It wasn’t enough that Dad married her; in some bizarre decision, he moved us into her house. We lived on a typical New Bedford street of three-deckers, built in the heyday of small manufacturing, as the whaling industry petered out and the textile industry grew. As owners, we lived on the first floor and rented out the other two three-bedroom flats. Mrs. Rose lived in the only single-family house on the block, a modern ranch house built on an empty lot where once there had been a three-family that had burned down in the sixties. Dad rented out our flat, and I was literally given a tiny closet of a room, the walk-in closet they’d turned into my bedroom by moving the door. It came with one rectangular window placed so high that all I could see was sky. Living in a closet, I didn’t have one, so my clothes were stored in a series of cheap cardboard storage boxes piled one on top of the other in order of the prevailing season. My bed and bureau from our old house occupied most of the floor space. When Adele screamed at me to clean my room, it took barely four sweeps of the vacuum.

My new stepbrother, Paul Scott Rose, Jr., exactly two years older than me, slept in the real second bedroom of this two-bedroom ranch house. A room that was filled with his stuff—model airplanes, hockey equipment, stinky clothes.

Paul, as it turned out, could do no wrong, not just in his mother’s eye but also in my father’s. He was the son he’d never had, a reprieve from being the father of an only daughter. Paul, bright and precocious, was the sun around which this pair revolved, and woe was me if I didn’t see Paul in that light. Paul was mean. Paul set me up for trouble. When Paul lied, I was the one who got punished. The more I protested, the worse it got. I was no longer Daddy’s little girl; I was a stepchild. I had inherited my mother’s Portuguese coloring, brown eyes and a unibrow; my only Meade quality was that my hair wasn’t dark brown, but dirty blond. Adele never avoided an opportunity to remind me of my Azorean heritage: “Don’t dress like that; you look like a little Portagee.” A slur that puzzled me until I understood that Adele had been brought up to think that any vivid color combination was somehow low-class. And, from her lofty position as a WASP, everyone who had been baptized in the Catholic Church was low-class. I was an adult when it finally occurred to me that she lived in New Bedford, too. What made her so high-and-mighty? Her first husband, a nice-enough guy, smart enough to bail on Adele, was Portuguese, which made Paul as Portuguese as I was, but somehow that didn’t sully him as it did me. A Rose in New Bedford, by any other name, is Portuguese.

Once a year, we traveled to some exotic location: Atlantic City, Myrtle Beach, Kennebunkport, in that peculiar way of seaboard people who always venture to someone else’s coast to enjoy themselves. When I was fourteen and Paul sixteen, we made the pilgrimage to Disney World. Which meant two days in the backseat of the Chevy Citation with Paul. Two days for him to torture me with farting and shoving. Adele and my father would trade driving in five-hour increments. We spent one night in South Carolina before forging on to Orlando in a manic race against the clock. Getting there late meant losing out on one of our three days in this mecca of American fun.