Free The Orphan Sister by Gwendolen Gross

powerful Irishmen wearing green T-shirts and flirting with all of us, where to deposit our things. They hauled crates of books atop their heads, stepping heavily up three flights of stairs, grinning and winking. I loved their accents.
    There were nine bedrooms in the house, and eleven bathrooms, so there was no dearth of choices, but mine was clearly the most secluded, like a penthouse in a posh hotel. My windows were original glass from 1910, and they blushed mottled and uneven sunlight. We chose wallpaper from catalogs; we picked rugs and curtains (I chose a mint-green, lacy fabric labeled Spring Fever, and my mother laughed a short sound of surprise when she saw the price, but bought them anyway).
    We had been ordinary girls, and now we were rich girls. Of course, the other girls at our school were richer; their mothersdidn’t keep Accounts books, didn’t bring them to Nordstrom but limit their expenditures, looking nervously in a tiny notebook, mumbling about sales tax. They shopped at the Lilly Pulitzer flagship store in Manhattan; they bought chunky, white-framed sunglasses at a counter at Saks Fifth Avenue. Still, our house was huge, and there was a gardening crew, and a cook and a cleaning service, and we had ponies.
    My sisters took to it all with natural ease—not that they were greedy, they were just adaptable. While before we had gossiped wistfully about birthday parties at the roller rink in Montvale, now we were invited into air-conditioned limos that conveyed us to Broadway and hip plays at the Little Red School House. I wore my Gap jeans and polo shirt from Nordstrom, my sneakers from a former life instead of pumps—who could walk in pumps? And besides, our mother didn’t want to cast away our old clothes just because we were living in a state of endowment.
    “Those jeans still clothe you,” she said to us when we told her in concert how our classmates all wore Jordache instead of Gap. “You aren’t going naked, but we aren’t spending more unless we need to. We have , but that makes us all the more responsible,” she said, squinting at the parsley she was chopping in the new kitchen, which had a walk-in fridge and so many cabinets and drawers that half were empty.
    We played hide-and-seek, climbing up above the water glasses where our new friends would never look for us.
    At first, we three went to the same parties, all had the same friends, before we branched out, before we were differentiated—me, and them. Until I met my friends Sophie and Mary, I was part of The Clump of girls, the vaguely popular group—neither mostnor least. I felt that I was acting. My sisters felt secure—it was a distinct imbalance. They couldn’t comfort me, though, or didn’t want to. Sophie and Mary changed things for me—a pair of girls who wore dark lipstick and cast spells from a book of Wiccan magic and had their palms read in Greenwich Village—and who also read books all the time and liked not just riding horses, but caring for them.
    After we rode the trails together, we sat on our ponies—mine was a fat, black, walleyed sweetie named Giselle who seemed asleep except when there were sugar cubes. We groomed them and French-braided their tails and read aloud to each other and our animals from a collection of Elisabeth Bishop poems, not entirely understanding.
    I wasn’t part of The Clump anymore, but in sixth grade I tried out for the school musical, even though that was a highly Clumplike activity. Mary and Sophie scoffed, but they respected me for doing something I wanted. I wanted to sing. I wanted to act. I wanted to be on Broadway, though I was shy and my classmates were stunned, sitting like flies waiting to be shooed from a windowsill in the auditorium, when I belted out the audition song, “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” from Guys and Dolls , with passion, volume, and surprising talent. I’d been singing to the Beatles, warbling along with Ella Fitzgerald records our father kept in a wooden