The other day I watched the movie Wonder, with Julia Roberts. In one scene the main character, based on August Pullman, decided during a math test in fifth grade to show his answers to a classmate to help him out. And what struck me was the movie’s indulgent attitude about this cheating—it made me feel good that they didn’t make a big deal out of it.

One morning when I was in fifth grade—while a couple of my classmates in front of me were furtively trading answers on a standardized reading test—I did something that would be life-changing: Worried that they were going to score much higher on the test than I was, I tried to peek over at a classmate’s answers.

Before fifth grade I’d always felt happy and confident in school. I’d had teachers I liked and who’d liked me—and maybe that was a mitigating influence that allowed me to feel smart and successful despite my father’s daunting expectations. But in fifth grade I had a teacher, Mrs. Koehler, who didn’t like me, though I never knew why. Soon I began noticing differences in my classmates’ abilities—Ronny and Carol were best at math and Margie was best at spelling. Up until then I’d been able to keep up with all the kids in the gifted group in my class, but now, for the first time, I began to worry about measuring up.

This was also the year that I started becoming obsessive and began to painstakingly write my homework in an elaborate cursive with fancy “descenders”—and if I made more than one mistake that I had to cross out, I would crumple up the page and start over.

It was the year I developed “eveningmares” and had to have a nightlight to sleep. I’d seen a movie called The Revenge of Frankenstein, and every evening after dark I became terrified of seeing the monster in a window, coming for me.

When I remember these details now, it almost seems to me that I was sensing an impending doom, and that this was a child’s way of externalizing her fear—for death was impending, though it was a psychic rather than a physical one. Because what was happening behind the scenes in my parents’ lives would, over the course of the next three years, spell emotional disaster for all of us. And, as Maurice Sendak said in one of his lectures, “Children know everything.”

When my teacher’s voice rang out, “Cathy, why do you feel the need to cheat?” I felt abjectly humiliated. What I couldn’t have known was how fateful this transgression of mine would prove to be.

For the first three years we lived on Raymond, Doug and I shared a small bedroom. Before bed, my mom would set my hair in pin curls with bobby pins; then my dad would tell us a bedtime story about the hair-raising adventures of two kids. And though neither of my parents was particularly demonstrative, we always got a goodnight kiss. Unfortunately, my dad’s tall tales often involved giants, which gave Doug nightmares—and sometimes a bobby pin would get clipped to my ear when I rolled over in my sleep, so my ear would be painfully sore the next morning.

I have one curious memory I associate with this yellow-flowered bedroom. One evening at bedtime it occurred to me to wonder why I always slept on my back. Then I remembered: in my preschool years, when I’d sleep on my stomach, I had a recurring nightmare about a boogeyman who would creep up on me in my bed at night and seize me from behind—and tickle me, which was frightening both because it was so sudden and unexpected and because I sensed his malevolence. I’d started sleeping on my back in an attitude of vigilance—and the nightmares had stopped. But I wasn’t afraid anymore, I told myself, and from then on I slept any which way.

Eventually my parents decided it was time for Doug and me to have our own rooms. He was consigned to the narrow back porch, which had a bank of windows on three sides and no radiator. It was freezing cold in winter—a situation that always troubled me. Then my parents stripped off the old wallpaper in what was to be my room, and Mom set about turning it into the dream bedroom she’d never had as a child. She bought a polished-cotton bedspread with pink and purple pansies and a vanity with a skirt that matched the bedspread—with arms that opened out so you could reach the drawers underneath. It had a mirror top, as well as a triptycal standing mirror that you could adjust to see yourself from various angles. On the one window she hung gauzy pink ruffled curtains, and she bought a light gray rug to go with the newly painted cool gray walls.

I’ve never liked pink and purple together, however, and I’ve always remembered this room as depressingly cold in aspect, now that it was no longer warmed by yellow roses. I was too young to wear make-up, so instead I used the tryptical mirror to draw self-portraits when I was sick. I also recall how cold the mirror top felt when I rested my arms or elbows on it. But maybe some of this sense of chill had to do with being alone in the room now—or even with guilt about my brother’s frigid bedroom.

In any case, this was the beginning of my drawing portraits, first of myself, then of friends and family too. The self-portrait above I sketched when I was ten.