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Her mother gathered Betsy and her sisters in the study on Saturday, just after Aggie put the baby down for a nap.

The room smelled of patchouli incense and musty pages, thanks to piles of magazines and dog-eared newspapers, stacks of neatly typed articles paper clipped on her mother’s large mahogany desk.

The heart of the room was a single oversized picture window overlooking the harbor, and on opposite walls, two bookshelves with a mix of nonfiction and fiction titles.

Books were scattered elsewhere, too, piled on the end tables, the radiator, stacked on the floor, making it impossible to ever find the one you wanted.

While Betsy’s father took over the space during the Senate recess in August, it had always been her mother’s room.

In the acknowledgments section of her most recent book, her mother had even thanked the study, saying she did some of her best work here from Memorial to Labor Day since her mind opened while looking out at the water.

Betsy perched in her mother’s swivel chair, allowing herself to imagine what it would be like to be as respected as her mother.

Spinning in the chair, Betsy tracked the framed Ms. magazine covers hanging on the walls, her mother’s name emblazoned alongside the headlined stories she’d penned: W HY THE FBI IS S PYING ON THE W OMEN’S M OVEMENT ; J OB A DVICE IF Y OU’RE “J UST A H OUSEWIFE ”; W HY THE P ILL IS A B ASIC H UMAN R IGHT .

“Wait until you see this.” Her mother opened the small closet and lifted a cardboard box from the shelf.

Then she carried out a cumbersome metal projector and set it up on the wooden desktop, plugging it in and aiming it toward a portion of blank wall behind it.

“I found all these old home movies that Dad took when you girls were little. He loved to follow you around, but I forgot about them until last week.”

Her mother threaded the canister of film through the antique projector.

“Honestly, I’m surprised this thing still works.

Can someone close the curtains?” She flicked the metal switch of the projector, and the machine rattled on, a whir of the film looping as Betsy and Aggie swept the navy drapes closed.

An image flashed on the wall. A grainy picture of Louisa’s cherubic face came into focus, the camera adjusting to sharpen her features.

Louisa was about nine, a freckled nose, a complete towhead, a sweetness in her playful expression as she swept her eyes up to the camera, smiling.

She was reading to a stuffed bear on the back lawn, the harbor painting a lively scene behind her.

There was no sound, but then she began speaking to someone off camera, and the gritty video panned to Aggie, an eight-year-old string bean, doing cartwheels in the grass.

“Oh my gosh,” Aggie said. “Look at us. Louisa, you’re a dead ringer for Hayley Mills.”

“You don’t remember how much attention she got for that face?” Betsy had learned to smile politely when strangers remarked how pretty Louisa was; they all did. “The two of you looked like twins. I forgot about that.”

“Yes, but I was the much taller version.” Aggie had spent a lifetime slouching because of her height until she’d met her husband, who towered over her. “I can’t believe Dad took these. I feel like he was always so busy.”

“Just keep watching,” her mother said without taking her eyes off the screen. “Betsy, you’re only four in this one.”

The picture shook as her father turned around and walked over to the patio, closer to the front door. He stopped at the picnic table, bent down, and into the frame came Betsy’s large brown eyes. The entire room erupted in a swoon.

“Betsy! You’re like a little fawn,” said Aggie.

Something shifted inside Betsy then. She felt like she could cry at her own innocence, holding Goodnight Moon , her stuffed animals at her feet.

“It’s Bluebell!” Betsy pointed at her old lovey, a blue jay with long eyelashes and a striped sleeping cap.

She loved her sisters so openly back then.

She loved her sisters now, too, but something had changed between them.

At some point, Betsy had worked to keep parts of herself private from them.

She didn’t want them to know her like they did in this home movie, and when she thought of her family now, there was always a piece of her that felt hardened.

Almost like she had to don armor to visit home.

She supposed it started in college, but maybe it was before then.

Her mother pinned her eyes to the screen. “You’re pretending to read, Betts. You always had to do whatever Louisa was doing.”

Her cheeks burned. The art of imitation. That’s what Betsy was good at. She thought of Andy telling her she hadn’t come up with one original thought in her thesis. The peanut butter she had at breakfast burned up her throat.

