She was plump-faced, slow-moving, almost pretty, with her mother’s fair skin and wide-spaced gray eyes and honey-colored hair—hair that Marya coveted—but she hadn’t Wilma’s special air, that razorish edge that Marya feared and admired. She was three years older than Marya but oddly intimidated by her. It must have seemed to her an amazing stroke of ill luck, that she and her sallow-skinned little cousin were suddenly sisters.

“I didn’t ask to come here,” Marya whispered more than once. “I didn’t ask to be born.”

They were to share a bedroom for many years—nine, nearly ten—but were never to take warmly to each other. “Marya doesn’t like me,” Alice complained to Wilma. She isn’t my type, Marya would think when she learned the helpful word “type” some years later; the explanation made as much sense as any.

Still, they were close as many sisters; they rarely fought; they played Parcheesi together, gin rummy, checkers; they read comic books and Wilma’s cast-off magazines, sometimes in the house, sometimes in the old blue Buick, cozy and companionable in the front seat on a drizzly afternoon. When it came to games—“games” being anything done on two legs, rough, rowdy, shading into actual violence—Alice was no good at all: silly, helpless, contemptible: spurned even by Marya, her “sister.”

The bedspread that covered their slightly sagging mattress was a bright orange chenille, fuzzy and rigid, that Wilma had won at bingo at the Shaheen Falls Volunteer Firemen’s picnic one August. They had a wall lamp—“brass”—with a sharply fluted shade; and another lamp ingeniously fashioned out of a white ceramic lamb with enormous blank eyes. The carpet that inadequately covered the floorboards of their room had once been in Wilma and Everard’s room, and retained still a certain slapdash glamour—it was a deep-piled russet splashed with black streaks, with long russet tassels, wonderfully soft beneath Marya’s bare feet. There was only a single window in the room, an absolute square, framed by filmy white “draw-back” curtains from Woolworth’s; its view, unfortunately, was the messy rear of Everard’s garage, an area in which old tires were heaped, rusted hubcaps, odds and ends of lumber left over from building the house, nameless things no longer useful but not precisely useless, not outright junk. There, hidden from most eyes, men patronizing the garage sometimes went to urinate, quickly and stealthily: it was Marya’s habit to turn away from the window as soon as she saw a man approaching, but Alice sometimes watched, hidden behind the curtains. . . . “Oh isn’t he a pig, isn’t he nasty,” Alice might say, genuinely disgusted. “Do you recognize him? Is it Kyle Roemischer’s father? Is it what’s-his-name Dietz?”