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and playing in the weathered red barn or in the sorghum fields behind their house.
    Once, we were exploring the barn. All the cows were still out grazing in the pasture. The pungent odor of cow manure and hay filled the dimly lit barn as we clambered among the metal milking stations. I climbed up on top of a metal gate. I sat on the top bar, one leg dangling on each side, and then I looked down, anticipating
my descent. It seemed so high up. “Ann,” I whimpered, “I’m stuck! I can’t get down.”
    â€œAw, come on,” Ann replied, squinting up at me.
    I started to cry. “Go get your mom, get her!”
    I can still remember her mom’s arms reaching up to grab me down, the salty smell of her neck as I clung to her chest, my legs around her waist. The feel of her hand, gently patting my back. “See, you’re fine now.”
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    THE SCHMITZ GIRLS, all four of them, had long hair, and they all wore it in the same style: parted in the middle with a single long braid dangling down their back. They were a big family—four girls and one boy—and we loved to play hide-and-seek and tag in the woods behind their house.
    Sometimes, I stayed overnight. I shared a lower bunk bed with Nancy, who was my age. In the morning, Mrs. Schmitz placed a stool in the middle of the living room. One by one, she called each daughter in turn. They sat on the stool while their mother combed their hair with a bristly brush. First, Mrs. Schmitz would brush the hair, then carefully divide it in three sections, braid the three plaits together, and secure the end with a stretchy band with two colored balls attached. I watched from the living room doorway, my chest tight, silenced and riveted by the crackle of static and the repeated strokes of mothering.
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    MY SITUATION WAS TABOO IN so many ways: a mother gone, and what had happened to her. I talked about it at first. Once, standing next to the metal jungle gym at recess, I repeated to a girl
what Dad had told me. I told her matter-of-factly, “My mom’s in a hospital, but it’s not her body that’s sick, it’s her head. The doctors are fixing her.” She stared at me, her eyes wide, mouth open. I felt I’d made some terrible mistake. A chill of shame overcame me: Mom’s condition was not like having a broken leg; something bad was wrong with her.
    Over time, I would learn other words to describe my mother’s condition. No one shouted them at me. Instead, like radio waves, the words hung in the air, unseen and ever-present: crazy, nutcase, loony, mad, psycho, mental, wacko, bonkers. There was no end to the names.

Chapter 7. Atlantic City
    THE SUMMER AFTER MY mother left, my father drove me to Atlantic City so I could spend the break from school with his parents. We drove down the Garden State Parkway, stopping for lunch at Howard Johnson’s halfway through the two-hour drive, where I devoured a plate of fried clams, slathered with ketchup. “Hey, Ketchup Kid! Ready to go?” Dad asked, when I was down to the last clam. I picked up the clam with my fingers and popped it in my mouth, nodding at him.
    Our lunch stop and the sights along the way were familiar from all the visits Mom, Dad, and I had made several weekends every summer. Only now, instead of Mom, I was sitting in the front seat next to Dad as he slowed the car to throw a quarter in the Garden State tollbooths. I gazed at the unending bank of oaks and maples and sycamores lining the road, until those woods finally gave way to the stunted South Jersey Pine Barrens, then the marshland and causeways leading to Atlantic City. As we approached the city skyline, I leaned my head out the open window and inhaled the sea air.
    My grandparents owned a kosher dairy restaurant a block inland from the famous wide Atlantic City boardwalk. I loved the sight of the pink neon sign blazing WILSON’S DAIRY RESTAURANT in the front window, as if we