My Eurail pass grants me unlimitedtrain travel. Transit is narcotic, eeing irresistible

He needs to do it at his mother’s house. He needs the powergranted by her presence, and he needs to thwart that power

“How is your family?” she asks guardedly,separating her blood from mine

ut he resents his servitude, along with the castrationimplied by the robes he’s forced to wear (he calls them skirts); andhis insurrection nds a target in mothers: in mine and in mygrandmother, who took away his wife and child; in the church itself,through whose wall he once put his st; and, of course, in his ownmother, with whom he always seems to be ghting over the mosttrivial matters.

We’re taught to call the church our mother

What I feel is not so much guilt as dislocation

My grandfather, in fact, comes across as docile and friendly. Helacks the loud, large bluster of my father, but then, he is mucholder, his hair completely white, his walk sti. In his car, away fromthe notice of my father, his hand strays past the gearshift and ontomy thigh. “Oh, oh, oh,” he says. “You make me wish I was thirtyyears younger. If I was, you’d be in trouble.”I don’t dare look at him, nor pointedly away, so I stare forwardout the windshield. The next time he has to change gears, he takeshis hand o my leg

The shingles are not gone when I leave, but there have been nomore blisters for a week, and most of the old ones are now scabs. Ican turn my head a little, and although my right arm is too weak tolift my backpack, I can use the ngers of that hand for short periods.“Long enough to write a postcard,” I say to my mother, wigglingthem

And after that,” he’s said, “we’ll drive to my mother’s. You’llmeet both your grandparents. You’ll see where you came from—theother half of you.

could stop myself from falling if,having stepped from a rooftop into the air, I remembered, too late,the fact of gravity

And though I don’t reassure my father—I won’t givehim the satisfaction, nor will I relinquish the facade ofindependence—my relationship with my boyfriend has not survivedmy father’s sudden entry into my life.

Where were you!” my father demands, nearly hysterical,spluttering in anger.“I was out,” I say.“With him?”“Yes. Him.

and without thecomplications of staving o his physical advances, and denying myown response to them

heresy was resolved when God announced to my father that He wasrevealing Himself to my father through me

Dymphna was the daughter of a widowed Irish king who wanted tomarry her. She ed, but he pursued her. She refused him, and he cuto her head

which I read once and then left ina drawer, and two of female saints, which I studied and slept with

Through those transformations made possible by faith, I wouldbecome worthy of her loving me. Either that, or faith would makeme feel no more pain from my mother’s abandonment than I didfrom my jaw while lying in the practitioner’s lap.

I looked in themirror at the blood coming out of my mouth, at the same magicow that had once summoned my mother from the impossibly wideworld of grown-ups and trac and delivered her to my side.

he arena of faith was the only one in which I had a chance ofsecuring my mother’s attention. Since she was not around duringthe week to answer to more grubby requirements, and because shewas always one who preferred the choice morsel, it was to mymother rather than to my grandparents that the guidance of my soulwas entrusted

What was disconcertingwas my erce recital of verses, my vigilant posture on the edge ofthe red plastic kindergarten chair

I became determined to returnto wherever it was I had visited in the practitioner’s lap

I neverquestion his sanity; although I will come to the point where it is lesspainful to regard my father as crazy than to conclude that he hasbeen so canny in his judgment of my character and its frailties thathe knows exactly what language to use, what noose of words to castaround my nec

doesn’t occur tome that his invocation of divine will is thetidiest and most unassailable means of exonerating us both

When the preacher in my father speaks, I lose what’s left of mypower to defend myself. The words that might send most peoplerunning are the very words to trap me

Not erōs

In his laugh are allhis years of studying theology held up against my ignorance ofwhatever God and His anger might be lik

I’m afraid that whatever he wants, I will give him. It’s only amatter of time.

