Numbers Six and Seven

ONCE UPON A time we seven siblings breathed and lived and played together as a single organism. We had names, but we never thought of ourselves as truly separate beings. We moved as one wherever we went. People around town always said, “Look at ’em Forester kids going off again.” The common joke was that our parents hadn’t known when to stop making babies. We didn’t understand why these strangers would cackle with a gleeful wink, but we didn’t care. There was always something new to discover in our backyard or the next one beyond that.

Sometimes we pretended to be mountaineers climbing Mount Everest, which was nothing more than a face of crag shaved off the side of a hill two blocks away from Norrie School. We carried up heavy backpacks, stuffed with pillows and sleeping bags even though we had no need for them in broad daylight. The boulders were easy to conquer, so we yelled, “Look out!” just to spook each other for giggles, and we jumped around and whooped it up once we got to the top. We talked about how we would hop on the next rocket from Cape Kennedy and shoot off for the moon where we would boing like balloons and leave behind big footprints and wave back at the earth looking like a pretty marble. We didn’t have an U.S. flag to stake and claim the moon as our own, but we were already plotting our next adventure.

Below us was the only world we knew then: the tree-lined cave-ins and St. Michael Church’s steeple rising out of the low skyline of Ironwood on our right, and the small and sloping hills of our neighborhood where houses were mostly hidden by enormous trees straight ahead of us. We were never happy that we couldn’t see our own house from our mountain. We tried using a pair of binoculars once. Too many trees in the way. We never climbed the mountain in winter because it was caked with dribbles of ice. We relished each snow day by piling on layers of clothes, scarves, threaded mitts, snow pants, and snowmobile boots, and heading out to the backyard where snowdrifts, whipped to great heights by blizzards, awaited our conquest. Sometimes we could not move quickly so we fell backwards and tasted the snowflakes falling on our faces. We made snow angels. If the snow had the right stickiness, we made snowmen.

In the summer, we took particular pleasure in taking shortcuts through other people’s yards and stealing handfuls of sugar snap peas from their gardens and clapping our hands at the chained dogs just to get them to bark like crazy. Sometimes the neighbors scolded us, but we laughed it off and headed toward Norrie School. It was our favorite place. It had a huge playground with tall swings, monkey bars, and a basketball court. The school was tall and wide with august-colored bricks, and a very tall chimney was stuck in the middle of its roof. Winters it puffed out a great deal of smoke, and every late morning we could smell the cafeteria food wafting from the south hallways where the gymnasium was. It housed kids from kindergarten all the way up to eighth grade. We siblings passed each other in the hallways and on the playground every day, but we never said hello. It was somehow understood that all seven of us would gather near the side door on the west side and walk together the four blocks home. We felt better together.

Such is the story I’d like to believe about the family you and I grew up in.

FOR A LONG time I didn’t know the names of our siblings: Victoria, Patricia, John, Will, Colleen, me, and you—five girls and two boys. I knew them first by their faces and by the way they moved their lips. I thought it was odd how they opened and closed their lips in so many different ways. I looked at myself in the mirror and tried to do the same thing, but my lip movements l