My brother was the smart one. I was the pretty one. All things considered I guess that’s better than the other way around. We were more than that, though. He was the good one. I was the screwup. In most families it’s the reverse. The boy is supposed to be a bit wild. The girl is supposed to be good. Or so we’re led to believe.

But in my family the norm got itself reversed and I became anti-matter.

My brother was born first. In 1942. Our dad was off at World War II. He was a Marine and only twenty-four. At Parris Island, where the Marines take basic training, my father didn’t tell them he had graduated from college. So he spent a lot of time marching with a fifty-pound pack on his back. Or maybe it was seventy-five pounds. In any case he marched a whole lot of miles with that pack and he got real trim. The Marines do a lot of screaming at raw recruits. Especially the Drill Instructors.

After basic, my dad became a DI. The Marines are known as a tough, mean, don’t-get-in-their-way-because-they-don’t-take-any-shit bunch. Of all the Marines, the DIs are known as the toughest of this tough bunch. I didn’t know this until I was well into my thirties. I didn’t even know what a DI was until I heard someone talking about his Marine Corps training and how scared he was of the DIs.

“My father was a DI at Parris Island,” I remember saying out of nowhere.

“Jesus,” the guy said. “That must have been hell for you kids. Having a DI for a dad.”

“Actually, he was always very reasonable. Very calm. He never raised his voice or told me I couldn’t do something or put any restrictions on me about anything.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No. Honest.”

At the Marine Corps base they like to keep everything operating-room clean. Years later, after I had moved to Virginia not far from Quantico where the Marines train their officers at OCS (Officers Candidate School), my parents used to go back to the base to picnic. My mother said she knew the bathrooms and picnic tables would be cleaner there than anywhere else on earth. They were too.

When the Marine Corps noticed that my dad was pretty smart, they looked up his records and saw that he had gone to college. Four years at the Wharton School tagged him for testing. My dad was one of those good test takers, especially the math part. My brother inherited that part of his brain. So the Marine Corps sent Dad up to Quantico to OCS and he became a second lieutenant. Then they sent him off to kill or be killed.

My dad was not one of those handy-around-the-house type dads. He was more the “I’ll make huge gobs of money and hire other people to do all that other stuff” type. He wore custom-made suits and dress shirts and Italian silk ties. Even his casual clothes were the best you could get. He never had a pair of raggedy jeans (I never saw him in a pair of jeans at all) and his khakis were always specially made for the task at hand. Thus, when he was going out into the country where there were likely to be tall weeds with burrs or thorns, he wore “Bush Khakis” designed not to allow anything to stick to them. As if he was in The Bush – you know, in Africa. Not that he ever actually went anywhere near “The Bush” in Africa or anywhere else.

The only time I ever saw him wear clothes that looked at all worn was on a boat. For boating he went for the “salty” look. He had a series of battered hats, each looking at least twenty years old and as if he had fished it out of the water after someone else had cast it overboard. His boat was always orderly, each line (not ropes, please) carefully swirled in a flat circle on its appropriate spot on its correct deck next to its own cleat. And you would never see a speck of dirt on my dad’s boat. Salt yes. Salt was de rigueur. Dirt was un-Marine Corps. He named his 30-foot Egg Harbor Semper Fi. You see this slogan, which is a bastardized version of the Marine Corps slogan Semper Fidelis, on a lot of cars in eastern Virginia where the Marines long ago established Quantico as their HQ. Here’s us pulling up at a gas dock in Essex, Connecticut, one summer – me at age eleven:

The man who works the pumps sees us heading for the dock. He stands waiting to receive the bow line my brother is ready to toss.

“Here son, toss it over.”

“Got it?” My brother.

“Yeah. Who’s that astern with the aft line, your sister?”

This is a joke, because it’s my mother. She tosses him the line and he pulls the boat alongside. He walks past the stern of the boat to tie up the line to the big cleat on the dock and looks up to see the boat’s name carefully painted in bold golden letters.

“You Goddam sonofabitch bastard.” The dock guy.

“Yeah, you too, you M-F-ing goldbricking bastard.” My dad yells back at him as he jumps from the boat to the dock.

Why is my mother smiling at this, I wonder.

The two men clasp hands as if they’re old buddies. Back slaps all around. They walk over to the gas pumps swearing and yakking.

“Mom,” I look over at her.

“A Marine.” She reports and goes below to perform some galley type chore.