I need you, too,” I whisper. Please don’t make this the price, Ibeg silently

On the road we are free,and yet it is a freedom too exhausting to sustain. There’s no place tolight or to rest, and though for now it goes unrecognized, denied,there will always be the knowledge that what we felt during ourrst stricken week together is the truth: We lost each other. We lostmy childhood and his fatherhood and twenty years of love, andthese losses are not recoverable. We are eeing from this truth, butwe can’t ee indenitely.

I could overcome whateverobstacles prevented my mother’s loving me. I could overcomemyself

My mother, soon exhausted by my relentless crying andclinging to her neck, her legs, her ngers—to whatever she wouldlet me hold—took me to a practitioner whose name she picked atrandom from the listings in the back of The Christian Science Journal.

Later that afternoon, I woke upscreaming in a panic that had been interrupted, not assuaged, by thedrug.

Whenever she wore this dress I was unable toresist touching the fabric of the skirt. I found the notes evocative,mysterious, and if she let me, I traced my nger over the stitcheddots as if they represented a dierent code than that of music’s, likeBraille or Morse, a message that I might in time decipher.

and unclean, chosen and unchosen. My mother never went to temple,and I think the faith of her forebears must have struck her as dowdyand workaday, lacking the overt glamour of crucixion. The bloodof Judaism was as old and dull as a scab, whereas Christ’s owedbrightly each Sunday

Above my bed was a plaque bearing these wordsfrom its founder, Mary Baker Eddy: “Father-Mother Good, lovinglythee I seek. In the way thou hast, be it slow or fast, up to thee.

“You were named for saints and queens,” my mother told me when Iwas young enough that a halo and a crown seemed interchangeable.

I’ll be compelled forever by my parents’ courtship. Butwhat will fascinate me about the letters my father sent my motherwill not be any quaint “otherness,” not their belonging to a timedierent from my own, but their absolute familiarity

I have embarked on a peculiar passage in my life—a time out ofreal time, one which will not t either into the life I lived as a childor the one I create as a woman, but which will carry me, like a road,from one to the other.

It is April. It is May. Days pass unmarked, except in relation tohow long it is since last we were together and how long it will bebefore we’re together again

My time, empty of activity, is lled by my father. I think ofno one else, of nothing else

I’ll weep reading the letters my father sent my mother, for all thatis in them, all that I so wanted to believe was mine and only minewas, as she said, hers.

By claiming all of my father’s devotion, she pushes me towardhim. Because, if she won’t love me, then the only way not to fallinto the abyss of the unloved is by clinging to him.

I cry with the intention of getting my mother in trouble,cry harder and longer, learning the power of vengeance

From a mother who won’t see me to a father who tells me I amthere only when he does see me: perhaps, unconsciously, I considerthis an existential promotion. I must, for already I feel that my lifedepends on my father’s seeing me.

Back at school, there is a specic hour during which I and studentswhose last names begin with the same letter as mine are supposedto register for classes, and I miss it. There is a makeup registrationand then a late registration that carries a penalty fee, and I missboth of those as well

So abnormal to love me so completely: that’s what I hear her say.What I hear is that not only does my mother not love or admire me,but she will nd a way to reinterpret my father’s love, to make it allher own

I stand among them. I duck under the skirt ofone and let it fall around me like a yellow tent, a tent the color ofthe sun and smelling of owers. I push my face into the smooth

“You know,” she says, pointing, “this isn’t about you. It’s aboutme.

He says he can’t picture things in his head, that he thinks onlyin words, a text unrelieved by any sensual memory. Trying tounderstand what he means, I remember looking something up in theEncyclopedia Britannica and noticing how claustrophobic its drypages were, many crammed only with black letters, no images, thenarrowness of the margins discouraging a reader’s drifting o intomental pictures

ve separated him from the act;I’ve made the adjustment of regarding the kiss as I would a morehelpless physical transport, a seizure, perhaps, or a spasm ofcoughing. If the kiss was an accident, outside of human control,then it doesn’t pollute the love he has for me. It doesn’t demand thatI turn away from what I wan

