an unmade bed. It had happened at night, I remember thinking when I was older. They were sleeping.

In the center of this bed was a small, dark, charred cavity that went through to the floor. I stared at it. A child had died in there.

When we got home, my mother called my father an idiot. She was livid. He arrived with what he thought might be a prize. "These banisters will make great table legs," he announced. I chose to remember the Matchboxes and the Raggedy Andy, but what child leaves behind these toys, even if slightly blackened? Where were the parents, I wondered all that night and in the nightmares that followed. Had they survived?

Out of fire grew narrative. I created for this family a new life. I made it a family like I had wanted: Mom and Dad and a boy and girl. Perfect. The fire was a new beginning. Change. What was left behind was done so on purpose; the little boy had grown out of his Matchboxes, I imagined. But the toys haunted me. The face of the Raggedy Andy on the path outside, his black and shiny eyes.

The first judgment of my family came from a six-year-old playmate of mine. She was small and blond, that kind of towheaded blondness that dissolves with age, and she lived down the road at the end of the block. There were only three girls my age in the whole neighborhood, including me, and she and I played at being friends until we got lost in the wider world of grade school and junior high.

We were sitting on my front lawn near the mailbox pulling up grass. We had just that week begun to ride on the bus together. As we pulled grass up in fistfuls and made a little pile by our knees, she said, "My mom says you're weird."

Shocked into a sort of mock adulthood, I said, "What?"

"You won't be mad, will you?" she pleaded. I guaranteed her I wouldn't.

"Mom and Dad and Jill's mom and dad said your family is weird."

I began to cry.

"I don't think you're weird," she said. "I think you're fun."

Even then I knew envy. I wanted her blond, strawlike hair, which she wore down, not my stupid brunet braids with the bangs my mother cut by strapping plastic tape across them and cutting along its edge. I wanted her father, who spent time outside and, on the few occasions I ever visited her, said things like "What's shakin, bacon?" and "See you later, alligator." I heard my parents in one ear: Mr. Halls was low-class, had a beer gut, wore workman's clothes; and my playmate in the other: My parents were weird.

My father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did. Then I began to catalog and notice. They mowed lawns. They drank beer. They played in the yard with their kids, walked around the block with their wives, piled into campers, and, when they went out, wore joke ties or polo shirts, not Phi Beta Kappa keys and tailored vests.

The mothers were a different matter and I loved mine so fiercely that I never wanted to admit to envy there. I did note that my mother seemed more anxious and less concerned with makeup, clothes, and cooking than the other mothers did. I wished my mother were normal, like other moms, smiling and caring, seemingly, only for her family.

I saw a movie with my father one night on television, The Stepford Wives. My father loved it; it scared the hell out of me. I, ofncourse, thought my mother was Katharine Ross, the only real woman in a town where every wife was replaced with a perfect, automated robot of a wife. I had nightmares for months afterward. I may have wanted my mother to change but not to die and never, never to be replaced.

When I was little, I worried about losing my mother. She was often hidden behind the locked door of her bedroom. My sister or I would want her attention in the mornings. We would see our father leave her room and, as we approached, he would explain.

"Your mother has a headache this morning," he might say, or, "Your mother doesn't feel well. She'll be out in a while."

I learned that if I knocked anyway, after my father went downstairs and shut himself up in his study, where we were not allowed to disturb him, that my mother sometimes let me in. I would crawl into bed with her and make up stories or ask her questions.

She threw up in those days and I saw this once when my father hadn't thought to lock the door. When I went inside her bedroom, which had its own bathroom, I could see my father standing in the bathroom doorway with his back to me. I could hear my mother making horrible noises. I rounded the corner in time to see bright red vomit spewing from her mouth into the sink. She saw me staring at her, my eyes hip-level with my father and reflected back to her from the mirror in front of the sink. In her gagging, she pointed me out to my father, who shooed me out of the bedroom and locked the door. They fought later. "For Christ's sakes, Bud," my mother said, "you know well enough to lock the door."

My mother's pillows when I was little smelled like cherries. It was a sickeningly sweet smell. It was the same way my rapist smelled on the night of the rape. I would not admit to myself until years later that this was the smell of alcohol.

I like the story of how my parents met. My father was working at the Pentagon, a better paper-pusher than a soldier. (When, in basic training, he and an army buddy were ordered to scale a wall, he broke his partner's nose by stepping on it, instead of inside the stirrup of this man's hands.) My mother lived with her parents in Bethesda, Maryland, and worked first for National Geographic Magazine, and then The American Scholar.

