Chapter One

MY MOTHER'S DEATH was a long, blurry process. At the end, there was no memorial service for her, no wake and no tombstone. And no one will ever know exactly when she began dying. But I remember feeling it begin.

I NEVER UNDERSTOOD anything about my parents, not really. As a child, from my room, I couldn't hear what they said when they fought, only the tone and the tenor. Once, when I was very small, I went up to their bedroom door--a balsa wood door resembling a venetian blind--and tried to move the wooden slats so that they would be horizontal and I could look in, or at least hear better, but it was impossible: the wood was fixed still. Eventually, I learned to fall asleep easily and deeply during my parents' fights. Just before sleep, I'd imagine a corner of my room opening to another world, yawning wide while I slept so my spirit could travel through it. This was the escape I would not complete for another ten years.

As I grew older, my mother began to seem to me always tense and irritated--like a fly trapped between window and screen, blocked on all sides, painfully bumping, still flying. She constantly yelled at my father and nothing he did could calm or satisfy her. My parents began to sleep in single beds, with a table set between them. Even at ten I knew what that meant.

When I was small, every April my mother would ring my birthday cake with rabbits constructed from two marshmallows--their eyes and mouths were dots of food coloring; their ears, strips of paper bent around toothpicks. As I got older and my parents' fights became more frequent, she became impatient with the ritual and began instead to use the rows of fused pink marshmallow rabbits that were sold in boxes in the supermarket for Easter. Then, on one birthday--I was nine or ten--the cake she made caved in, swampy at its center. She threw it on the floor dramatically, with a loft; its circular layers separated in the air, disking out in the slippage of icing. After it fell, she leaned against the wall and slid down to the baseboard, crouching, crying, her slippers extending into the mess: the flotsam of exposed toothpicks; rent, spongy cake; and a row of squashed pink rabbits, partially torn from each other, in the midst of it all. I told her that I had not wanted the cake, that she never had to make a cake again. The cake stayed there accusingly for hours, rabbits in a shipwreck of icing. I did not touch it, out of respect for my mother's misery and rage.

My mother was an ambitious woman in ways. At least she talked ambitiously about her fife. My father was a professor at the University of Hawaii; she did not work. Before the divorce, she made little motions toward independence: She joined a women's therapy group, bought some Anne Murray records, took some courses at the university toward a master's degree. She decided, for a while, to let her hair go gray; for months, the color line shifted downward until finally the last dyed-blonde ends were cut off. And she left my father.

For a month or so after she left, my mother and I lived in an apartment building in downtown Honolulu with a swimming pool that had a roof deck from which you could see the stars. She would sit there next to me on a deck chair--serene, her hair back, her face serious--and I'd think: Just stay that way and everything will be okay. I made odd, unenforceable bargains with her like that, in my head. I willed her happy. On that deck, it seemed that anything could happen with us; as if an adventure would begin. I was almost ready to embark on it with her.

Yet when she left Hawaii, with me in tow, my mother saw no option but to return to her family--her mother and a set of aunts and uncles with whom she'd grown up--and their New Jersey towns (Chatham, Summit, Madison; we had lived in Kaneohe, Kailua, Manoa). She chose the place she knew, and found a job teaching high school there, just as she had twenty years earlier, before she met and married my father. She rented a half-house in Chatham for us to live in and filled it with half a marriage's furniture--as if we would share half a life there after the divorce, a continent and an ocean away from my father.

I'd met my mother's family, the Learys, perhaps twice while I was growing up in Hawaii. I knew from the beginning that I did not want to become part of this new, adopted family. They were proper, formal Irish Catholics with a wardrobe of Izod Lacoste and plaid. I still put Sun-In into my hair and wore uneven cutoffs, their threads dangling; T-shirts with fluorescent surf logos; and rubber thongs that chafed between my toes. They had a stocked liquor cabinet and would refill the grown-ups' drinks as soon as they were low. I was averse to drinking, perhaps because I already sensed that my mother drank too much. They were part of an insular community focused on the church and the prep school it ran. A priest from my cousins' school would often come play piano at their house, singing "Danny Boy" in his high range. I went to mass with them once, but I refused communion when it was offered me and I wasn't taken again. I had grown up without religion and did not want it now, though I could tell my mother was ready to return to the Catholicism she had once abandoned.

