Our mother, who had willed her children into existence （and suffered mightily along the way）， would not give up her notion of what they might be. She grew adept at deflecting the “observations” of others—parents on the playground who joked about how the triplets steered clear of one another, or their teachers at Walden, who took some strange delight in describing the children’s intra-aversion in parent-teacher meetings. Even her own mother had a way of tut-tutting through her rare visits, whenever Sally, Lewyn, and Harrison declined to do something adorable together. So maybe the true, deep bond her children had for one another just wasn’t registering in an obvious way, or was something only a mother could possibly intuit. So when Harrison called Lewyn fat and Sally put Harrison’s chess medal （which came not from Walden, where everyone got a medal, but from the Brooklyn Chess League, where you actually had to win in order to get a medal） in the garbage, or Lewyn didn’t want to share his puzzle with the other two, or Harrison lifted not one finger to help his brother conquer homesickness at summer camp, or Sally refused to agree to any movie or television show that Harrison wanted to watch （even if she also wanted to watch it）， simply because Harrison wanted to watch it—our mother refused to attach great importance to any of these things, because on some deep, deep level, where it counted, she maintained the fragile notion that all three of her children were devoted to one another. And besides, close intimacy in childhood was no indicator of close intimacy in the fullness of time, which was much more important! （She herself had once been close to her elder sister Debbie, but now Debbie had her own life with Bruce and their boys, and the sisters hardly ever saw each other.）
Into this void Johanna poured routines and rituals—so many routines and so many rituals! Breakfast parfaits and walking to school one way in the morning and home from school another way in the afternoon, stopping at the same bodega for Snapple and OJ, building a family cookbook of recipes they voted on, and taking turns to choose the restaurant on Sunday nights. Disney movies at the Cobble Hill Cinema, stops at Lenny and Joe’s on the drive to the Vineyard, the Flying Horses with the brass ring dispenser in Oak Bluffs. She had patchwork quilts made of their baby and kid clothes, so they’d remember. She took Sally for Saturday-morning pedicures and marched Lewyn and Harrison across the Brooklyn Bridge to buy roast-pork buns in Chinatown. On their birthday she took those photographs on the back porch of the Vineyard cottage, and hung them along the staircase wall in Brooklyn so they could see themselves grow up together every time they went upstairs. But if she faltered, even once—one Sunday, one birthday photo, one route home after school—not one of them seemed to notice, let alone care.
When they were six, they departed Walden’s nursery school building and entered the Lower School on Joralemon Street, where, for the first time, the three of them were assigned to separate first-grade homerooms and given individual class schedules. The transition would certainly be destabilizing, so our mother set out to prepare her kids, reminding them that the important thing was the comfort and strength of what they shared. She delivered solemn sermons to them over dinner as they approached this traumatic separation, and took them out separately to allay any fears. Harrison she brought to the bookstore on Court Street, treating him to a stack of books; Sally she took to a special lunch at Serendipity. Lewyn got a private walk on the beach, a few days before they left the island that summer. And when the momentous morning arrived, she woke them with excitement and pancakes and asked Salo to go in late to the office so they could walk the kids together, and all the way there she fretted over the approaching moment when two parents would somehow have to divide three children, leaving one or two or all three vulnerable to feelings of abandonment. Harrison was clearly the strongest of the three, so they would all accompany him to his homeroom and leave him, and that would be that. Then she and Salo would split up to take Sally to hers and Lewyn to his, and not leave any of them until each was truly okay. But when they got to the building that morning, the sidewalk and hallways were packed with first-day parents and caregivers and kids, and her boys suddenly announced that they knew where they were supposed to be, and walked off without a backward glance. Only Sally consented to be accompanied to her new classroom, and Johanna couldn’t help wondering whether there might be an element of actual pity in the gesture.