The two of them were set up on a blind date. They hated each other. My mother thought my father was a "pompous ass," and after a double date with the two people who had set them up, they put the experience behind them.

But they met again a year later. They didn't hit it off exactly, but this time they didn't hate each other, and my father asked my mother out a second time. "Your father was the only one who would take the bus out from the capital and then walk the five miles from the last station to our house," my mother always pointed out. This endeared him to my grandmother, apparently, and eventually my parents wed.

By then my father had a Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from Princeton, and my parents moved to Durham, North Carolina, where he held down his first academic job at Duke University. It was there, alone all day and unable to make friends in this new place, that my mother's drinking took a turn: She began drinking secretly.

My mother had always been nervous; she never acclimated to her prescribed role as housewife. She would repeatedly tell my sister and me how lucky we were to be in our generation. We believed her. The fifties seemed horrible to us. Her father and mine had convinced her to leave her full-time job by emphasizing that a married woman didn't work.

She drank for less than a decade-but long enough for my sister and me to come into the world and have our childhoods. Long enough for my father to move up the academic ranks by taking promotions that took the two of them, and then the four of us, to Madison, Wisconsin; Rockville, Maryland; and, finally, Paoli, Pennsylvania.

By 1977, my mother had been sober for ten years. During this period, she began having things we called "flaps." Flaps were our name for when Mommy went crazy. If my father was an absence-sometimes literally gone to Spain for months-my mother was too much a presence. Her anxiety and panic was infectious, making every moment twice as long and twice as hard when she was under their sway. Unlike normal families, we could not trust that, having left to get food at the local supermarket, we would actually achieve our goal. Two steps into the store, she might begin to have a flap.

"Grab a cantaloupe or something," she would say as I got older, and thrust a bill into my hand. "I'll meet you in the car." She would hunch over during a flap and rapidly rub her breastbone to soothe what she described as her exploding heart. I would rush into the store to buy that cantaloupe and maybe something on sale near the front, wondering all the time, Will she make it to the car? Will she be all right?

In movies and in life, the burly men in white suits who stand on either side of a mental patient are nondescript and indistinguishable. So, in many ways, were my sister and I. Mary is absent from many of my memories because my mother and her illness are so dominant. When I remember, Oh, yeah, Mary was along on that ride, that's exactly how I see her: the other support for our always potentially collapsing mother.

Sometimes, Mary and I functioned as a caretaking unit. Mary would husband her to the car and I would grab the cantaloupe. But I watched my sister develop from a child who thought the world would fall apart to a young adult who resented how the flaps made us different, exciting stares and comments in public. "Stop rubbing your tits," she would hiss at my mother.

As Mary grew less and less sympathetic, I compensated and became the emotional overlord-soothing my mother and condemning my sister. When Mary helped, I was glad to have her there. When she whined and entered her own incipient version of my mother's panic, I shut her out.

The only memory I have of my father expressing physical affection for my mother was a brief kiss as we were dropping him off to catch a suburban limo to the airport, where he would embark on his annual academic trip to Spain. The reason for this isolated incident could come under the heading of "Let's Not Have a Scene." Simply, it was my prompting, then begging, then whining that brought on the kiss.

By then, I had begun to notice that unlike my parents, other couples touched each other, held hands, and kissed on cheeks.

They did this in supermarkets, walking around the block, at school occasions to which parents were invited, and in front of me, in their homes.

But it was the kiss my father gave that day upon my urging that let me know my parents' relationship, if solid, was certainly not passionate. He was, after all, leaving us for a number of months, as he did yearly, and I felt that, with an absence of that length, an expression of love was owed my mother.

My mother had gotten out of the car to help my father with his bags and to say good-bye. Mary and I were in the backseat. This was my first time seeing him off on his yearly trip. He was flustered as he always was. My mother, always nervous, was flustered too. Sitting in the backseat, I remember I got it into my head that something was not right with the picture in front of me. I started whining, "Kiss Mom good-bye."

My father said something akin to "Now, Alice, that's not necessary."

Surely the result was not what he hoped for.

"Kiss Mom good-bye!" I yelled louder and popped my head out the back window. "Kiss Mom good-bye!"

"Just do it, Dad," my sister said bitterly beside me. She was three years older and maybe, as I imagined later, she knew the score.

But if what I'd wanted was to gain confirmation that my parents really were like the rest of the couples in Spring Mill Farms, and perhaps like that famous TV couple of the time, Mr. and Mrs. Brady, the forced kiss didn't do the job. It opened the door for me. It made me know that in the Sebold house, love was duty. He kissed her on the forehead, the kind of kiss that would fulfill the demand of his child but nothing else.

