“‘When I was a little girl,’ his mother said, ‘till I got to around ten, we slept two to three to a bed. Girls with girls, of course, boys altogether. Under lots of thick quilts when it was cold, one pillow per bed, and four of the girls in two beds in one tiny room and three boys and my two older sisters in two beds in another small room. My mother or one of the Polish girls would have to wake us up because we slept so heavily. She’d bang two pots together most times to do it or tinkle a spoon against a glass if we were already stirring. Strange we all slept the same, for in the next room the others had to be gotten up that way too. And also that we were all sent to bed the same time, even though there was twelve years between the oldest and youngest. I suppose my mother wanted to make sure she got an hour to herself. Or if there was any hanky-panky between her and Uncle Leibush, who lived with us, that would be a good time, with my Dad still at work.’ For years after she got married she woke up around eleven or even noon. The children would be in school or in the nursery or bedroom with the live-in maid. His father would have left for work at seven. ‘Some people like to have their teeth fixed before they go to work,’ he said, ‘because it’s their only free time to or they think if they’re still half asleep they won’t feel as much pain. And lots of my patients I don’t give novocaine to when they need it because they want to keep the bill down.’ Then she’d come into the kitchen in her bathrobe, make fresh coffee (his father had his breakfast made by the maid), read the paper, smoke some cigarettes, have a second or third coffee, then bathe and dress. ‘It was a little bit too hedonistic,’ she said, ‘but I loved it while it lasted. It made me feel like a real lady and late at night I got lots of good reading done.’ She changed this routine when his father went to prison and she had to get a full-time job. Then she’d be up before seven, shower and dress, get the children up and ready for school, let the nanny in for the youngest child, make herself a quick breakfast, leave the house with her two youngest sons but in front of the building go left to the subway station while they went the other way to school. ‘A kiss, a kiss, a kiss,’ he remembers her saying on the sidewalk, after his brother and he started off, and she’d get down almost on one knee so they could one at a time or together come into her arms easier and kiss her. A few months after his father got out of prison she started getting up around nine, after the children had left for school. They had a housekeeper who’d make breakfast for his father, wake the children up and help then off to school, take the youngest to kindergarten and pick her up and take care of her the rest of the day. His father had a number of jobs for about ten years before he got his dental license back. Factory worker, shoe-store salesman, department store floorwalker, then for eight years selling materials in the Garment Center. He always left early to get to work before anyone else. ‘No matter how menial a job it is, the boss appreciates it,’ he said, ‘and the extra hour gives you a jump on everyone else. So you do it for show and possible advancement and the little time alone everybody needs and to make more money.’ She was an interior decorator by then — she’d taken an interior design program at night while he was in prison — and once her business got going she’d usually begin seeing clients around 11 a.m. His parents came home around the same time at night and there was lots of take-out Chinese-American food and dishes like lasagna and roast turkey and flanken soup she’d cook to last three to four days. She started sleeping poorly twenty-five years ago, she said, when his sister’s disease got much worse and the first symptoms of his father’s showed. ‘I got up five to six times a night, just as I do now, but then to help them, running from one room to the other sometimes.’ He said a few times it could be the black coffee now she drinks late at night and, after his sister died, the hard liquor she seems to start drinking around noon. ‘I don’t drink coffee after dinner and I only nurse a drink or two a day, and when you’re here for dinner or a chat and the way you pour, maybe a bit more.’ He once checked her bourbon bottle and in three days it was two-thirds gone. ‘You have anyone over for drinks since I was here last?’ and she said ‘No, why?’ ‘This bottle. You couldn’t have consumed that much since then. The woman who cleans up for you, maybe?’ ‘You mean to sneak? No, and what about how much is gone? I bought that bottle almost two weeks ago. They say twenty-two shots to a bottle, so it’s right on time.’ ‘I think I opened it for you when I was here last,’ and she said ‘Couldn’t be, since you were here about six days ago and I never could have drank so much in that time.’ ‘That’s not the way I remember it, but I could be wrong.’ ‘You’re wrong, believe me, dead wrong. I’d be puking every night instead of just tired if I put so much away. As I’ve told you, I nurse my drinks, put lots of water in them, and ice, which becomes even more water the way I drink them, and lots of times after that ice melts I put in some more. Sometimes I think it’s the taste of the bourbon-tinted water I like rather than the bourbon.’ Almost every time he speaks to her on the phone she complains she didn’t sleep well the previous night. ‘Last night I was up almost the entire time. I put on the TV at four in the morning and watched it — the cable weather station, as nothing more interesting was on — till six, while I read and did my needlepoint, and then lay in bed for an hour trying to keep my eyes closed till it took away too much energy from me and I got up for the day. I know old people don’t need that much sleep, but a few hours wouldn’t kill me.’ From what he’s seen and she’s said over the years her day runs something like this: bed by eight or nine, sleep till ten or eleven, read a book or watch TV in the sitting room while she sews or does needlepoint, back in bed listening to radio call-in shows and reading and sometimes sleeping for an hour, in the kitchen around three or four, a drink, some coffee, watch TV or read or both, back in bed, sleep for an hour or so, up, coffee, bathe, fresh coffee, half a toasted bagel or slice of dry toast, read the