My sister and I lived with our Italian grandparents in New Jersey for three years, while our parents were on tour with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians. My grandfather was the town butcher, and their apartment was on top of the grocery store where he worked.

My grandmother was a seamstress and worked at Dix, a factory in town that made nurses' uniforms. She made our clothes, beautiful little garments out of skinny bolts of cloth that had been marked down. The ladies in the fabric store showed her these remnants of silk, mohair, gabardine, too small for a woman, but perfect for a child. Dresses and skirts she sewed were lined in some surprising color of satin. The clothes were too pretty - dirndls, French linen blouses with smocking, red velvet jumpers - but I wore them and tried not to ruin them.

I missed my mother badly, but I didn't tell my grandmother because I didn't want to hurt her feelings.

My parents would stay gone for six months at a time. They traveled on buses and planes and performed in every state but Hawaii. I dreamed of crashes and fires, my mother and father's faces looking out the portals screaming for help. There was nothing I could do to help them; I'd wake up in a panic and pray myself back to sleep.

After they'd filmed Fred Waring's holiday special, they'd come home for Christmas. My mom and dad would sit on the sofa, me wedged shyly between them, my sister on my mother's lap, in my grandmother's dark living room, and point at the TV and make fun of themselves. There were two things that took me a long time to understand: how they could be in two places at the same time; why the people at the top of a Ferris wheel didn't hang upside down.

One year my parents left the road and came home for good. They picked us up from my grandmother's and moved my sister and me to Minisink Hills, into a small blue house on seven hilly seven acres. Almond-eyed deer looked in the dining room window.

My parents seemed like glamorous strangers. I was in love with them, a little fan who watched them like TV, but I didn't think they could take care of me or my sister. They were dangerous. My father with his fast cars, always something small and red in the driveway, my mom spending too much money on slim cobalt blue dresses and fancy shoes my dad suspected weren't or him. I missed my grandmother.

Some nights they argued late in the dark living room and I sat in the hall in my pajamas to listen. I worried they would leave again because in one argument I heard my mother say they got along better on the road. I could hear the ice in their drinks, the scrape of chair legs, my mother walking through rooms to get away, her high heels clicking on the terrazzo, muted by the den carpet, clicking again on the terrazzo, and then my father's heavy footsteps following, begging her back to us.

This is me with my grandmother in her kitchen. This is my first Christmas without her.