The Puppy YearsI WAS THE youngest child in my family, born five years after my next-youngest sibling—young enough in comparison to the rest that, when I was tiny, I sincerely believed every last thing they told me, even when Dom, Denise, and Dennis said that I was not their sister or my parents’ daughter at all. Instead, they claimed I was an abandoned baby they happened to have found on top of a trash can and taken home, having mistaken me for a stray puppy. (“You were cute even though you were dirty,” Dennis told me, and “Maybe because you were dirty,” said Denise.)
How my imagination managed to accommodate the idea that an infant could ever be confused for a dog is now beyond me, but at the time it seemed perfectly reasonable, and didn’t bother me in the slightest. In fact, I was perve
