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can’t walk another step.”
    “Come on! Try this!” That’s when my sister, the Mensa member, invents the Way to Walk Through Phragmites. She locks her arm around my waist, then clamps mine around hers. She demonstrates how to stick your leg in the air, then form an arc with it. Legs synched, we sweep the stuff down one exhausting step at a time.
    “We’re never gonna make it,” my voice wavers.
    She laughs. “If I die first, you can eat me.”
    On a trip to New York we visit our old apartment. “Was it hard to swing?” my sister asks.
    “Piece of cake. I sent a letter ‘To the Occupants of 4E.’ I sprinkled it with phrases like ‘Mem’ry! That strange deceiver!’ ”
    My sister laughs.
    In front of the building we pause on the sidewalk. This is where we learned to roller skate, play hopscotch, jump rope, and ride our bikes.
    “Who was the doorman who gave us Life Savers?”
    “Tom. Who was the elevator man who borrowed our comics?”
    “Jimmy.”
    Inside the lobby I study the bench where she once made me wet my pants by blocking access to the elevator.
    “Who was the super with the German shepherd?”
    “Mr. Korber. Who was the doctor with an office in the lobby?”
    “Dr. Port.”
    Then the elevator reaches four, and we are standing in front of our old front door.
    “Remember when you locked me out?” I say.
    “Yeah.” My sister sounds wistful. “Remember when you sleepwalked to the neighbors, and they found you on their toilet?”
    “The Walds. They had angels on the wallpaper.”
    We ring the bell. A wary couple opens it, and from zero miles per hour I break into racking full-fledged sobs.
    “Excuse me,” I say. “I have no idea why this is happening.”
    “It’s all right.” They look worried.
    “Omigod!” My sister looks around. “It’s exactly the same!”
    “Well, we ripped up that horrible brown linoleum in the foyer somebody put in,” the woman says.
    That was our linoleum, state-of-the-art.
    “May we see the kitchen?” I ask.
    In the kitchen my sister says again, “It’s exactly the same!”
    Not to me. It looks tiny. Everything looks tiny. But I was turning twelve when we left, and my sister was full-grown.
    “Remember the time I pretended to commit suicide behind this door?” she says.
    “Yeah, but you forgot to hide the Heinz ketchup.”
    We double over laughing. The people move closer to each other.
    In the pantry, we automatically go right. Mattie’s room is a storage closet now. I’d forgotten the wall behind her bed was made of privacy glass. Must have been to let light in, since her window overlooked an air shaft.
    In the playroom, there are picture moldings I never noticed.
    “Remember when we watched Lux Video Theater in here?”
    “We did everything in here.”
    In the hallway leading to our mother’s room, my sister says, “Remember when I crashed through the glass door?”
    “Weren’t you chasing me?”
    The bedroom, which had the same trellised wallpaper Ozzie and Harriet’s had, is peacock blue now, but the bed’s in the same place.
    “I used to love when we were sick and got to spend the day here.”
    “I used to love when Mom let us try on her green velvet robe.”
    “I used to love the way she rubbed Vicks in my chest for growing pains.”
    “I used to love the way she played with my hair after a shampoo. She dried it with her fingers. It took hours. Hours and hours and hours.”
    “You always had short hair,” my sister says. “It took five minutes to dry.”
    The people are following us from room to room. I see pure relief on their faces when we start thanking them for the visit. Then I realize I haven’t seen our old bathroom. I used to think there was treasure behind one of the tiles because it sounded hollow when you rapped it with your knuckles.
    “May I use the bathroom?” I say.
    There’s a pause. They’re not happy. Reluctantly they follow me to the bathroom. I smile at them and shut the door. I rap on the tiles. Still