Many years later, I would find black-and-white photos of my father with daisies in his hair and submerged in water with flowers surrounding him. He was smiling, showing the teeth he hated because they came in helter-skelter and his family hadn't had the money to fix them. But he had been happy enough in these photos not to care. Who took them? Not my mother, this much I know. The box of photos had arrived at our house after my grandmother Sebold died. I searched among the photos for clues. Against my mother's stern warning not to take any of the photos in this box, I tucked one inside the waistband of my skirt.

Even then I felt the absence of something I couldn't then name and it hurt me for my mother, who I instinctively knew needed it, and would, I imagined, flourish under it. I never begged or made a scene over his lack of affection again because I didn't want to encounter that emptiness in their marriage.

I soon discovered that only the unconscious touch slipped by inside my house. As a little girl I would sometimes plan my attack, the goal: to be touched. My mother would be sitting at her end of the couch, doing needlepoint or reading a book. For my purposes it was best if she was reading a book and watching television at the same time. The more distraction, the less chance she would notice my approach.

I would take my seat on the far end of the couch and slowly inch my way down to her end, where I would contrive to put my head in her lap. If I made it, she might rest her stitching hand if she was doing needlepoint, and casually finger the locks of my hair. I remember the cool feeling of the thimble as it touched my forehead and how, with a thief's awareness, I could tell when she became conscious of her actions. I might encourage her then by saying I had a headache. But even if this bought me a few extra strokes, I knew the jig was up. I debated, until I became too old to play such games, whether it was better to remove myself from her or to be pulled, reluctantly, off her, and told to sit up or go read a book.

The soft things in my life were our dogs: two sloppy, loving bassetts named Feijoo and Belle. One name was that of a Spanish author my father admired and one, condescendingly for him, a word that the "uneducated" might recognize. "French for 'beautiful,' " my father would point out.

My father commonly called my sister and me by the dogs' names and this was a clue as much to who was closest to all of our hearts as it was to how preoccupied with work my father was. Dogs and children were the same to him when he was working. Small things that begged attention and needed to be put out.

What the dogs knew was that there were four distinct environments in our house and they rarely came together. There was my father's study, my mother's bedroom, my sister's bedroom, and wherever, throughout the house, I might be holed up. So Feijoo and Belle, and later Rose, had four places to try for attention. Four places where a hand would, distractedly reach out to fondle their ears or reach down for a good hot spot scratch. They were like comfort caravans, carting their lumbering, drooling selves from room to room. They were our comedians and our glue, for otherwise my father, mother, and sister lived in books.

I struggled to be quiet in the house. While the three of them read or worked, I kept myself busy. I experimented with making food in odd ways. I squirreled away Jell-O and made it under my tall four-poster bed. I tried to make rice on the dehydrator in the basement. I mixed my mother's and father's perfumes in little bottles to create new scents. I drew. I climbed boxes up to the crawl space in the basement and sat for hours in the dark cement hole with my knees drawn up. I played histrionic games with Ken and Barbie where Barbie, by sixteen, had married, given birth, and gotten divorced from Ken. At the mock trial, where the courthouse was made out of poster board I'd cut up, Barbie gave her reason for divorce: Ken didn't touch.

But I would get bored. Hours and hours of "finding ways to occupy myself" gave way to hatching plots. The bassetts were often my unwitting assistants. Like all dogs, they nosed through the trash and under beds. They carried away trophies: smelly clothes, used socks, unattended food containers, and whatnot. The more they loved it, the harder they fought to keep it, and the thing they loved the most, with an animal passion that makes sense of the phrase, was my mother's discarded maxi-pads. Basset hounds and maxi-pads are a love marriage complete. No one could tell Feijoo and Belle that that particular item was not meant for them. They were wedded to it.

And, oh, the scene, the lovely scene. It wasn't a one-person or two-person job, it was the whole thundering house. The "horror" of it made my father hysterical and my mother adamant that he get involved in the chase. The sheer thought of it was obscene! Maxi-pads! The bassetts and I were happy because it meant everyone came out of their rooms to run and jump and scream.

The downstairs of our house was laid out in a kind of circle and the bassetts had figured this out. We chased them round and round from front hall to back through family room, kitchen, dining room, and living room. The bassett assisting-the one sans maxi-pad-would bark and bark and cut us off at the pass when we attempted to make a lunge at the lucky one. We got smarter in our tactics, tried to block them with doors or corral them in the corner of a room. But they were wily and they had a clandestine assistant.

I let them get by. I false-lunged. I gave my parents and sister misdirection. "Back hall, back hall!" I would yell, and three hysterical people would run that way. Meanwhile the bassetts were happily hiding with their snare underneath the table in the dining room.

