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grabbing both girls’ hands for the short walk to Woodrow Wilson School 19.
    There was a light mist falling, and in the dense fog my mother could not see around the next corner.

chapter eight

    1952—1957
    F OR MOST OF 1952, my parents lived in a hotel while Linda stayed in the hospital. Late in the year, they were able to move to the Warinanco Village Apartments in Elizabeth that we called “The Village.” When she was well enough, Linda came home to the new apartment, and my mother got busy lining up friends for her among her new neighbors. She managed to find all the mothers with girls around Linda’s age and recruited them to her cause. As a result, Linda had a group of loyal friends she felt safe with and camaraderie she cherished for a very long time.
    One day, the boys included the girls in their after-school baseball game—mainly because they didn’t have enough players—in the courtyard behind the apartment complex.
    The captains took turns picking girls for their teams, and Linda was left standing alone. At the time, Linda wore a brace on her left leg up to her knee that included a shoe like a man’s work boot.
    Linda ran home, as best she could, crying.
    “They don’t want to play with me.”
    My mother was hesitant to intervene with explanations and her usual plea for understanding. She knew Linda should start taking over this role for herself.
    Just as she considered what to do, she heard a commotion outside. Out the window, she and Linda saw an animated argument between the boys and girls. Hands on hips, fingers pointing, girls shouting, boys cowering. Within minutes, her friend Nancy Boroff knocked on the door, marched in, and pulled Linda’s arm to go back outside.
    “We told those boys we aren’t playing unless you play. JoAnn, Janie, Sue, and me, we all told ’em,” Nancy told Linda proudly. With a grateful lump in her throat, Linda joined the game.
    Nancy was a skinny, high-energy little girl with wide eyes and ash blonde curls. Later on, I loved her because she always brought me a present when she visited. But her best gift was the friendship she lavished on my big sister.
    Together, they had contests to see who could jump over the hedges from a moving swing. They would roller-skate through clotheslines of clean clothes, chased by the women who had just hung them out. They had wars with wagons full of berries they picked from the bushes behind the apartments. They made costumes and put on talent shows for their parents.
    Linda felt so normal with her friends that she sometimes forgot her limitations.
    “Let’s go play by the brook in the woods,” Nancy suggested one day after school. A small gathering of trees behind the apartments passed for woods. The shallow brook could becrossed by hopping from rock to rock as stepping-stones, requiring a full leap between them.
    Linda had been warned that she shouldn’t go near water, that it would ruin her brace and shoe. But when Nancy hopped from one rock to the next, she followed despite her heavy metal brace.
    Pretty soon, she lost her footing and fell in. The brace and orthopedic shoe were soaked, ruined.
    Linda panicked, “My mother is going to kill me! I can’t get this wet. She’s warned me a zillion times!”
    “Don’t worry, I’ll tell her. I’ll take the blame,” Nancy said. “It’s my fault anyways, I shouldn’t have brought you here.”
    They slogged back to the apartment, the waterlogged shoe and brace weighing Linda down. They stood on the front stoop for several long minutes, and just as Nancy got the courage to knock on the door, it opened.
    My mother saw Linda dripping wet and ushered them both inside.
    She yelled, “Oh, my God, how could you?” Her Hungarian temper flaring, knowing how upset my father would be about the expensive shoe and brace. But she couldn’t bring herself to really be mad.
    Secretly, she thought, This is what normal kids do.

chapter nine

    I WAS FIVE . I was six. I was seven. I was eight.
    I