1. Susannah, age 25 -- She was the first after my mother left, the experiment, the trial run. My father was heart-broken; Susannah was hot. Petite, toned, impulsive, she introduced him – and me – to The Joy of Sex. She would brush, braid, unbraid, re-braid, pig-tail, pony-tail my hair. “Poor little broken bird-wing,” she would coo. She never stopped touching, brushing, unknotting, making knots. She never stopped talking. She never stopped juicing. She had been macrobiotic; she was now raw. She took a garbage bag and slid our food into it; we wouldn’t need it anymore, she explained. We drank dinner one August evening and discussed the benefits of Chi. She had seen the light. She was ahead of her time. She was changing her name to Vashti. What did we think? She then borrowed my father’s Cadillac convertible. “I want to clear my head of all the static, all the clogged energy in this house,” she said, tossing from side to side the red curls that sat poised, ready for change, on her head. My father, mesmerized, enraptured, inebriated, gave up his car keys. After a few days, I called the police to list the car as missing while my father cried. “She was it,” he said. “The love of my life.”

2. Bert, age 29 -- The Alpine Olympian was my favorite; she almost got the Bronze, but hit a tree, broke her back in Innsbruck and had to retire after the ’76 games. She was Austrian and large and beautiful in a don’t-fuck-with-me way. She wore black leggings and gold hoop earrings and said “whatever” and “you betcha” with a smile that reeked of foreign insincerity. “Almost 30,” she would say as if living that long was an accomplishment, a victory. The size of her thighs intimidated anyone who tried to part them (my father) and she made jokes of the skinny girls who puked their way through high school. “Grow up,” she would say, snapping the metal tab of her Pabst can. In the washer, her thong underwear wound itself around my Lanz of Salzbergs, and while watching me untether my clothing from hers, she would laugh and say, “Here,” handing me the scissors. Then, one afternoon, she dropped me and a friend at the Palace Movie Theatre and said she wouldn’t be late. When the movie was over, my father, handsome in a jock-ish, overly suntanned, boozy sort of way, was making the ticket girl laugh. “Where’s Bert?” I asked. “Who?” he said.

3. Marjorie, age 37– This one prepped in New Hampshire (St. Paul’s) and “did” her undergrad work in New Haven (Yale). She spoke like a Hemingway heroine in code to my father: “Darling, I’m so terribly thirsty” (she wanted to get drunk) or “Darling, there are too many people here” (she wanted me to leave). She was older. She had traveled. She had her own money, but didn’t want to spend it. She ordered the wine at restaurants. She “wore” her hair cut short and she gave me the same cut; she had “prime” legs and said I did too; she “cultivated” a look and I would, too. She bought me a Lily Pulitzer skirt and stood next to me on the seventh hole. I clasped the club, she put her hands over mine; together, we practiced the swing again and again. It was like dancing. I was enchanted; I was in love. And then, that summer, while I was at sleep-away, she did her own version of ethnic cleansing: She discarded my cacti collection (I had 86 little terra cotta pots displayed on the living-room mantel) because “these prickly, stumpy pieces of dung are unsightly”; she killed my pets – two dogs, two cats, one bunny – by taking them to the vet and insisting they were ill and should be “put out of their miseries of which there must be many, given their mien”; she packed up my bedroom and put the boxes of “irrelevancies” in the basement and redecorated or rather “restored the room to its previous state of habitancy.” What the word meant was beyond me and when I returned from upstate yonder and asked a few questions (my head was most likely revolving like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist and my tone of voice was not Preppy Proper), she took her lady-like palm and slapped my face, my golfer’s legs, my torso, my ass, anything she could hit before I got to the back-door and ran into the woods. “I’m sorry, hun,” my father said, looking on as she slapped and slapped, his hands in his pockets. “I’m so sorry.”

4. Trudy, age 16 -- I liked to watch Trudy. She was like a sister, she was a truant. She would complain about my father, talk about their sex-life, share details as if we were peers, which we were. She was double-jointed and ambidextrous and, I think, bi-polar manic-depressive. Her arms and legs could wrap around her body like a cobra; she cried for hours and hours, and then laughed for hours and hours. She was sensitive to touch and when she parted her hair, she said, “Ooooooh, that tickles.” She “applied” mascara, she didn’t put it on; she “fell on hard times,” she was not poor and mooching off my father. She loved light and color and space. She’d been to France; she’d seen the Impressionists. She said I was an artist; still-lifes were my calling, my bowl of pears had promise. Her skin was flecked with green or purple or yellow so I flecked mine with a similar palette. “I need to chase my muse,” she announced, packing for an artists’ colony out west; she said she would be gone for two weeks. After a year, we received a postcard from her and my father said, “Which one was she again?”