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went to perform. Well, Jackie got panic-stricken and forgot the few steps she had learned. She just couldn’t follow the music, and finally she simply stood there on the stage watching me. The audience booed. I was embarrassed and frightened. I took Jackie’s hand and we walked home to our mother.
    But was it a terrible childhood? A friend once said, when another pal was complaining about her childhood, “You didn’t have a terrible childhood. Helen Keller had a terrible childhood.” I had love. I never lacked for food or clothes. I had cousins with whom I happily played, especially in the summers. I had uncles who taught me to swim and took us to amusement parks. I had a mother and a grandmother who doted on me. I had a father who, although often absent, was never unkind or abusive.
    I did have a friend here and there. (I remember one when I was about ten, with whom I smoked cigarettes stolen from her mother.) So if I was a sad and serious little girl, I can’t say that my early childhood package was wrapped in plain brown paper. It had some shiny paper, too, provided by occasional excursions into my father’s unusual life. And it also had some pretty bows, tied carefully by my mother.

“Skinnymalinkydink”
    O VER THE YEARS as I was growing up, Mother, Dad, Jackie, and I would from time to time visit the Walters family in New Jersey. My uncle Harry Walters was a leading citizen in Asbury Park, New Jersey, just over an hour from Manhattan. He and his wife, my aunt Minna, owned a big dry goods store in Asbury Park. They sold sheets, towels, and even children’s clothes. They did very well. When we visited, Uncle Harry would give us presents from the store.
    Uncle Harry and Aunt Minna had three daughters around my age (sadly all have died, but I do still see their children). My cousins had a governess, an honest-to-god governess. The sisters loved one another and played together.
    I never remember either of my parents setting foot in a temple. My father used to say he was an atheist. But Uncle Harry was very involved in the synagogue. He and Aunt Minna celebrated the Jewish holidays; they fasted on Yom Kippur and celebrated Passover with big feasts for the family. We never did. The closest we ever got was when my mother would light Sabbath candles on Friday night. Friday was the only night my father would make a special effort to be home. We certainly knew full well that we were Jewish. But practicing the religion just never seemed important. As a result I have no Jewish education or any religious education and don’t observe the holidays.
    One more thing about Uncle Harry and Aunt Minna. They seemed to have a very good marriage. Everyone in the Walters family came to them for advice, comfort, and, oh yes, money. Uncle Harry headed the family. He was handsome, easygoing, sweet, and, I guess, predictable. His older brother, Lou, my father, was adventurous, a gambler, an artist in his way, and definitely not a family man. I envied my three happy cousins (talk about belonging), and yet, when we grew up—forgive me for saying this—my life was so much more interesting than theirs. Not necessarily better, but much more interesting. And for better or worse I came to value “interesting” far more than “normal.”
    The Walters side of the family always looked down on the more common Seletsky side. And, no surprise, my father never fitted in with the Seletskys. But we spent much more time with my mother’s relatives.
    Every summer for about five years, when I was a little girl, my mother, father, Jackie, and I shared a house with my mother’s sister, Aunt Lena Alkon; her husband, Sidney; and their two sons, Selig and Alvin, in Nantasket. Nantasket, now a Boston suburban community called Hull, was, and is, a skinny peninsula twenty miles or so from Boston with Massachusetts Bay on one side and Hingham Bay on the other. It wasn’t a swank summer resort like Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, site of the home compound for the