The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller Page A

when we were hurt or sad and would sit with a weeping child for an hour, well after the crisis had passed, holding a small hand, in no rush to go anywhere. In that sense, he was the opposite of Suky, who skittered around in a flurry of activity eighteen hours a day. She relaxed only when she lay down with me to put me to sleep, humming wisps of songs into my ear in her high, breathy voice and curling a strand of my hair round her finger.
    The truth is, I never got to know my father very well. Suky eclipsed him; the fire that burned in her day and night blotted him out in my imagination. He was a shadow figure, a refuge at times but not fully real to me as a man. I find this sad, because now I realize that, of all my traits, the ones I got from my father are the most valuable; it was the Des in me that allowed me to survive.
    It didn’t seem strange to me that my parents barely spoke to each other. Their exchanges were almost entirely confined to talking about the children, or simple requests, such as ‘pass the milk please.’ As far as I could tell, Suky spent any free time she had with me. She got most of her affection from me, too. I wonder what my parents’ life together was like before I was born, or when they were newlyweds. In one early photograph, they seem shyly happy together, holding hands and smiling outside my father’s first parish in Hartford. My mother is wearing a flowered housedress. Her face is young and round. Growing up, I was fascinated by this image, because Suky was not tiny then. She was almost plump.

Dolls and Husbands
    I was always a housewife when I played, a little mother pushing my toy vacuum cleaner, a fussily dressed baby doll on my hip, or primly taking messages on a pink pretend phone for my husband, a tall, shadowy being I called Joey. Sex with Joey was a swift, choreographed movement. I would lie down, flap my legs open and closed, and stand up again, returning to my chores. I think I got the idea that you lie down from my friend Amy, who was, at nine, already a bit of an aficionado.
    â€˜You know what the worst word in the world is?’ Amy asked me one day as we played in the dark corridor of our second floor. ‘What?’ I asked. Amy stood against the window, pensively swiveling the head of one of my dolls round and round. A web of fine, shiny brown hair tumbled to my best friend’s waist. Her cornflower blue, crescent-shaped eyes gave her an old-fashioned, wistful air. ‘Fuck,’ she said flatly. Then she turned to look across the street at her older brother, Andy, who was mowing the town green. Amy’s family was rich compared with ours, yet all the kids but Amy had summer jobs, to teach them the value of money. I watched Amy from behind: her arms rested on the crossbar of the window frame. Her lilac dress was cinched at the waist by a slender belt and fell in neat little pleats to just below her knees. Her bare feet were crossed at the ankles. I felt awed by her elegance and her beauty. There had never been such a girl, I thought, so perfect, so confident, so lovely. I felt like a troll in comparison. I was short, my face was flat, my hair was the color of straw, my eyes like gray marbles. One summer afternoon, as I pulled on my bikini bottom, Amy contemplated my muscular stomach with a cool, thoughtful air.There was a faint line on my belly, like a sepia seam, from my navel to my sex. She pointed to it and said, ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’
    â€˜What?’ I asked.
    â€˜When you were in your mother’s stomach, you were going to be a boy until the very last second .’ I looked in the mirror, at the broad muscles in my little shoulders, the round, strong thighs. I didn’t look like a girl at all.
    â€˜You’re a boy-girl,’ she said, laughing. I laughed, too, though I felt my throat constricting. I shoved her onto the bed, and we tumbled, hysterical now, screaming, wrestling. Then we lay very