Depressed in the wake of his visit, she’s actuallymore understanding than my grandparents of my desire to see himagain; she is for now, at least.“Yes! Yes!” she says, when I tell her that he’s returning, and weagree that the visit will, once again, include her

thrall to her, spiting her—the person neither of us could ever knowor possess—we hold on to each other. She is more compelling thanwe are, because she always eludes. She is mysterious, whereas weare only too eager to bare ourselves

Our words about love are, like most people’s, unoriginal,unmemorable; but my father and I have a subject more consumingthan love: Her. Love’s object. My mother. His wife

I can’t dismiss the vision of the cockroach I trapped under thewater glass, how it circled slowly at rst and then faster, faster

It’s the drug my father administers in order that he mightconsume me. That I might desire to be consumed

When I turn on the light in the kitchen, I nd a cockroach on thecounter; rather than kill it, I gingerly and at arm’s length place awater glass upside down over the insect—leaving the problem formy mother to resolve in the morning. I dislike insects, andcockroaches in particular have always frightened me.

She has a headache. She is attened bydiscouragement. This visit, like all his others, has convinced her thatshe’s wasted years on the wrong men, the wrong life. “You drivehim,” she says. “He seems more interested in your company than inmine, anyway.

Alone, outside my mother’s closed bedroom door, I feeljealous. And, like all children, I discover that I’m squeamish at thethought of my mother and father having intercourse. I’m bothfascinated and repelled

“They didn’t let me hold you,” he says. “Not at all. I don’tremember that they ever let me. They had you on a schedule. It wassacrosanct, it was absolute. They tolerated no exceptions. They fedyou, they changed you, they put you down. If you cried, no one wasallowed to pick you up.”By they he means the baby nurse, my mother and grandmother.“They didn’t even let me say good-bye,” he says. He puts his handunder my chin and turns my face toward his.

I’m always doing something wrong I knowjust how ugly I must be

n my father I meet someone not only familial but familiar:like myself. Now, my stubborn streak, my willful, marching walk,and the way I frown when I’m thinking—all such traits are notevidence of my separateness but of my belonging

I’m as captivated by him. I’ve never really known who my fatherwas, and the promise of revelation is inherently seductive. There is,too, the fascination of our likeness, that we resemble each other inways that transcend physical similarities

As if what my father caught with his camera was themoment when suddenly we knew we’d begun to burn

I watch as he poses and records images of her, and shewatches as he poses me. Though no one counts aloud, I sense thathe is careful to make an equal number of exposures of both of us,and that we all keep track of this quantiable measure of hisattention

it will always have the look of an incomplete collage—some detailstoo large, others too small, many missing.

’m helpless against it, this response to my mother’s chroniclateness, to having always been the last child to be picked up fromschool, camp, church, birthday parties, dental appointments, dancelessons

She wants me to get a diaphragm, that notoriously unreliableform of birth control. But I can’t be tted for one.

I lose my capacity to get pregnant, to be ina danger of the kind that precipitated the abrupt fall from grace sheendured.

wanting her to look at me, my body. I like nothing somuch as taking my clothes o; I do now that I’m so thin.

Anorexia can be satised, mymother cannot; so I replace her with this disease, with a system ofpenances and renunciation that oers its own reward. That makesmothers obsolete.

my mother’s daughter: the one she doesn’t see? Or am I so angry ather endless nagging me about my weight that I decide I’ll neveragain give her the opportunity to say a word to me about my size.You want thin? I remember thinking, I’ll give you thin. I’ll dene thin,not you. Not the suggested one hundred and twenty pounds, butninety-ve. And not size six, but size two.

It will be years before I can acknowledge that in preserving suchevidence I document another, dierent emotional transaction: notone of love but of rage, my rage over always receiving directivesdisguised as gifts and my refusal, ultimately, to accept them. Underthe Christmas tree I make the appropriate noises of delight, but thenlater, alone, after the house is dark, I reverse my response, I rejectthe gifts by wrapping them back up as if I’ve never opened them.