I felt that my parents' fighting and their divorce had broken me somewhere and I sensed that this new family would not fix this brokenness--maybe they would worsen it. I would be polite, I decided, but the Learys would be my mother's family, not mine. I had my books instead. I was an idealist, an absolutist, as a child; I held in my heart the dream of something better. I believed that I could keep myself separate from this family, and from my mother, and then someday leave--preserving my damaged state, held together in a mimicry of wholeness like the composed shards of a broken cup about to be fixed--and never look back. I began to fight with my mother about accompanying her to visit the Learys and eventually she went alone, except on rare occasions.

I think the Learys' house was the only place my mother was truly comfortable after the divorce--with two drinks and a third coming; with references to how, as a child, she had been the messy one whereas her sister, Betty, had been neat. Even when I would not visit the Learys, my mother still told me stories about them, as she had when I was younger and we lived in Hawaii. So, in a way, they remained stories to me even after the move. For her, I think they were the only thing that was real.

My mother loved the sordid flaws of this family as much as she loved its virtues. She told me all the worst stories, in a prurient way. How one of my aunts had caught her husband in an affair, finding a lipsticked love note in his pocket. How another had come upon a cache of her husband's pornography and he'd said he was no longer attracted to her, but how she'd won him back by spending days walking on the treadmill until she lost weight. How my second cousin, who had left graduate school in business because of depression, had tried to kill himself by crashing his head against the toilet bowl, then trying somehow to drown himself in it. My mother held back nothing. In her view, there was no age that was too young to know anything. I think she was very lonely in her life. She wanted me to be with her in it, to be like her. I was thirteen, fourteen when she told me the stories. I wanted to be a child, and not to hear.

LATE ONE NIGHT, a few months after we moved to New Jersey, I came downstairs to find my mother with a man in the kitchen, eating slices of cheesecake from a bakery box. They didn't touch, but I knew they were together from their casualness with each other. I felt the sexuality in it--and I felt the flatness of my chest, my skinniness as I stood there before them. It startled me to see them. I had never seen my mother like that with a man, even my father.

"Can I have some?" I asked, motioning toward the cheesecake, trying to be casual.

"Julie. Of course you can."

Apologetically, my mother rose to greet me, standing taller and heavier than I, as she always would, even as I grew.

"This is John Brunner, a friend of mine from high school," she said.

I remember distinctly the way she looked at that moment. The skin of her face, gray and large-pored in the kitchen's sputtering fluorescent light, her blush red and streaky. Coral lipstick leached into the vertical lines above her upper lip. The flesh beneath her chin was so loose that it almost made a straight diagonal from the tip of her chin to the base of her neck. Her hair, frosted to a white blonde, was cut short and choppily, close to her head. She wore an A-line skirt, a plaid oxford shirt, a pilling gray sweater vest. Her figure was slightly heavy but compact, her breasts a shelf of flesh shored up by a thick-strapped bra. Her stockings were orangy brown; her shoes were like orthopedic shoes, thick-soled and laced up. Her clip-on earrings were whorls of fake gold. I felt sorry for her, but in the way of pity and not of sympathy. I saw her wasted beauty, I saw that it was over for her. And I viscerally feared being her, becoming her.

As a joke, John Brunner stood up, grasped my shoulders, and turned me around so he could look at my ass. He took a long look; he really looked at me.

"Yes," he finally told me. "Go ahead and have some cheesecake."

My mother laughed. She laughed differently when he was around.

I took the plate with the slice back up to my room. As soon as John Brunner had spoken, I'd recognized his deep voice, which caught and rasped. I'd picked up the phone once at our house in Hawaii, just before the divorce, and that was the voice I'd heard.

Perhaps it was for him that she left my father. But this is only speculation. He'd been her high school boyfriend, she told me later. He'd been envied then, the son of the middle-class New Jersey town's most successful car dealer, with his own new Porsche at sixteen. I could tell she still saw him as he had once been: his blond curly hair fine, shiny, and long enough to be rebellious; a rich boy in the town who liked her even though he had his choice of girls.

When my mother returned to him, John Brunner's curls had gone to matted, graying frizz and he wore sunglasses even on shady days. He was gaunt and slightly hunched, with a wispy mustache. His voice was grainy from smoking, his alcoholism so bad that, at one point, my mother joined his family to confront him about it en masse, as a doctor had recommended, lights darkened until he entered the room. He'd almost driven his dead father's car dealership into ruin by inattention, but it was said that his father had hired good salesmen and the business squeaked by.

