My mother was not svelte. She spent her life washing clothes, lifting children, and hauling sacks of potato and flour from the market to our small apartment in Flushing. My father frequently looked at the Sears catalog, commenting on the models within. "Why don't you look more like this one?" he would ask, as though the answer weren't obvious. My father did not look like Marlon Brando (young), and my mother did not look like Marlene Dietrich. Yet somehow, I never heard my mother ask my father why he didn't look like this one. Long suffering, some might say.

She used to walk by the department store and look at the dresses on the mannequins. They were not designed to make her feel good about herself; they were designed to make her imagine herself, for a moment, young, thin, attractive, the kind of girl that might get called off to Hollywood in a moment's notice and end up headlining a film about a poor girl turned into a star, opposite Cary Grant.

Sometimes, while my father was out late drinking, she would think about her thick face, her sagging cheeks, her broad shoulders, her sagging breasts, and she would weep a little. Then she'd look at me, tell me to do my school work, and walk off to finish her chores.