I followed the attendant into the small room in the insane asylum in Taunton, Massachusetts, and took the heavy chair she offered me. The place brought back horrible memories, memories I thought I had buried deep within my mind, thought I had forgotten. They came again to haunt me as I sat and faced my sister.

Marla's empty voice spoke through twisted lips: "I had a lot of nightmares last night. I dreamed that Ma was a big lion, and I was a little kitten. There were people all around me, surrounding me. They kept repeating the same words. `As long as you stay with me, you'll be safe. As long as you stay with Ma, you'll be safe.'"

I smothered a lump in my throat by swallowing hard. The wire mesh on the window on top of the only door reminded me of a prison. It was a cell—no pictures, no lamps, bare walls. A plain gray table separated us.

The pungent smell of disinfectant penetrated my nostrils, causing my eyes to water, but it was Marla's eyes that made me wince. She wore the dilated look of a tortured soul, that look I knew so well but never could get used to.

Why? I asked myself. Why did this have to happen? I wanted to know, needed to know. I searched my mind for reasons. A clue. Anything.

She had always wanted a child, but she had become that child. Was it her fears that had stood in her way? I used to blame her for the times when she would lay in bed for hours on end, for the times when she would overdose on drugs, although it wasn't the drugs alone that had made her ill. I used to blame her for making Mother her slave. Now I'm not so sure. Now, although I will always love her, I let God judge her.

I fought to keep back the tears; sometimes I tried not to believe it. She was a stranger to me now, someone I was seeing for the first time. Although she was two years younger than my fifty years, Marla looked ancient. It wasn't the wrinkles alone that made her look so old. Her thin lips revealed yellow teeth with big gaping holes, and years of taking medication had thinned her hair and turned it gray before its time.

There were craters in her face where blackheads had taken over, and a protruded belly was framed by limp arms—the same arms that had battered my mother more than once, smashed chairs, and shattered dishes.

I blinked back fresh tears when I remembered she was once pretty. I could still picture the blonde ponytail and innocent expression in blue eyes. I remembered too the many nights when I had prayed for my baby sister and the pain I felt when I realized slowly, through the years, that she would never recover.

As I listened to her, I was acutely aware of an old proverb that repeated in my mind: "There but for the grace of God—."

* * *

She was baptized Marla Olga Stephanie Midsummer, the youngest of four children born to Leslie and Jack Midsummer, our mother and father. Theirs was a wild courtship. He was only five feet six, but powerful, handsome and clean-cut, with reddish hair and a hint of freckles that displayed his Swedish inheritance.

"Wow" was all he could say when a friend introduced them, completely lost to the magic of love.

She smiled shyly, unaware at fifteen of the curves on her body or the heads that turned to stare.

He was four years older, had never used profanity, drank, nor used tobacco, but he loved the excitement of living on the edge. He took chances when he operated his bulldozer at work, coming a little bit closer than others to falling off the precipice, and people admired him for it. He was good.

And he was daring on his motorcycle. One day, as he was driving at high speed, he slid off a winding road on a sharp curve. He was lucky to survive the crash, which left him with a broken collar bone as well as a broken leg. Still, even though he was in formidable pain, that didn't stop his ardor. He limped for seven miles each day on crutches to see her.

When his fractures finally healed, he let her drive his "bike" on ladies' day at the cycle club. Dressed in black jodhpurs, her dark brown hair blowing in the breeze, she saw nothing but happiness in her future.

Work wasn't always easy to come by in Rhode Island in 1934, and Jack was happy when his job took them to Athol, Massachusetts during the first year of their marriage. There, the times they spent together were filled with joy, even though he had to trudge through miles of heavy snow to get to work. Her body began to swell with pregnancy.

When the job was over, they moved back to Rhode Island because the economy there was improving. And when her labor pains began during a New England nor'easter, he was aghast because they had to walk two blocks to the delivery room in Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket.

But she laughed and chided him innocently, "Why are you afraid? They're only going to cut a hole in my belly and take out the baby." No one had told her of birth and the pain.

She was knee-deep in snow, and dragged her belly over the top. The wind was fierce, and it caught the huge wide-brimmed hat she wore twice and tossed it into a snowbank. She thought it was all in fun when he had to chase it. A snowplow came by, and he tried to convince the driver to give them a lift. But he refused.

"No baby is going to be born on my plow. Besides, it's against the law."

* * *

The labor was long and hard, and she was swollen with toxic poisoning. He paced in front of the delivery room for twelve hours and smoked three packs of cigarettes. But she was young and strong, and their first child, a boy, was born on January 23, 1935. They named him Samuel after his brother who had been killed in a motorcycle accident and her brother who was hit by a train and died shortly afterward. They vowed this Samuel would have a full life. They would see to it.

