first threw herself into Christmas with an enthusiasm as profound and suspect as that of department stores. Then she began to yell at us, mostly at me, since everyone else had chosen not to listen. We got used to yelling, and when Becky from the electric company called the morning of Christmas Eve to complain about the bill being late, not because we didn’t have the money but because my parents had stopped thinking about that sort of thing, my mother yelled at her too. The difference between being Becky and being anyone else my mother yelled at was that Becky turned off our electricity.
Christmas Day my parents left the dark house early in the morning. They didn’t tell us they were leaving, they just walked out and shut the door, and Liddie and I weren’t sure whether we had been left on purpose or forgotten. The lights had been out all night, and the food in the refrigerator was starting to go bad. Liddie and I sat in our pajamas, alone, staring at the tree that wouldn’t light up. When our parents returned hours later with pizza and Chinese food and flashlights and candles, we exhaled breath we didn’t know we’d been holding and ate cold food in the dark silence.
The next summer we moved, hoping for redemption through change of location. My father accepted an offer from Georgetown, where so far as anyone knew he’d always been quiet and eccentric and prone to drinking, not unforgivable traits in a law professor. My mother devoted herself to the kind of ostentatious suburban pursuits that let her pretend we were the ideal family, without actually having to talk to us. She chauffeured us to sport and dance lessons until we were old enough to refuse, she won three homeowner’s association bake-offs in a row, and she made such a show of ceremonial occasions that Liddie and I tried to skip our own birthday parties. Even when we had good days, at night it was clear that we had run away from everything except ourselves. Most nights my father was locked in his study, and my mother was knocked out on sleeping pills. Liddie brought her nightmares to me; I did what I could to comfort her. She slept in my bed more often than not until she was twelve and I was fifteen. When I woke one night and found my hand cupped over her breast I shook her awake.
“Liddie,” I told her, “you can’t sleep here anymore.” If my mother, who already looked at us like slightly dangerous strangers, walked in on us curled up in bed together, she’d throw herself off the nearest bridge. Liddie looked at me like I had slapped her. It had never occurred to her that we could be anything but kids together and I had shattered something by the very suggestion, forced her into premature adulthood. She went back to her bed and slept there for the rest of our adolescence, though her nightmares continued; I could hear them through the wall.
At fifteen, she started bringing her boyfriend over and having sex with him in her bedroom. No one stopped her. My father was passed out in his study, and my mother, when she was awake, knew Liddie had more control over the house than she did. I listened to the frantic panting for a few nights, then bought a Walkman with headphones.
Sometimes I thought she’d never forgiven me for not taking some action to save us. For never taking action when I should. She was pleasant enough tonight though, singing “As Time Goes By” off-key all the way back to her dorm room. My mother had refused to pay for a hotel room, on the grounds that if we each had our own spaces we’d probably ruin the point of the visit by confining ourselves to them. It was a rare insight on her part. I dropped my stuff in Liddie’s wood-paneled common area and tried to think of something brotherly to say about the formality of her living quarters, but all I could think of to say was, “It’s very clean in here.”
Liddie ignored me. She’d grabbed a book from out of her bedroom and sat across from me on a beanbag chair, reading furiously and applying yellow Post-it notes to pages. She was sitting between the radiator and the open window, and occasionally a breeze made the pages flutter. Watching her, it seemed even sillier to me that my mother