Eventually, I took matters in my own hands and, when my mother stepped downstairs to the kitchen or was reading outside on the porch, I would lead the most available bassett into her bedroom and turn my back.

Within minutes:

"Bud! Feijoo has a Kotex!"

"For Christ's sakes!"

"Mom," I'd say helpfully, "he's tearing it up!"

Doors burst open, footsteps on stairs and rug. Screaming, barking, raucous, joyous scene.

Always, though, as these scenes resolved themselves-disgruntled bassetts going away to lick their paws-my mother, father, and Mary would return to their rooms. I would be in the house at large again. Lonely.

In high school I began as a geek. A geek because I played the alto saxophone and, as was required of almost every musician save the lucky violinists, if you played, you marched. I was in jazz band, where, as second alto, I jammed on such tunes as the "Funky Chicken" and "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head." But getting down with my bad self was not enough recompense to be labeled a band geek. So, after marching in a Philadelphia Eagles half-time show where our band formed the shape of the Liberty Bell on the field (as an indication of my marching skills, I was asked to be part of the crack), I quit band. Later, without me, the band won a state championship for marching. The feelings of joy over my absence were mutual.

I went from music to art. Ours was a crafts-oriented art department and I loved the raw materials. There was silver, hunks of it. And, if you were good enough, gold. I made jewelry and cut silk screens and fired enamel. Once, with Mrs. Sutton, half of the husband-and-wife team who ran the department, I spent a whole afternoon pouring molten pewter into coffee cans of cold water. Wow! The shapes! I loved the Suttons. They approved all my projects, no matter how impossible to complete. I made a long-haired-Medusa silk screen, and an enamel choker of two hands holding a bouquet of flowers. I worked swiftly to finish a set of bells for a present for my mother. They featured the head of a lady with two arms forming a frame. Inside the frame were two bells with blue-heart nipples as the clappers. The bells made a fine sound.

I followed in the wake, academically, of my perfect sister. She was quiet, neat, and got straight A's. I was loud, weird, and obsolete. I dressed like Janis Joplin ten years after her death and I defied anyone to make me study or care. I still got by. Teachers, individuals, touched me. The Suttons and a few English teachers combined to make me care just enough-if you didn't point it out to me-not to become a druggie or a pothead or spend the free periods outside in the smoking lounge hiding doobies in my boots.

But I could never be a druggie because I had a secret. More than anything, I finally decided, I wanted to be an actress. And not just any actress but a Broadway one. A loud Broadway one. Ethel Merman, to be exact.

I loved her. I think I loved her even more because my mother said she couldn't sing and couldn't act but that her force of personality was so strong that she took the attention away from everyone else on stage. I wore an old feather boa and a sequined jacket that Father Breuninger held back for me from a church clothes drive. What I sang, as loudly and as charismatically, I hoped, as my idol, was her signature song. Traipsing up and down our spiral stairs with the bassetts as my audience, I belted out "There's No Business Like Show Business." It made my mother and sister laugh and my father loved it more than anyone. I couldn't sing either, but I would cultivate what Merman had, or try: force of personality. Bassetts at my feet. A little extra weight. Seven years of braces and rubber bands. There seemed no better time to break into song.

My obsession with Broadway and bad singing led me to friendships with gay boys in school. We sat outside Friendly's ice cream shop on Route 30 and sang the soundtrack from Bette Midler's The Rose. Gary Freed and Sally Shaw, voted the cutest couple in our school, walked by on their way to Gary's '65 Mustang after a Saturday-night sundae. They laughed at us in our black clothes and the silver jewelry we made for cheap in art class.

Sid, Randy, and Mike were gay. We were infatuated with people like Merman, Truman Capote, Odetta, Bette Midler, and the producer Alan Carr, who appeared on Merv in large, brightly colored muumuus, and who made Merv laugh in a way that other guests didn't. We wanted to be stars because as stars, you could get out.

We hung outside Friendly's because there was nowhere to go. We all rushed home to watch Merv if we knew Capote or Carr would be on. We studied Liberace. Once he flew in on a guy wire over his piano and candelabra with his cape spread out. My father loved him but my friend Sid didn't. "He's making an idiot out of himself and he's really talented," he said, as we smoked cigarettes outside Friendly's near the Dumpsters. Sid was going to drop out of school and move to Atlantic City. He knew a hairdresser there who, over the summer, had promised to help him out. Randy was sent to military school by his parents after "an incident in a park." We weren't allowed to talk to him anymore. Mike fell in love with a football player and got beat up.