"He's all boy," he beamed to his wife in the hospital. "You've made me so happy."

* * *

In spite of the love and the caring, troubles began to smolder like a sore that festered. He was under a lot of pressure at work. They demanded more of him—more chances, more stress on his already jagged nerves.

She was used to getting her own way. She was delicate like a gazelle, and he was young with lots of hormones, as is natural. The bedroom became an arena.

"Not again. It hurts," she would scream at his demands.

She avoided sex like an evil woe, which did not help to bolster his male ego. To ease the pressure, he began to stop in at the local bar nights after work with the guys.

She became pregnant again. More pressure. He got so angry one night he became violent and kicked her in the stomach when she turned away from him in the bedroom. She was crushed. Now he had threatened the baby, and for the first time she began to consider breaking off the marriage.

Even so, our family continued to grow. They had three more children. I was number two. My younger brother Jack came eleven months after me. We called him Junior. Marla Olga Stephanie was last.

Every Christmas, my father used to drag home a tree and decorate it with lights and balls and all sorts of pretty things. Then on the night before Christmas, he always told us to look out the window for Santa Claus, and he would pick out a tiny star I confess I could never see and tell us it was Santa.

"See those lights in the sky? He's coming! Quick, get into bed. If he catches you up, you won't get any toys."

Then we'd run for our bedroom and try to sleep. The next morning, the toys would be piled up to the ceiling.

But I hated to get close to him because his breath stunk like whiskey. One day he came home with no pay. I think my mother was mad because he slept on the floor that night. When he awoke, he rocked his head from side to side. He cried like a wounded puppy. Then he picked up his whiskey bottle which was beside him and shook it. It was empty.

"Crap!" he yelled as he threw it into the kitchen sink. A big chunk of the sink flew out. It was our brand new sink. It had been so white and so pretty. But it was ruined. Then Dad looked at the hole in the wall that he had punched with his fist the day before. He hid his face in his hands and cried.

But I felt that he crossed us when he told people his kids had done it.

I loved Dad, but he was hurting Mom. Sometimes he put his hands around her throat and choked her. And what was he doing behind the bedroom door?

One day, when he told her to "get in that bedroom" and forced her to go inside, I said in a voice as gruff as I could make it, "All right, you old Jack Midsummer."

He sounded like thunder when he came out of the room. "Who said that?"

I was already under my bed hiding. I was frightened, but no one told on me.

And I'll never forget the first day of kindergarten. Mom had dressed me up in a pretty dress and put my hair in pigtails.

I looked ugly, and I felt everyone was staring at me, so I started to cry. But Mom said I was pretty, although I never believed it.

But my sister Marla was pretty, and sometimes I was jealous. I could talk her into giving me anything she had. It was so easy. She always had the prettiest doll, and she always traded me for my doll that I didn't like. And then I would feel bad.

She loved Sam and would come running to him whenever he came into the house crying "Sabit" because she couldn't pronounce his name.

When Dad drank, he was like a wild animal. Mom had to look at us twice through black and blue eyes. She looked like a raccoon. Once, he even broke her nose. When he took her to the doctor, Dad told him that Mom had "banged into a door." The doctor didn't believe it.

"Are you trying to kill her?" he asked and told Mom to leave him.

I remember we were always at the police station. They told her to leave too. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she just couldn't take it.

But it wasn't all bad. Dad loved Italian food, and he liked to take us for spaghetti and meatballs at the Larga Roma tavern. We were happy then. We liked it when he sang to us too. He would sing us songs about his "bronco" that threw him and The Strawberry Roan. We didn't know his "bronco" was his motorcycle. And Mom would laugh.

Every time my mother left him, she took us to my grandparents' house. Granny and Pepere didn't mind. But Dad would always come to her and beg for forgiveness. Once, he grabbed my sister and kidnapped her. It was part of a plan to get Mom back. He left my sister with his mother and, the next day, went to tell my mother.

"Marla has swallowed a pin! You've got to come home to take care of her. She needs you. Please, come back. I need you too. I'm sorry. I won't do it again. I love you."

She went back more times than I can count. Once, my uncle Jeffrey, Dad's brother, came to see Mom and talked her into going back to him.

"If it doesn't work out this time, I'll never ask you again," he promised.

But it didn't work because my mother was suspicious of my father. Whenever Dad didn't come straight home from work, she questioned him over and over. One day she broke the window screen in her bedroom when she tried to see if he was parking with another woman in front of the house.

