Daniela rose from the table, took her purse, and went into the restaurant to pay for our meal, knowing I’d never babysit her children again.

Irene

“I therefore advise you to treat her gently,” the notary concluded.

“But do you know what she did, Cruchot?”

“What?” asked the notary …

“She gave away her gold.”

“Well, didn’t it belong to her?” asked the notary.

“That’s what they all say!” said Grandet, letting his arms fall in a tragic gesture.

—HONORÉ DE BALZAC,
Eugenie Grandet
(trans. Lowell Bair)

When she moved to Bologna to study at DAMS, Irene abdicated her role of daughter and sister. She didn’t show up for my eighteenth birthday party, at the house on the seaside, or for my brother’s, on a barge on the Tiber. Luca and I knew she had a fight with our father, and we figured it was her fault, for being so adamant about studying away from Rome even though she was sure to get a better education at Sapienza, according to an article our mother had read in the paper.

Through the events I’ll discuss in this section, I’ve reconnected with Irene, and have finally learned why she left. Three years before her high school exit exam, she’d started seeing a therapist because she had low self-esteem, and wasn’t doing well in school. I call it therapy, though Irene says she didn’t lie on a couch. I was thirteen and Luca, eleven: for us, her appointments blurred with other extracurriculars our parents forced on her. In junior high, she’d become isolated, had gained weight and hated interacting in groups; the only thing she was passionate about was rock music—but she didn’t play in a band—and she wore baggy pants that were frayed from wear. My mother, hoping to help my sister “find herself,” told her that she should see both a therapist and a dietician. But after a couple of months, Mom told her, without explanation, that she couldn’t do both and had to choose. Irene doesn’t recall why, between these two solutions to her existential problem, she preferred dieting, or, for that matter, why a well-educated woman—our mother—would accept that her daughter preferred addressing the effect to discovering the cause. The truth is, Irene doesn’t even know if she’s the one who decided. We remember these things as if they occurred in a fog.