About My Sisters by Debra Ginsberg Page A

disagreed with the “loose” way some of their peers were raising their own kids and they were fairly vocal about it. They held no truck with any of the pop psychology coming in and out of vogue. There was something of a “children should be free to set their own boundaries and explore their own space and shouldn’t be told negative words like ‘no’” movement happening in those days that my parents shared with Maya and me and then laughed at outright. My parents had an extremely firm belief in the word “no” and the only space that was going to be explored was the one they provided and controlled. Unlikemany of the parents they knew then, my parents did not think that children should be setting their own boundaries or making their own decisions. I would say they even leaned generously to the seen-and-not-heard school of thought. My father once pointed to the passage in Alice in Wonderland (my favorite book at the time) where one of the characters tells Alice that she’s thinking again and that makes her forget to talk, and said, “See this? This is important because, in reality, the exact opposite is true. When one is talking, one forgets to think. The words come out of your mouth, but you don’t know what you’re saying. Always remember to think first. And don’t talk unless you’ve really got something to say.”
    Whatever the reasons, there were rarely other children around in those days. Because we so often switched schools, Maya and I didn’t have time to develop friendships there either. In effect, we were the sum total of our own peer group. I never perceived any of this as a lack. Aside from Maya, I thought most children were much less interesting than adults, at least the adults I knew, because my parents’ friends were nothing if not interesting.
    Altogether, these friends made a Venn diagram of two circles that intersected in the middle. We switched back and forth between London and New York several times between 1969 and 1971. There was a circle of friends in each city and then a few who drifted back and forth between them as we did. There was Sara, for example, a New Yorker who lived for many years in London. She was already married and divorced by the time she was in her early twenties. I thought she was one of the most exciting women I’d ever meet. Sara dressed like the characters that populated my mother’s deck of Tarot cards. In velvets, robes, and scarves, she was alternately the Fool, the Empress, and the Magician. When she lived with us in London, all the sheets, pillows, and blankets in her room were printed with Tom and Jerrycartoon characters. Sara shaved her head bald and wore a giant ankh around her neck. She always spoke to me as if I were a small adult instead of a seven-or eight-year-old. She told me that she’d had a baby at the age of thirteen and had to give it up for adoption. Her eyes were big and sad when she told me this, but she didn’t cry. I wanted to know more but couldn’t figure out what questions to ask.
    And then there were David and Wanda, Londoners who didn’t travel outside their city. David was beautiful to look at (everybody knew he was beautiful to look at and commented on it regularly), very talkative, and full of quips. He was one of very few people who could consistently make my mother laugh. David was an aspiring actor and always had a story about an audition or a film set. He was terribly glamorous and I always loved it when he was around. When he told the story about breaking his arm during an audition for a Shakespeare play, my heart wanted to break.
    Wanda was David’s girlfriend and perpetual fiancée. She was even more beautiful than David, but it was the ethereal, milky-skinned, limpid-eyed kind of beauty, as if she was some sort of landed ocean sprite. I always felt comfortable trading a joke or two with David, but Wanda was just too beautiful. I couldn’t