“The Mop Up At Guadalcanal” was a strange description for what he actually had to do in “The Pacific,” another phrase that went with his almost never told war stories. It seemed to me that the generation that fought in World War II always referred to where they were sent by continent. Thus his friend Jack Shapiro fought in “Africa” against Rommel (ThatGoddammKrautSonofabitchRommel, as Jack often said, as if it were one word). In The Pacific, my dad was assigned to lead men into the jungle every day looking for snipers that the Japanese had left behind to pick off Marines who were sent out into the jungle every day looking for them. He told us they could only see about two feet in front of them because the jungle was so dense. They went out with machetes and their guns and hacked away at the jungle. That was after they all lined up every morning to take their quinine and salt pills. Malaria was a bigger threat than the Japanese, I think. Every night what they had hacked away would grow back. This was before Agent Orange. By Vietnam we had become far more efficient at totally annihilating every living thing. But back in the 1940s they didn’t have such efficient ways of exposing the enemy.

My dad went over to the Pacific in a troop ship. He described it as a big steel belly with hammocks for thousands of guys stacked one over the other. These guys spent the weeks in transit puking their guts out because the rolling and pitching was so bad and the storms so severe. In case you don’t know the difference, rolling is from side to side and pitching is front to back, or stem to stern if you’re a nautical type, which I like to think I am, except that I get horribly seasick but never throw up. (see previous chapter, Travel) It’s supposed to be better to actually puke if you’re seasick. You get some relief that way. I just get sicker and sicker and want to pass out but can’t. Maybe that’s because I think I’m pregnant, which feels the same way to me.

Before our twins were born, Strong With A Spear and I bought a sailboat. I started sailing when I was ten. My mother believed in exposure to everything because you never knew when it might come in handy, and because the more you got exposed to things the more likely you were to find something you liked or were good at. In the 1960s I would take this whole exposure-to-everything theory to an extreme she never dreamed of, but when I was ten she sent me off to a sailing school in a miniscule Connecticut hamlet called Noroton. Noroton was a suburb of the almost as teensy Rowayton, which was affixed to the waterfront community of greater Norwalk, which at that time was a rather neglected town on the Long Island Sound just before you got to Westport as you were coming northeast on the train from New York City.

We were supposed to sail every weekday morning out of Noroton’s Five Mile River. But first we had to learn rowing. This was a familiar sequence for me.

I had been to summer camp in Maine for two years starting when I was seven. Since many of the girls came to Camp Minnehooha from cities like Pittsburgh and New York, swimming was a really important part of the first month there. Because I had spent six months a year in Florida since I was two, I was one of the best swimmers at Camp Minnehooha. I had been swimming nonstop for years by then. At the edge of the lake they had roped off swimming pens and designated these by cap color. White Caps were the kids who had lived their entire lives in a city and were afraid to go in past their knees. Red Caps were beginning swimmers. The doggie paddlers. Blue Caps were accomplished in two strokes, and Gold Caps (there were only a few) could go anywhere they liked in or out of the pens and swim freely at any time. These girls could do every stroke including that most underused (for good reason) of all swimming styles, the butterfly. Now, if you had a shark circling you in the water I maintain that the butterfly would not be your first line of defense.

At seven I was the youngest girl in camp my first year. So they stuck me in with the White Caps. I swam around and slipped under the rope and joined the Reds, kept on going under the next rope and popped up with the Blues and finally disappeared underwater again until I joined the two teenaged Gold Caps who had been attending Camp Minnehooha for six years. I headed for open water but a counselor whistled and stopped me long before I hit the falls about a half mile down the lake.

They made me pass a bunch of tests. In order to trip me up, these included diving, which was optional at Minnehooha so technically unfair to ask of me. When I executed a perfect Swan Dive off the lower board, they finally had to admit I was qualified for “Swim Alone.” A real honor at Minnehooha. But I had my sights on a bigger target. Blue and Gold Caps could start to learn boating. Rowing first of course. Life is full of prerequisites. They stuck me in a heavy tub of a rowboat, a pram I think it was, and pushed me off from shore with instructions to follow the course laid out with small red floats. Turn first to starboard and then to port and then row backwards and keel haul and ship oars and stow oars and name the parts of the boat, gunwale, stern, and like that. It was pretty easy. The next day they had to let me take out a canoe. Which had been my chief objective all along. I’d never been in a canoe before. They looked pretty sleek. Not an aluminum canoe. These were all wood. Very Down East.