He was divorced like my mother; his children, a boy named Biff and a girl, lived with his ex-wife, and he lived alone in a country house gone to ruin. Visiting it for the first time, I found it full of Ping-Pong and pool tables set up in rooms that had once been living rooms and children's bedrooms, rooms strewn with toys his children had discarded when they were younger. He lived directly on top of the detritus of his marriage and of his children's early years. He offered me some of the toys, but I was already too old.

He lacked the energy to clean the fishpond on his property, its mouth choked with algae that encroached gradually outward over its surface--in the way it seemed to me that life was engulfing him and my mother, threatening to close over their heads. On one of our visits, he tried to teach me to fish in that decaying pond to impress my mother--talking to her over my head as he helped me bait the hook, his fingers over mine; forcing the worm with difficulty over the fishhook's head, then easily moving it farther down along the thin line of metal.

I might naturally have disliked John Brunner, but I forced myself to like him well enough, and told my mother so. I knew that, whatever his problems, there would at least be safety if my mother married him. I sensed that she needed safety of some sort.

John Brunner and the Learys: my mother's life as it had been twenty-five years ago, now returned to her. It could not quite work--even I sensed it--but she could not resist it. I still think of her, always, as in thrall to her past. It dragged her back to New Jersey from halfway across the Pacific to rejoin her family; it kept her in its hold when she might have started a new life.

It happened that my mother never had a chance to leave the past to which she had returned after the divorce, because she died a death that started early, took a long time, and took everything from her. But I believe she would not have left anyway. If she hadn't become ill, I would have returned, reluctantly, to New Jersey for holidays, to hear the same stories and to watch that family around their long dinner table. She was deeply in love with the past, she was its child, its supplicant. I was falling in love with the future even then, and I equally belonged to it. Maybe that was the simple difference between us; maybe that was why we did not end up loving each other enough, after all.

FOR A LONG time, my mother was always with her family in the evenings or with John. She was very sexual with John when I saw them together--pulling him toward her hips when she hugged him, sitting on his lap--but I knew he did not make her happy. On the nights she saw him, she would still come home and close the door of her bedroom and, no matter how early it was, stay there until morning with the lights out. Sometimes she said she had a headache. Sometimes she did not say anything to explain herself. I would eat dinner alone downstairs, and listen for her moving.

Although I was alone in the house much of the time, I did not feel lonesome. I felt more like a contented bachelor. I spent laborious hours with my homework. It benefited from my entire energy, and I believed it would save my life. And I bided my time by reading. Every other day I borrowed a new book from my history teacher; I don't know if he thought I really read them. After I finished my homework, I would read my borrowed book for four or five hours at a stretch and then fall asleep with the book in the bedclothes, spine cracked, facedown--as if the book were charmed, as if it would protect me. When I went to my room to read, I blocked the rest of the house out of my mind. I did not want to know what was occurring in my mother's room, only a few yards away.

I also had Masterpiece Theatre reruns of the old Saturday Night Live. On Sundays, I would take an old silver radio to bed, to fall asleep listening to the Top 40, as if I were a child of a different era. There was a supermarket just past our backyard and I would go buy food at the deli there; I lived mostly on roast beef with salad dressing.

For a while, there was a romance to my life alone, and I could often avoid my mother entirely. She'd conveyed to me implicitly that we were each on our own, and for a while that seemed fine to me. But later my mother took an increasing number of what she called mental health days from her job as a teacher, so that she was there in the house when I returned home after school. I began to worry that she would be fired. She began to drink more, buying jugs of yellow-green Gallo wine from the nearby supermarket every few days. The jugs shone threateningly in the very center of the refrigerator's middle shelf. She saw less of John and spent more time in the house.

Once I interrupted her on a foray to the kitchen, on a day when she had retired to her room as soon as she'd come home. She was sitting at the kitchen table. She stood up and threw the contents of her cup in my face. I flinched and blinked. As the liquid dripped from my face, I tasted it. I expected it to be white wine, but it was clear tea. Maybe she's drinking it to sober up, I thought. I simply wiped it off. She sat down again and looked at the bottom of the cup. I didn't speak to her. I backed out of the kitchen and turned and fled up to my own room. I was too far gone, too detached from this life with her, to cry about it. I was a pragmatist of survival by then and the tea had not hurt me. I could not imagine another mother, another life. I am closer to crying about this moment now than I was then.

