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turned around and I grabbed her head with both hands and I said, ‘Who. The. Fuck. Are. You. Calling. A. Guinea, you Irish bastard?’ Just like that. And the cashier is screaming, ‘Please girls, stop.’ But it’s too late. The manager comes over all worried, saying, ‘Ladies, what’sgoing on? What’s the problem?’ I say, ‘Nothing.’ The Irish girl can’t even talk, she’s so shocked. And . . . I walk out with my eleven items.”
    â€œOh, Rosalie . . .” my mother tried.
    â€œMa, I gotta hear her call me a guinea? Since when?”
    â€œOh, Christ, they’re all like their father, except my Lorraine,” my mother said.
    I always managed to run to the table and hear the tail end of my sister’s battles. “Why doesn’t this happen when you go shopping with me? I wanna fight someone at King Kullen,” I’d say.
    â€œI’m not even going to tell your father, because he’ll go to the supermarket and wait for the manager to come out and there’ll be a real shit storm,” my mother would say. “This is between us. Don’t tell your father!”
    â€œThat’s not even why I’m here,” Ro said. “Get Lorraine and Arlene. I wanna put Tiger Lilly in a doll’s dress and find a little black top hat for Lorenzo [our cats] and film a wedding ceremony tonight.”
    Before you knew it, we were digging through bags in the garage and retrieving tiny doll clothes for the cats to wear for their shotgun wedding—all caught on our Super 8 mm camera. Within an hour of Rosalie’s dropping in, we were all planning a ridiculous feline wedding, and that clip still exists to this day—almost forty years later. And it gets the same laughter time and again. That’s one of the reasons why you had to be around the magical aura of my sister Rosalie whenever shewalked into a room. You had to turn your chair in her direction. She made you look.
    When the house finally turned quiet, when Rosalie took her show home, Aunt Mary dozed off on the downstairs couch in front of the TV that I would secretly turn to the X-rated Escapade channel), Aunt Mae and Arlene walked home, and Lorraine fell fast asleep within minutes of her lights turning off, that was usually when I’d be under my covers and hear the ice clinking in the tumbler of my father’s third Scotch. That was the one he took past my bedroom and brought into his own before collapsing into his king-size bed. I’d listen to my mom carefully pleading with him to calm his anger when he’d discuss the corporate bosses or loopy customers who dropped by the store with stupid requests or silly demands. I could hear her undressing him and dropping his head on the pillow.
    â€œOh, Manoola.” That was the nickname he gave her. Nobody knew why. “I wish you could see the shit I have to go through every day with these crooked kikes. They all have mistresses, and they would sell their own mothers down the river to turn a dollar profit.”
    â€œAll right, Al, I know. It won’t always be this way,” my mom would promise him as he passed out. He would begin snoring immediately, and she would finally be able to light a cigarette and pop a Librium to adjust her high blood pressure and calm her down.
    Sometimes she would walk into my room and sit on my bed, smiling and laughing nervously to reassure me. “Oh boy!Well, your father was in rare form tonight,” she’d say, whistling through her teeth and rubbing my chest. “He was feeling a little bit stewed. Don’t worry, honey. If you hear him yelling, always remember Daddy’s under a lot of pressure at work. He works hard for us.”
    â€œI know, Ma. I know what Daddy goes through,” I’d whisper, closing my eyes. “I listen.”
    The call that changed my life that summer was, while unexpected, not out of the ordinary. For reasons