Lily was a year older than me and a hundred times louder, which was not a criticism because I loved her, but it was a fact, the central organizing fact of our household. She danced in the living room and my parents clapped. She brought home mediocre report cards and my parents talked about potential. She wanted ballet, then tennis, then piano, and the money appeared for all of it, for the lessons and the outfits and the recitals and the drives across town at inconvenient hours. She was the painting and I was the wall, which is not a metaphor I came up with at the time because I was a child and children do not yet have the language for what is being done to them. I only felt it as a low persistent weight, a sense of occupying space under sufferance, of being present by accident rather than intention.
When I asked about guitar lessons, my father sighed. He had a particular quality of sigh that functioned as a complete response, that conveyed disappointment and patience and a gentle implication that I was missing something obvious about my own situation.