As my mother began to spend more and more time at home, I learned that I was no bachelor, but a child, a dependent. By my sophomore year of high school, she would yell and scream at me almost every night when she came home. I had never done anything to provoke her. This is a child's answer, I know: "But I didn't do anything! But it's not my fault." It was always the answer I gave; she never believed it; it was always true. Once her checkbook had been stolen and someone was cashing her checks; she thought it must be me. Another time, she thought I was drinking her wine; in truth, I would never have touched it. (For years I would not even drink socially because of her.) I think she blamed me for the wine because she literally could not believe how much she had drunk the previous night, because she mistook her own capabilities, still had a sense of herself that was better than what she had become.

As she became more and more displeased with me, my mother began to fight with my father loudly on the phone about who would pay my expenses; she cataloged for him each dollar she spent on me so that I could hear. And she would often threaten me: "If you don't like it here, you can always go live with your father."

I was afraid I would have to test this threat sometime, only to find out that I could not go. My father had gotten remarried to a woman who had her own daughter, Kara, a child model. He had sent me a picture of the wedding, with Kara as the flower girl, wearing a lei. They all lived together in a condo in Hawaii. When I saw the photo, how they were a family in it, I began to know that the life with my mother was the only one I would be permitted to have.

My father would call to check on me, but he had never invited me to live with him. When he called, it became increasingly awkward to talk to him--as if each month I knew him less. As if a hundred awkward conversations, and the passing of time, would eventually make us wholly strangers. I don't know if he knew how bad it was with my mother; he must have had a sense. I loved him, but I was not sure if he would take me back. And I knew it would be a crushing blow to my mother if I ever accepted her offer and actually left. I knew I would go, if I went, only when she wanted me to. Her telling me I could leave was a taunt, a way to keep me scared and obedient, to confirm for me that I was trapped or to make me grateful to her. I had the feeling, that she was keeping me with her out of shame--because as a mother she was supposed to, she must, she must want to--that I would shame her irremediably if I ever asked to leave.

I missed my father and took irrational comfort in the fact that it was he, not my mother, I resembled--the strict T our noses and brows made was the same--as if that meant that his calmness, his stability and sanity, were also my inheritance. My mother could not claim a single feature that we shared. Even the Learys could not stretch a point to claim a resemblance. It simply was not there.

Even living so far from my father, I told myself I was still essentially his child: charmed like him, protected like him. If I could not be with him, it was enough that I was like him. Though in many ways my father was lost to me, I believed at some level that he and I were the lucky ones of the family--excelling in school, hyper-rational, careful to exercise, rarely sick. Blessed, we'd be protected, and danger would pass, as if tall angels bent over us until we were encircled, making a tent with their huge wings, the end-feathers brushing the ground.

My mother, I thought, was the one who would always be out of control, unprotected in the middle of the world, wronged in her own eyes and raging, always in grief. She was the one who was so often ill, with her migraines, the one who drank. Everything would be borne by her, I thought. My father and I would be exempted from her destiny.

Eventually, my mother's anger at the world became a presence in the house so palpable it gave me stomach pains. The muscles in my abdomen clenched tight at the mere sound of irritation in her voice. I came to know her anger intimately, judged its ebbs and flows, judged what I could ask for and what was impermissible. She gave me a set of chores; I did them all. She set a curfew; I followed it. I learned never to act without thinking, and above all never to argue back. I felt like a trapped thing: crafty, calculating how to live under the caprice of her anger.

I never invited friends to the house, because of my mother's screaming. Indeed, it is not too much to say that I did not really have friends in high school, because if I did then someday they would want to come to the house. Chatham was a middle-class commuter town where the parents worked in New York City, or in New Jersey banks and corporations. It was all white, all Christian, with very few divorces. The high school had state championship teams in soccer and football. It believed fervently in proms and pep rallies and cheerleaders. All the girls in the senior class were automatically on the ballot for homecoming court, whether they wanted to be or not. It was assumed you would want to be among the elect; it was a town where they chose you. Or did not. I felt that I could not risk the town's knowing about us. It was more than a feeling of shame, it was a feeling that it was somehow subversive for my mother and me to live there, that we might not be allowed to live there anymore if people knew.