“Girls, I know I’ve told you that Daddy always said you girls made us a family.

But I don’t think you know how much he beat himself up for not being home enough once he became a senator.

He loved to call me during the day and inquire how everyone was doing.

‘Tell me one thing about the girls,’ he’d say. ”

Her mother picked up a second canister of film.

Suddenly, there were the three little girls in the Vineyard house’s living room once more, Louisa and Aggie holding hands and singing, when the glee was disrupted by Betsy plowing into them headfirst, then falling in a heap of giggles.

It happened again and again, and no matter how many times Betsy rammed into her sisters, the camera returned to Louisa’s young face, her parted hair held back on each side with clips shaped like cherries. Her great big, charming smile.

They hooted, pointed at the screen, and Betsy thought, The eldest child really is the prize in a family .

On the wall came another movie, a giant image of Betsy and her mother in the driveway of the summer house.

Betsy was on her pink bicycle with the pink banana seat, her hair in long brown pigtails.

Her mother, dressed in a stylish belted housedress, beckoned her to pedal.

Betsy tried and fell repeatedly until there was a glorious twenty seconds when she balanced and rode straight toward her mother, who jumped up and down cheering.

Betsy turned to her mother, feeling her face go white. “But Mom, Dad taught me to ride my bike. I remember. In DC. On the grounds of the National Cathedral.”

Her mother switched off the projector, all of them waking up from some kind of dream when she opened the shades, daylight pouring in.

“No, honey, it was me. You learned how to ride on the Vineyard. You don’t remember?

” Her mother scrunched her nose, disappointed.

“It’s one of my favorite memories of you because I’d never seen you so determined.

Your sisters could do it and you declared you would too. ”

It was silly to make a big deal of it, but Betsy felt herself sagging anyway.

There were certain narratives she’d told herself over the years about her parents; she’d been forced to identify them as part of her graduate course this past semester.

The first was that her father was busy in the Senate but always made time for Betsy.

The second was that her mother had been busy changing the world, and she’d had no time for Betsy at all.

“What are we going to do with all these videos when we leave the house?” Betsy said, wishing she hadn’t sounded so short. She turned to look out the window.

Her mother seemed confused by the question. “We’ll take them to Washington with us.”

“But what about the gilded mirror in my bedroom? The sailboat Daddy and I built on the mantel?” Betsy held up a small bud vase with nothing inside. “Are we going to throw it all out? It won’t fit in your apartment.”

“I think stuff just accumulated over the years, Betts, and we can pare it down.” Louisa gave her a look that said, cool it . “We’ll save what matters.”

“Matters to who? You or me?” Betsy said. She imagined herself carrying armfuls of their belongings into an imaginary car, preserving whatever she could. It was just stuff, and yet this stuff, this house, it meant something to her.

“We have time to figure it out, honey,” her mother said, rolling a piece of paper into her typewriter.

Betsy glanced at the blank wall where the movies had projected.

Had her mother really been the one to teach her to ride a bike?

It didn’t add up. Then again, the video they’d seen was taken before her mother was the Virgie Whiting that was asked to speak at feminist rallies, who went on television to provoke viewers, who wrote op-eds to stir up support for national women’s groups.

It was long before her mother was expected to be the voice of her generation.

Before she’d driven a wedge in their family so deep that she and her sisters were forced to take a side.

Because the way that Virgie Whiting saw it, you were either with her—or you were against her. Seeing how innocent everyone seemed back then, Betsy wondered: What had her mother done to their family?

That night, after her mother went upstairs to read in bed, Betsy was restless.

She announced she was going to pack up the extra set of china in the dining room hutch, so the glass cabinets didn’t look so cluttered.

Her sisters brought in the newspaper, and they put on a Motown radio station, taking turns pulling dishes and wrapping them in newsprint, stacking them neatly on the table while Louisa caught them up on the famed Bakke case arguments about the constitutionality of universities establishing quotas for Black students.

Louisa was adamant that there needed to be protections in place to support minority students.

“You sound just like Dad.” Aggie rolled a crystal flute in newsprint.