LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, SEPTEMBER 1963: Nina kept handing me cups of Irish coffee and promising that things would pick up, but the sight of Sam grinning beside her portraits did a lot more to temper my disappointment. Back at the Little Gallery eight years ago, in what feels like another life, I accepted Manhattan and Mr. Stromlin’s connections and my circle of friends the way a child takes for granted all the pretty presents at her birthday party. By the time I left the Lacuna, only fifteen visitors had come and gone. Nina wanted me to stay through midnight, promising that the Saturday-night art crowd made Brooklyn their last stop, but I decided it was better to risk missing Mr. Stromlin than remain outnumbered by the faces on the wall.

65. Bath, Brooklyn, 1960

It looks like I’m floating. There I lie, arms outstretched, palms up, gazing beatifically at the ceiling, belly and thighs and toes peeking above the water. Depending who you ask, I look like a water nymph or a drowned corpse. Guess which one the newspapers went with? The whiteness of the water is hiding the upside-down cup that’s propping up my butt. The water’s white because I’d let the soap sit in it for a really long time in order to make “milkshakes.” The whiteness of the bathtub almost exactly matches the whiteness of the water, a happy coincidence Lillian wasn’t about to pass up.

The first half of opening week was crushingly similar to the first half of any other week. I got up, went to school, then played at Mrs. Ardolini’s until Lillian brought me home. It was just like my mother had said: no autographs, no bicycle. Optimist that I was, I kept telling myself it was just a matter of time. In a way that involves yanking optimism into a back alley and kicking its teeth in, I was absolutely right.

Maybe it was the twitchy woman I offended with my sales pitch, or maybe it was someone else, but that Thursday Lillian didn’t come for me at Mrs. Ardolini’s when she was supposed to. Which was fine, because that meant getting to invent bonus accidents for the Judy Splinters doll Kaja and I were torturing in Mrs. Ardolini’s backyard. An hour later Grete came for Kaja, and Lillian still hadn’t shown. As Mrs. Ardolini handed Grete a phone message, she said that I needed to go home with them, something to do with a gallery and a woman named Nina. From the way Grete thanked Mrs. Ardolini and danced us out of there, you’d have thought we were on our way to a ball at the Ritz. Instead, she took us to a stoop a block away. She sat us down on the crumbling steps to read what Mrs. Ardolini had written, but the message didn’t say anything Mrs. Ardolini hadn’t said already.