MY MOTHER LOVED murder mysteries and true crime, especially Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. On her days off, she stayed in bed to read them. And she liked learning about crime nearby. Driving at night with me on a winding back road near the Learys', she told me how a girl had recently been killed there, how the girl, driving, was bumped from the back, stopped, and was knifed. And when my mother took the wrong exit and ended up lost with me in the depressed inner city of Paterson, she told me that we weren't safe in the car, because black kids would gather around cars and rock them, to force the occupants out. She once showed me a tabloid headline--MOM KILLS KIDS AND SELF--and I knew for certain she would never do it, yet I knew also that the thought of ending this life with me, here, was not unpleasant to her. Instead, in her mind, it was funny and kitschy and almost possible. She liked to scare me, in the hope that I would appreciate her more.

I did not fear her exactly, but I feared the days with her, feared enduring them, feared how many they would be.

The summers were the worst. As a high school teacher, my mother had the summers off. This meant there was no money in the summer. And there was nowhere to go but the town, in which I had no friends. My mother would not allow me to learn to drive--she was afraid of teaching me and would not pay for lessons. This was odd, because she herself loved driving, loved big American boats of cars that were like a living room you rested in, loved manipulating her blue Chevy as it took its wide turns. She tried to teach me once and kept gripping the handle of the passenger door as if she would throw herself out of the car and leave the crash I was sure to cause. It was a small town with quiet streets and a low speed limit; there was no danger. Yet I did not learn to drive; I learned her fear of it instead. It still is with me.

And I learned to sleep twelve hours a day for those summer months, like an animal waiting for its Spring. When I awoke, it was midday; it was already hot.

Once my mother's childhood friend Elayne visited us in the summer. Elayne was a high school principal and counselor, perceptive about teenagers, and she asked me, "What do you do?" I think she could tell that there were days when I did nothing, spoke to no one, read books in the house that I had read many times before, in a cursory way, so that I could appear to be reading.

I muttered something about hanging around, about movies; mentioned the names of girls in my classes--Amy, Heather, Eleni--and said they were my friends. I could see my mother was proud of me for lying. I knew that she would leave me alone for a few days because I had vouched for her in front of Elayne, for our being normal.

LIVING MY SEPARATE life next to my mother, I began to lose the sense that I loved her, or that I ever had. I could remember that I had loved her, but not the feeling of it. When I was a child, she had been able to break my heart in a second--once, by not wearing a plastic sea horse necklace I'd given her; once, by not noticing my report card on the table. I had excelled in school to please her. I had learned to read before I'd gone to school to please her--because of the excitement in her face when she knew that I could. I had wanted that excitement--more than the words, more than the meaning that reading brought. My life was a show for her when I was a child. Now I excelled at school not out of joy but out of fear, and any gift I gave her was to allay her anger.

Love does end; it is extinguished. At least, this was what I learned from my mother. The divorce, she felt, had erased more than fifteen years of marriage. Thirteen of those erased years had been my life. My parents had moved to Hawaii together when I was one; all I'd known was that place, and their marriage. After the divorce, my mother would not speak of those thirteen years with my father and me. She spoke instead only of the present, and of her childhood and youth with her family. I never heard my parents' courtship story; I came of age to hear it just as my mother began to deny that it had meant anything, when she began, implicitly, almost to deny it had occurred. And my mother was not like other parents, who will tell their children--to their apparent embarrassment and secret pleasure--what they were like when they were young. I never learned from my mother about the child I had been. I sensed that, to her, my childhood was inessential or moot, part of a long mistaken trip she had taken before returning home.

In my tatami slippers, with their felt thongs and bamboo soles, and my surfer shirts, I must have been a living memory of Hawaii, and of my father, for her--the continuity between two lives that thwarted the perfect escape she wanted. Did she see my father in me, in the way I was calm and rational, the way I did not raise my voice and left her to rail and scream, to feel that she inflicted herself upon me? Like him, I suffered her rages, and did not rise to meet them--as if I knew that was what would hurt her most. She needed rage to meet rage--it had, in her own family. She and her father had screamed at each other nightly, but I knew that she'd cried bitterly, inconsolably when he died. My mother needed to tangle, and subside; maybe that was love, to her. The intimacy of fighting, of hot anger. We never gave her that, my father and I. Like him, I would never come to her, and I never really understood her. And, like him, I was punished for my failure to know her, and the punishment was that she left me--and if she did not put a continent and an ocean between us, there was enough space in the hallway between our bedrooms to create the same effect.