I can make myself thecreature she imagines she might love, at least while standing in thestore where she buys the dress.

Necklaces. Rings. Clothes. Books. A portable stereo and lenses formy camera. The fountain pen he used in college. His grandfather’srazor and strop in its original pewter case etched with curlicues. Adiamond stud that belonged to someone—I can’t remember who.Some of his gifts I’ll give away, and others I’ll sell to apawnbroker, tearing up the claim check as soon as I’m outside theshop’s door. The heirlooms I’ll return, packed carefully into a box,insured at the post oce and mailed without a letter to his address.They belong to his children. Not me, but the children he raised, thedaughters who will still be his when we no longer speak

—adesperate, fearful anger over her having abandoned me, an angerthat has left me stricken with asthma and rashes—as love

As my motherhas recently moved out, perhaps inspiring this pragmatic shift ofadoration, my grandmother is careful not to say anything seditiousthat I might repeat.

You love your mother best. That’s the way it is for every child,and that’s the way it is for you, too.”

As she does every day, she is wearingChanel No. 5 and the string of pearls her father gave her when shewas seventeen.

His own father died when he was an infant; hehas no stepfather. Having missed his lost father for all of his life, heknows what I cannot admit: that some of the longing in my life mustbe focused on that hole in the family portraits. It cannot all beconsecrated to my mother

she uses his curiosity aboutme, and mine about him, as the excuse to plan a reunion that willinclude her. If this is the case, how bitterly she will come to regretthe ruse.

Perhaps Isuspect or hope that passion lies behind such a bluster of ideology.That something must require such a screen; some interesting beastmust be contained by this cage within cage of words

If I suspect that the coming visit is my mother’s idea,it’s because I don’t remember suggesting it myself, and it has beentoo long since she’s seen him—too long since she’s taken anysolitary, mysterious vacations.

Someday a sentence will come to me, a magic sentence that willundo all that is wrong and make everything right. But until thatsentence comes, I say nothing

My mouth, so uncooperative. At swimming school it opens underthe surface of the pool and water rushes in, choking me. In front ofthe tape recorder, it closes on my tongue, refuses to surrender evenone word.

I’m afraid I made on him during the last visit, whenhe scolded me in the sculpture gallery.

“Hasn’t anyone taught you not to touch things in amuseum!” he says, and he looks disapprovingly at both my motherand me

my mother. I am sure, watching as they pack up the beachequipment and walk toward the car, that if I didn’t follow, theywouldn’t notice I was missing

As I grow up, I know little of my father’s life: He has a new wife andanother daughter. It snows where he lives. He has hay fever and alarge dog called a malamute that once ate a cat. He’s a doctor, butnot the medical kind—he has something called a PhD. My source ofsuch details is my mother, because the infrequent letters stop, andthere are only two visits during which I can observe him myself

I watchas he writes in them, stamps and mails them, too, so that our visitwill not interrupt their relentless ow to my address

Twenty years old. My life is that of a fugitive. I’m always in anairline terminal, trudging after him over expanses of stained carpetand dull linoleum. The walls around us warn of illegal transport.Arrows point to baggage claims and taxi stands. Everywhere thereare small blue signs bearing international symbols for food, rst aid,toilets.

money for his senior year at a fancy prep school scratched togetheras a kind of apology from his father.My father’s father was a philanderer. As my father tells me yearslater, he often left his wife and children to pursue other women. Thenishing touch to my father’s high school career—a diploma from aname-brand prep school and thus a chance at a better college—wasintended as a kind of compensation for earlier neglect. In that itgave my father the opportunity to meet my mother, it did changehis life. But not in the ways his father must have hoped.

oor is something that mygrandmother, herself raised by a father with a fortune, can makeseem very desperate, even fatal.

My grandparents thought they could end it

Very occasionally, I dream in French,and on those mornings I wake up ill: I vomit

nce, she throws the ashcards down and slaps my face.