"I'm going to live in New York when I grow up," I began to say. My mother loved the idea. She told me about the Algonquin Round Table and the people who sat there, how special they were. She had an outsider's mythology of New York and New Yorkers. She thrilled at the idea of me ending up there.

The year I turned fifteen my mother decided my birthday present would be a trip to New York. I think she worked herself up to go by pretending my excitement about it would keep her from collapse.

On the Amtrak train up from Philadelphia, she began to have a version of her panic. The dreaded flap. It grew worse as we sped toward New York. I was so excited to be going but as she rocked back and forth in her seat and her hands trembled-one on her right temple and one rubbing the space between her breasts-I decided we should go home.

"We'll come another time, Mom," I said. "It's okay."

She argued. "But we're on our way. You want this so much." Then, "Let me try."

She pushed herself. She fought to function normally. We should have turned back when we reached Penn Station. Both of us probably knew this. She was a mess. She couldn't walk upright. She had wanted to walk up from Penn Station to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Eighty-second and Fifth so we could see the shops and Central Park along the way. She had spent the weeks before planning it. Told me that on Forty-fourth was the Algonquin, and that I would get to see the Ritz and the Plaza, where she was sure my idol, Merman, often stayed. Maybe we would take a ride in a hansom cab around Central Park and see the famous apartment building, the Dakota. Bergdorf's and Lexington. The theater district, where Merman's musicals were playing. My mother wanted to stand in front of Sherman's statue and, as a daughter of the South, say a silent prayer. The duck pond, the carousel, the old men with their model sailboats. It was my mother's gift.

But she couldn't walk. We stood in the cab line out on Seventh Avenue and got in one. She could not sit up straight. She kept her head between her knees so she would not throw up. She said, "I'm taking my daughter to the Met."

"You all right, lady?" the cab driver asked.

"Yes," she said. She implored me to look out the window. "This is New York," she said as she stared at the dirty floor of the cab.

I don't remember the drive up save for crying. Trying to do what she said. The buildings and people were a blur to me. "I'm not going to make it," she began saying. "I want to, Alice, but I'm not going to make it."

The cab driver was relieved to reach the Met. At first my mother stayed in the backseat.

"Mom, let's just turn around and go hack," I pleaded.

"In or out?" the cab driver said. "What's the story?"

We got out. We crossed the street. In front of us were the monumental steps up to the entrance of the Met. I was trying to look around and take it in. I wanted to run up those steps thronged with people smiling and taking pictures. Slowly, with me leading my bent-over mother, we made it up some twenty stairs.

"I have to sit down," she said. "I can't go in."

We were so close.

"Mom," I said, "we made it, we have to go in."

"You go in," she said.

My fragile suburban mother sat in her good dress on the hot cement, rubbing her chest and trying not to throw up.

"I can't go in without you," I said.

She opened her purse and took a twenty from her wallet. She shoved it in my hand. "Run into the gift shop and buy yourself something," she said. "I want you to have a souvenir of the trip."

I left her there. I did not look back at her smallness on the steps. In the gift shop I was overwhelmed and twenty dollars didn't buy much. I saw a book called Dada and the Art of Surrealism for $8.95. I rushed back out after paying for it. People had surrounded my mother and were trying to help. There was no pretending now.

"Can we help you in some way?" a West German man and his concerned wife asked in perfect English.

My mother ignored them. The Sebolds did everything themselves.

"Alice," she said, "you need to flag a cab, I can't do it."

"Mom, I don't know how," I said.

"Go to the edge of the sidewalk and stick your hand out," she said. "One will stop."

I left her and did as I was told. An old bald man in a yellow Checker cab pulled up. I explained that my mother was the one on the steps. I pointed to her. "Could you help?"

"What's wrong with her? She sick? I don't want sick people in my cab," he said with a heavy Yiddish accent.

"She's just nervous," I said. "She won't throw up. I can't move her by myself."

He helped me. After living in New York as an adult I know how rare this was. But something about my desperation and, to be honest, my mother, he felt sorry for. We made it to the cab and while I sat in the backseat my mother lay down at my feet on the old Checker's big back floor.

The cabbie kept up the kind of patter you pray for. "You just stretch out there, missus," he said. "I wouldn't drive one of those new cabs. Checkers are the only kind of cab for me. Roomy. Makes people feel comfortable. How old are you, young lady? You look a lot like your mother, you know that?"

On the train ride home my mother's panic gave way to utter exhaustion. My father picked us up at the station and once we got home, she went immediately to her room. I was glad we were on vacation at school. I would have time to make up a good story.