My mother Pearl was born babbling in the nascent Los Angeles of the 1920’s. Her accent was dubbed ‘American West’ by an Italian linguist, who studied her in astonishment. I imagine she probably told him she was born in Winnemucca, Nevada—it sounds more appealingly Western than LA, the hard desert sun boiling everything down versus coastal haze. When I mentioned Pearl's birth in Winnemucca to Lydia, her brown eyes glared at me in outrage—Pearl once again pulling a fast one. Lydia ran off for the birth certificates. They verified her story: Pearl was born in Los Angeles, and Lydia was born in Winnemucca.
     They had different personal styles: Lydia took the truth hostage, guarding it jealously. Pearl abandoned it on a daily basis. What was at stake?
     Family reunions were rare but intense. I recall one reunion where our moment of collision gave way to a rolling obscure fight which lasted three days, wet and smothering with too much booze: Lydia’s four boys versus Pearl’s three girls—a strange proliferation, all charged up. We didn’t argue, we fought. Lots of politics, especially relating to sex. Still I loved them fiercely, each strange male cousin. Once Sam snipped the butt off a firefly and put in on my finger. Bitterness inside a sexual fog—that was the surface. Underneath was the grudge we inherited, Pearl and Lydia’s inscrutable calculus of betrayal and loyalty.
     Lydia didn’t remember Raymond, she was a baby when he left. Pearl was older—probably around seven—but didn’t remember anything before the age of 16. Pearl’s lack of memory was terrifically odd, itself a thing of great plasticity. It was as though out of pure will she’d substituted imagination for memory.
     At fifteen, I was a rapt audience for Pearl’s nightly performances, my attention made out of hard particles of dread and identification. Families are nuclear, and nuclei are smashed together. Do you know the difference between the weak and the strong forces? The strong one is the massive force of the universe, binding quarks of opposite charge. It’s only exercised across tiny distances, such as families. Everything else is weakness. I loved the dazzle: Pearl’s career as a high diver at the Depression-era fairs (aborted by an exhibition high dive belly flop that left her sinking to the bottom of the pool in a coma), the swim to glory and medals, making the Olympic team the year the games were cancelled, Pearl’s socialist Jewish father Raymond and his movie star friends (who even had movie star animal pals), the opium dens of Winnemucca. History made of such sparkles. The father in this tale even had a violin. (Lydia would later insist it was only a guitar.) The stories disappeared into one poignant pang after another. I couldn’t notice how they didn’t add up. I was too pleased with being part Jewish, and striped with Olympic muscles. It helped me in the neighborhood.