This all comes true, incidentally, althoughmy mother pursues these interests on her own, she doesn’t ever goto college.As for my father, suddenly faced with unimaginableresponsibilities—“How will you support them!” I’m told mygrandfather cried. “How can you possibly!”—he takes a job as anencyclopedia salesman.

How solemn she is, how unnervingly still for a girl of eighteen,and how much care she has taken with her clothes and her hair, theperfectly plucked brows over her wide hazel eyes. They aredangerous, those eyes in the picture, unplumbed pools of sorrowinto which I can tumble and drown. My mother’s expression is onethat betrays the kind of fear and vulnerability I associate withorphans or refugees, people who have lost everything. Her mouth issmall, precise, virginal, her lips closed against appetite. The Cupid’sbow of her upper lip is drawn with an exactitude that makes myown look comparatively blurred, unfocused.

I take it and hold it inmy hands. I look carefully at the photograph and at the words Iknow by heart.

“She enjoys reading and attending concerts, and hopes somedayto become a dramatic actress,” reads the legend below my mother’syearbook picture

What followed the night of the play, the night my parents met,was not unusual: infatuation, feverish meetings, pregnancy, a hastymarriage, the birth of a child, and then divorce—all of which wasplayed out in my mother’s parents’ home, as my father’s family livedfar away from the boarding school he attended. My parents becameparents while still children, without money, with no more than highschool educations.

My mother and father met in the lobby of a theater, where theywere introduced to each other by a mutual friend. They wereseventeen, and both virgins. Knowing this about my parents ispowerful enough to make seventeen the age at which I, too, lose myvirginity. I cast it o as if that birthday ordains my doing so; and mypartner is also a boy whose inexperience equals mine.

I write careful, pinched responsesthat require drafts and redrafts, the nal copies folded carefully inthirds and sealed in spotless white envelopes

but propound tedious theoriesof education and aesthetics. As with the letters he sent when I wassmall, their purpose is to instruct. When I read them, standing in thedrafty corridor outside my post-oce box, I am consumed byfrustration. Can anyone really talk and think this way? Is he erudite,or is he what my grandmother would call a “crashing bore”

She sees me often,but she comes and goes at her own discretion: she does not want tobe summoned by fevers or nightmares or lost teeth. It’s the rst ofmy mother’s attempts since the divorce to make an independent lifefor herself, a life that does not seem possible to her unlessmotherhood is left behind

At Thanksgiving, my mother arranges for angratifying way for the two of us to celebrate the holiday.From a social service agency she gets the name of a needyfamily who is willing for us to come and prepare dinner forthem. In the home we visit, several children share a roomhalf the size of mine at my grandparents’

As his second wife will tell me years later, she takes asher husband a man who is not entirely present to her, whois always looking back over his shoulder at my mother andat me.

He doesn’t speak or gesture. He never followswhen I run from the dark rooms in which I think I see him.But he provokes me in his silence, the way he seems,without eyes, to stare.

Though she dates other men and even accepts theirengagement rings, my mother remains romantically fixated,albeit mostly from a distance, on my father

As she smokes, she staresout, her back toward me, and the light comes through theglass and outlines her body under the thin white gown

It looks illicit, almost perverse, bordered by a narrowruffle of black lace, the kind I already associate with theunderwear she puts on before a date

She stalksaround her room as if enraged, a wild and astonished lookon her face. I make myself small, I back into the corner bythe door, and often she doesn’t seem to know I’m there.

Sleep makes my mother’s face itself into amask, one mask under another. She draws each breath soshallowly it seems as if she must be dying, that she mightnever wake. I go into her bathroom and run the water fromthe taps. I flush the toilet, pick up her hairbrush and set itdown hard on the counter, drop a shoe, close a door. I makeany noise I can that might rouse my mother but that can’tbe judged as a direct and purposeful assault on the fortressof her sleeping. Because for as long as my mother refusesconsciousness, she refuses consciousness of me, I do notexist