He had never cheated on her, but it made him very angry to think that she suspected him. One night she left us alone and walked to the barroom where Dad always went. She sneaked inside and, when she saw him talking to a woman, she was so angry she chased her into the ladies' room, pounded on the door, and started swearing at her.

"You're trying to steal my husband!" she screamed.

Dad made her go outside, and he gave her the beating of her life.

That night she packed a few things in a small red wagon and took us to Granny's house. My sister, younger brother, and I couldn't walk very far, so she put us in the wagon. Sam had to walk. He always had to do "grownup" things. My sister was scared stiff, and I was all mixed up. I couldn't figure out anything-didn't know why all these things were happening. Jack Junior was probably mixed up too.

My mother looked like raw hamburger when she showed up at my grandparents' house.

My brother Sam was a very serious child. Mom used to brag about him being able to say the alphabet by heart before he was two. He sure was the smartest one, and he sailed through grammar school at the top of the class. And he was the biggest. He had brown eyes and brown hair like Mom.

He was almost eight at the time my parents separated. Being the eldest, he was our protector, and he was happy that Dad didn't live with us anymore.

I had terrible nightmares after that. One nightmare was about a big spider that was on the ceiling just over my head. In my dream I had to lay there as he slowly came down a string he made. He always came to within a few inches of my face. When he reached the bottom, he would jump up to the top, and would start all over again. The suspense was horrible.

Jack Junior was the active one, and he always had a shy smile. He hated school, but he went every day anyway. He never stayed in the house. Each year he slept outside on the porch from March to November, even when there was snow on his blankets. He was either swimming or camping or climbing all the time, and he never sat still. Mom said Jack Junior and I were worms because we always wiggled.

Marla was scared of everything. During a thunderstorm, she went nuts. She would run around the house, screaming and crying, and then she'd hide herself in a closet.

She was afraid of Dad. She never wanted to come to him when he came over for visits. Her face was chubby and adorable, and her red hair was curly like Dad's. She was always trying to scrub off her freckles. And she could still be talked into anything.

Mom never wanted a divorce because she was Roman Catholic, but Dad would hear of nothing else. So when all the kids had mothers and fathers who lived together, we were a "divorced" family.

* * *

"You don't belong here. This is not your house," my old maid aunt Sarah would yell at us when we got out of hand, which was often. I got so sick of her telling us it wasn't our house.

Even though she had the biggest brightest room in the house, she was jealous of Mom and us because she had to share the house with us. She had wanted it for herself. Life had been cruel to her. Everyone said she was "slow."

As a child she woke up more than once in the middle of the night and found herself sitting on her neighbor's porch with her feet in the snow. She started to shiver in her thin nightgown and began to cry. Her cries awoke her neighbor who let her inside and gave her a hot cup of tea.

And when she was fourteen until she turned eighteen, she was committed to a mental institution.

My grandmother always said that she was sick because she fell into a tub of bluing water when she was very young. But we didn't understand why she could be so cruel.

"I want peace and quiet," she would shout. "Who do you think you are anyway? You belong on the streets."

We fought often and played tricks on Granny. She wore many petticoats under her housedress, and we would sneak behind her and place a "kick me" sign on the back of her dress. Granny thought it was funny; Auntie Sarah never did.

We'd play "water tag" in the summer. We'd run around the house with glasses of water, trying to get the "bad guy." There was water all over the place, even on the window screens, because we'd play outside as well as inside and hurl the water through the windows. It was cool and fun.

Samuel would hang his long johns on a broomstick over the stairway and make a puppet out of them by tying strings to the legs. Granny would laugh so hard her belly would shake.

Our Granny was very old, sixty-five when Mom came home with us. And she was the backbone of our family at that time—mine anyway. When a nightmare would haunt me, and I ran to her big feather bed, I'd be able to sleep soundly.

We had oodles of cousins because she had thirteen children. And she made the money stretch. We had more vegetables than most people because she grew corn, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, radishes, and so many vegetables I can't remember in her small garden.

But I remember the strawberry patch because I loved strawberries. And the rhubarb. We used to put sugar in whiskey glasses and take them out into the garden. Then we'd peel the rhubarb and dip them in sugar. It was so good.

It was a very old two-story house that had formerly been a barn, and every piece of furniture in it was broken, as well as every spoke on the stairs. The rooms were small, except for Aunt Sarah's room which stretched across the entire front of the house. We had one bathroom with a tub, sink, and toilet, with no hot water. Taking a bath was a real challenge.