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Beckie gnaws her terrycloth bib. Mother chops little squares of liver sausage, Edam cheese, banana, and Cheerios on a small cutting board. In one generous motion she spreads them across the plastic tray like a salesman with his samples, and Beckie reaches, lifts them to her face, her chopstick fingers scissoring. Our Westie sits in a hopeful posture beneath her chair. He knows the routine. Next spooning the applesauce, pudding, oatmeal into her mouth, catching the half that dribbles down, then spooning again. It’s a serene moment: eating is Beckie’s pleasure and Beckie’s eating is my mother’s pleasure. We girls banter and spin happily around this quiet corona.
    Touch of gloom: It’s naptime, which mother will get to when she finishes the dishes. Meanwhile, Beckie sprawls diagonallyon her back across the kitchen doorway. In one hand, a plastic bottle of milk, which escapes her sawing fingers and rolls away. As I step across her I notice she has stopped reaching. Her eyes are creamy white with a poppy-seed speck in the center. Something is wrong, very wrong. Her eyes have rolled back into her head. She’s at the bottom of a white lake, blinking. She’s
blind
. I scream for my mother, who swoops in with a rag, irritated, dabbing, tsking. “It’s just milk. She missed her mouth. That’s all. Now go find something to do.”
    If my parents felt unlucky, misunderstood, unfairly burdened, I never heard. If there was guilt or anger or desperation, all was withheld, reserved for the early morning hours when the girls were asleep in every reach of the house from attic to basement. When they awoke, the house bustled. Beckie in the high chair, Beckie on her rubber mat, the sour smell of used diapers and Desitin, which mother applied to both rear end and face. The clamor and lineup for “hair-fixing time”—five girls, two braids each. Or “stair-fixing time,” when we removed the newspapers, books, toys, games, sunglasses on three flights of steps, cleared out a safe-walking zone. Or laundry—clean diapers folded into thirds stacked almost three feet high. Beckie’s laundry occupying half of the couch, the remainder, everyone else’s. Our parents persisted, buoyant and conscientious, chasing what they thought was best for Beckie.
    In the midsixties, this meant embracing the techniques of Doman and Delacato, scientists at Johns Hopkins. Their theories were a pragmatic elaboration of a much older notion, that ontogeny (or the stages of an organism’s growth) recapitulates phylogeny (the evolutionary history of a species). Crawling, creeping, crude walking, and mature walking, in that order,mirror the process of human evolution from amphibian to reptile to mammal. A mentally retarded child, they reasoned, must master this exact progression if she is to develop normally. Treatment, known as “patterning,” required the patient to move repeatedly through the physical motions of each phylogenetic stage. For example, in the homolateral crawling phase, the child crawls by turning her head from side to side and extending the leg and arm of the opposite side. If she cannot do this herself, three to four adults must manipulate the movements for her. The purpose of the exercise was to impose the correct “pattern” onto the central nervous system. Doman and Delacato’s claim was that mentally retarded children could improve, even progress normally, as long as the exercises were repeated for at least five minutes, four times a day.
    Four times a day, volunteers from all over the neighborhood knocked at our double front door and made their way up to Beckie’s room—Yenta and Gretchen from the downstairs apartment, Georgia and Nancy several blocks away. We girls filled in when there was a vacancy, and there was always a vacancy. We lifted Beckie onto a folding table and stationed ourselves: the youngest moved her head, the other two worked her