I sat in the bow and a counselor sat in the stern. I liked everything about the canoe. The counselor, whose name was Ajax (at least that’s what everyone called her) must have been five foot ten or eleven. I stood twig-like at about forty-four or -five inches. The canoe swooped way up at the bow. I listened to every order she barked at me and swung my paddle from side to side, watching as we miraculously slid through the water, turned, made a circle, paddled in figure eights against the side of the canoe to bring us up alongside the beach so we could both get out easily, backpaddled, me paddling like crazy to keep up my part of the bargain. Pretty soon we switched seats and I gave the orders. After a few days I got good at it. So good in fact I became the youngest camper in Minnehooha’s exalted history to become a “Stern Alone” canoeist (or canoer) thus qualifying me for two important and life-altering options. A three-day canoe trip leaving from Minnehooha and heading down the Three Long Lakes, including camping out overnight and going over the falls and, late in the summer, a day trip by bus to Lake Keekoopaki, a much larger body of water, for one mind-altering day of water skiing. I think that day set me up for my life’s most outrageous purchase, at age 22, a Porsche 911, whereupon my mother almost gave me up as the failure of her life.

Sailing lessons three years later on Five Mile River followed a similar pattern. Except you didn’t have to prove you could swim. If you said you could, Captain Bill, the sailing teacher, our grand master, a man of about forty (as I said, I was ten, so maybe he was thirty or even twenty-six) took you at your word. He had light reddish hair streaked with yellow and white. It was long and curly. He also had a full and blustery beard that always seemed to sport remnants of his breakfast. He favored eggs, as I recall.

“This is the tiller.” Capt. Bill thumped the wooden handle with the palm of his hand. “It attaches to the rudder.” He pointed down toward the water.

“By pushing the tiller, I can make the boat change direction.” He pushed and we swerved to starboard. Another push sent us in the opposite direction. We weren’t sailing yet, you understand. We were still underway courtesy of the small outboard motor mounted at the stern of the intrepid Sea Snake.

“This is the mast.” Capt. Bill pointed at the upright wooden pole in the middle of the boat.

“And this is the boom.” He touched a horizontal wooden bar lashed to the sides of the boat so it wouldn’t swing wildly and hit any of us.

“The sail goes up the mast and along the boom and catches the wind.”

We putt-putted toward a dock not far from the mouth of Five Mile River.

We tied up at the dock.

Capt. Bill took out a cooler. He handed out sandwiches all around and opened some Cokes and passed these around also.

“Being on the open water makes you hungry,” he told us.

We ate our sandwiches. When we had finished, the mate collected our wrappers and cans and tossed them in a trash can on the dock, then hopped back aboard and pushed us off. We putt-putted a few hundred yards from the dock and, miracle of miracles, Capt. Bill unfurled the sail and hoisted it up the mast. Then he unlashed the boom sheet (this is a line that ties onto the boom allowing you to guide the boom against the wind) and the sail puffed out to one side. The boat rolled over a bit.

“This is called heeling.” Capt. Bill told us as we all tried to sit upright while the rest of the world tilted at an increasingly uncomfortable angle.

Soon we were going at a pretty steady clip, headed straight down Five Mile River and back to our starting point. The whole trip took about an hour. We tied up at the dock and our mothers were all there waiting. In those days no mothers in our world worked. They all carted kids around all the time. Except that sometimes the maid would cart the kids around while the mothers went to “the club.”

“Bye, Captain Bill,” we sang out.

Capt. Bill waved at all of us and said he hoped to see us next summer.

I hope my mother didn’t pay much for that camp. It should have been called rowing camp.

A year later my father gave me a sailing dingy. Well, it was actually the dingy that went with the thirty-foot Egg Harbor that he bought, but he paid someone to outfit it with a centerboard and detachable rudder/tiller combination. And a mast and sail. No jib. Just the one sail. I tell you this because it has important implications. This sailboat, and I am stretching it to call this craft anything other than a dingy with a lot of chutzpah, was not a great challenge to racing vessels of any class. Mainly because when the wind took that little sail and the tide was anything but dead low or full high, in other words when the tide was running at all, that little sailing dingy, which probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds, went straight sideways. But fast. And the one sailing lesson I’d had with Capt. Bill didn’t really teach me how to deal with this situation. Or much of anything else in a sailboat. So I had to learn on my own. And that’s what I loved most about my father. He just handed me the tools and walked away. So I learned.

Pretty soon I was sailing sideways up and down our inlet and into the river on the other side of our little spit of land and then out into the Long Island Sound as far as the little dingy would take me in an afternoon, but not too far.

One very windy day I was skimming the shallows on the east side of our cove. As the dingy got close to shore the water depth lowered to about eighteen inches and the centerboard of my little craft dragged bottom and lifted up, almost popping out of its slot. Then the rudder caught the rocky bottom hard, flipped up to the water line and wrenched half free from the bronze fitting that looked like a horizontal L, the smaller leg of the L being the part that kept the rudder from lifting off. This broke off from the pressure and my rudder dangled precariously by the remaining lower L fitting, making steering my sailing dingy next to impossible. When I heard the crunch of the centerboard colliding with a large rock underwater and saw a sizable piece of flat wood pop to the surface and float away, I realized that the day’s sailing was over. I let go of the tiller, lowered the sail, furled it loosely and packed it down at my feet, grabbed my oars, pulled up the oarlocks and started pulling against the wind. All of Capt. Bill’s schooling came back to me in a flood and I suddenly saw the value in learning the basics.

