I called him the Vampire because he was from Eastern Europe and because his two incisor teeth rested on his lower lip, lazy and white, like Alabama trailer trash. I made Liev a button that said “The Vampire” with a kit I had been given as a birthday gift. He wore it delightedly, answering, if asked, that the Vampire was the name of a British band. He told me that one girl had said she couldn’t believe she’d met someone else who was so into them: she had all their B-sides and everything.

Girls were always saying stupid things to try to start conversations with Liev. The problem was, he really didn’t like to talk. His voice, which was somewhat reedy and a few notes off grating, did not fit well with his dark, brooding looks, and he knew it. I often think that my low expectations of men stem from my childhood experience of living with two vain men, and one woman who did not bother with mirrors. I’m still working out whether my mother abhorred looking at her own reflection because it upset her, or whether she simply was not interested.

Until I was ten, Mother was very beautiful. She didn’t know it. She believed my father when he told her that she was not. Because she had no compact to consult, there was no proving him wrong for her. I’d try to tell her but she would hush me and say that she did not care to concern herself with such things and neither should I. But I did. I was proud, when she collected me from preschool, that my mother, with her wavy mahogany hair and dark-lashed green eyes, was noticeably so much more attractive than the other moms. I am the winner, I told myself. The next day, with the boldness of one who had just learned how to talk, I said it in front of class, during math, as I recall. Overwhelmed by the urge to share, I raised my hand.

“Yes, Ruby.”

“I,” I answered, rising from my seat, “am the winner.”

“And why is that?”

“Because my mother is so much more beautiful than everyone else’s mother.”

To boos and hisses of the assembled toddlers, I was corrected.

“What?” I asked, brow furrowed. “I didn’t say everyone else’s mother was ugly.”

The teacher, a progressive woman, shook her head. “Ruby, you are far too concerned with beauty. You must get over it if you are to function as a grown-up in the real world.”

I never got over it. The world never got over it. As I got older, it became, increasingly, our prime concern, me and the world. Neither of us functioned properly, so the principal was at least half right.