She might mention, in passing, the lace she'd worn at their wedding, lace handed down from mothers to their firstborn daughters for thirteen generations, beginning in England with Goodith Constantine in 1629 and continuing through such delightfully named ancestors as Lettice Beach and Damaris Atwater. The deeper history, the cultural history, filtered down only piecemeal: my father was embarrassed by some of his forebears, and my mother blithely assumed everyone knew all about hers. It was unclear why such nuances should matter to me. On my father's side, the Friends and Holtons unselfconsciously said "tomayto." On my mother's, the Robinsons were staunchly in the Anglophile "tomahto" camp, while the Piersons, on the even more superior view that "tomahto" was pretentious, were ardently pro-"tomayto." At the family beach house on Long Island, my great-uncle Wilson Pierson would rebuke my mother, a Robinson in such matters, if she asked for a "tomahto." "Would you like some potahtoes with that?" he'd say. On the question of how to pronounce "tomato," for instance, the family was split. My grandparents were distant constellations, and as they wheeled across the sky I felt unshadowed by their marriages, their affairs, their remarriages, or their quarrels. Though my parents gave me love and learning and all the comforts, I believed I could go it alone. I believed my character had been formed by charged moments and impressions - the drift of snow, the peal of church bells, the torrent of light cascading through the elms out front into our sunporch. I believed, then, that my family was not my fate.
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