Yesterday I thought of my grandparents’ house in Great Neck, their second to last house, small, yellow, and oddly built, with steps up to the little sun room, and down to something else, and up again to the living room, with further steps to the bedrooms, where we almost never went. The backyard was a hill that ran down to the street.

The room I always think of, when I think of this house, is the dark dining room, filled with its table, on whose walls were hung several oil paintings. I almost remember one of these paintings, or I should say I remember its setting, a little piece of land in front of a wall, but not its subject. I know why I think particularly of this room: When my mother’s mother died, and her father remarried, his new wife, my grandmother, made an effort to instill table manners in her stepchildren, instructing them never to take food without offering it to someone else first. In a spirit of enmity, my mother and her brothers spent a meal offering each other the food my grandmother cooked, but never actually eating it. My mother told us this story.

Yesterday I realized that this wasn’t the dining room it happened in, that my grandparents had moved twice from that dining room, before they were in the one that I saw, and remember. Then I realized that none of the memories I had of my grandparents’ house, or almost none of them, were memories of things that had taken place there. They were stories my mother had told me, that I had grafted onto an alien place. It was useful to have in mind a house where these bad things had happened.