The time just after the divorce may have been the very beginning of her dying--but we did not know. The divorce was an easy scapegoat: it could be invoked to explain everything, to excuse, to overshadow. Yet I sensed dimly that my mother's anger, which had sometimes flared in my parents' fights before the divorce, had gradually begun losing focus even as it became more frequent. It spun out, diffuse, a messy anger that often had no actual object, or if it had an object, it was one manufactured out of paranoia--my drinking her wine, another teacher in the school who she said was out to get her. It was as if something were hurting her, making her lash out with more force but less direction than before--as if at an unseen assailant, an invisible destroyer. Sometimes when she screamed at me it sounded like keening, as if she were in grief over her own anger.

The first doctor my mother saw gave her a prescription for painkillers, sent her to a psychiatrist to talk about her divorce, and told her she must be having particularly bad migraines brought on by stress. She did not wholly believe the doctor even then, sensing that her headaches signified something more than tension, that her blurry vision was something more than glasses could ever correct.

Once, just after parking the Chevy in a supermarket lot, she folded her arms on the steering wheel, laid her bowed head on them, and said in a whisper, "I don't know what's happening to me."

Hearing her whisper, I thought only that the breakdown I'd expected for so long, ever since the divorce, had finally come. Day by day, I waited for it, waited for her breaking. I wondered how people went crazy. Would it just be the same thing but more? Would it be a different thing altogether? I did not have a lock on my bedroom door to lock against her; I locked my mind and heart against her instead.

I STARTED TO have dreams in which a presence, restless and aware, stalked us, padding through the rooms of the half-house. It took different forms. Sometimes it was unthinkably huge, its face as big as the night sky, staring out at me through the cataract of drifting clouds. Sometimes it was small and domestic and insinuating, like a cat. At times it was even smaller, small enough to flatten itself and slip through the space under doors. In dreams, I kept very still for fear of it, shutting my eyes tightly to avoid watching its face. Twin cones of light, starting at its eyes and widening outward into round spotlights, touched me with their orbs of cold but never rested. They rested elsewhere, in another room.

I GRADUATED FROM high school in three years, on the pretext that the high school did not have enough advanced courses, but really to escape her. I wonder if anyone at the school saw through my explanations or, rather, how completely they did. And if my mother did, too. I think she would walk into my room, see me with my head bent over my books, and know that her intense, serious daughter was striving with all her will and energy simply to be able to leave her and never to look back. A survival instinct kept me creepily focused. When I read, I had a preternatural concentration so that I could not hear my mother's voice even if, several times, she might speak my name. She would have to raise her voice to reach me.

I was driven and frozen at the same time, waiting to grow up only so I could get away, lonely without realizing it. I could not live now the way I lived then, my life reduced to its skeleton. Then I was focused only on surviving, leaving, obsessed by these things. If I could have gone to sleep one night at any time during high school and awakened seventeen years old and on my way to college, I would have chosen that. I would have given over four years of life in a moment.

When I received Harvard's letter of acceptance, the feeling I had was primarily not joy but relief: it was the ticket out. The relief disappeared when the financial aid letter came. My mother said she would not pay her thousand-dollar contribution. I did not understand then that there were government and private loans to which I could resort, that the school would make it possible for me to go, somehow. I thought it all depended on her whim, as so much of my life had for the past four years. For weeks, I felt the world darken around me, as if it were about to close up. Finally my father said he would pay her thousand-dollar share as well as his own. I could go.

Thus, as my mother was beginning the long process of her dying, I began the process of my leaving--as I had left in my heart long ago. I did not hate her, but the love I had for her as a child was gone; it seemed distant, confined to an earlier time. And I believed that I needed to leave her to survive her--as if whatever was happening to her, the breakdown, the dissolution, were contagious; as if I would wake up one day in her room or even in her mind, and leave my own forever. And I believed in divorce, I had learned from it. I believed that she had left me first, and with a child's logic I thought that made leaving her right.

I believed then that you could jettison your family, as if it were the part of a rocket that falls away, and falls apart, even as the rocket is speeding forward. Does it need to be said, I wonder, that in leaving I fell apart, inside, instead--soundlessly and unbeknownst to myself? I did not know that I had, though, for a long time, and for the moment, as I graduated from high school, I felt free, as if the world were open to my heart's plans.

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The Bad Daughter

9781565121850

1565121856

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