When my father finally saw that sailing that dingy was truly a demented way to get from point A to point B, he bought me a small catamaran. An Aquacat. Two air-filled pontoons and a canvas sling strung between them above the water. But still only one sail on an aluminum mast at the top of which was a large white styrofoam ball that sat like the star on a Christmas tree. In case the cat ever capsized, this ball would in all likelihood keep you from turning a full 180 degrees and ending up with your mast stuck in the mud and the pontoons facing the sky. I never got to test this theory since I never capsized.

I went on my first real date when I was just twelve. This means that a boy called me on the phone and asked me to go to a dance with him. His parents drove us there and back. I had no idea what to say to him. I don’t remember his name. I don’t think I liked him much. I do remember wearing a dress with a crinoline under it. It rustled when I walked. He must have been my age. But other, older boys were showing up on the horizon. Boys who were already driving cars. Boys who did not go to private school. Boys who wore their hair in ducktails. One boy in particular whose name was Rusty. Yes that’s true. Red hair and all. He was a bad boy, or so it seemed to me, and therefore highly desirable at the time.

The year was 1967. Flower power was budding throughout the land. THE PILL had given women certain social options they had never known before. In three years I would be bringing four pounds of marijuana through Kennedy airport. Or two keys, if you prefer the lingo of 1970. (Forget it, I checked. The statute of limitations has run out on my crime and I don’t plan to run for any political office and yes, dammit, I did inhale. And I NEVER sold any of it. It was purely for medical use. I suffered from terminal feelings of outrage and this was my palliative drug.)

Let me state for the record here that I was not interested in bearing arms myself. I was busy bearing a pottery wheel or a paint brush with acrylics dripping from it as I attacked a stretched canvas. Sometimes nude.

Here’s how this argument went, while my brother, the Harvard man, sat out each inning on the sidelines presumably storing more standardized-test type information in his enormous brain, which seemed to have a limitless capacity for anything that could be answered by filling in a small circle with the point of a number two pencil.

Dad: Did you see where those kids marched on Washington? And then burned their draft cards?

Me: They have every right to petition their government. It’s an immoral war.

Dad: When your government tells you to go to war you don’t have the option of questioning the morality of it. It’s your duty to go.

Me: That sounds a lot like what the Nazis said. “I was only following orders.”

Dad: I fought for the rights of people like your friends who are marching so they would have the freedom to do whatever they want, no matter how ill-founded and misguided it might be.

Me: So we agree. They have every right to march.

Dad: I fought for those rights but I don’t agree with them. So they should go and fight this war even if they don’t agree with it.

Me: That’s crazy. It’s like saying because we have the right to bear arms that every one of us should have a bazooka in the backyard next to the barbecue.

Dad: Exactly.

Me: WHAT?

Dad: My point exactly. I defended with my life the right of every American to bear arms. And to speak freely even if I don’t agree with what a particular person has to say.

Me: So you think the right to bear arms means we should be able to have a Howitzer parked in the driveway?

Dad: The second amendment says, “the right to bear arms,” and I take that literally.

Me: Well then, you wouldn’t mind if I manufactured my own nuclear device in the kitchen. I would be protected by the Constitution.

Dad: That is not the point. You’re not going to do that.

Mom: Will you two stop now?

When you pull a tick off your dog and it’s been on there a few days or a week, it’ll be all bloated so you can’t even see its head or its little waving legs. It just looks like a big taut gray ball. So what you want to do is pull it off and then shoo your dog away. Then you want to drop the tick on a stone patio. I’m sure this is why so much flagstone is used in Connecticut. Nice and flat. Then you want to go “Eeeyoouu-ooo, gross” a few times. Then you take a hammer and smash it as hard as you can so all the blood goes flying all over the place. An alternate scheme involves igniting the gray ball with one of those big wooden matches. You achieve similar explosive mass, but in my book the added pyrotechnics do not compare with the sound of the hammer on the flagstone. I would give it a seven on the kid satisfaction gross out chart. The hammer gets a nine point eight.

So here it is, Article [II]:

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

That’s pretty simple. And from this we get twelve-year-olds blasting their way through middle school math class with dozens of rounds of ammo and kids who can’t drive yet bringing pipe bombs to school or ambushing their ten-year-old classmates from some bushes behind the soccer field.

I would just like to know how that equates with a “well regulated militia.” Anyone?