Underwear was everywhere and it distressed me. Panties lay on the bed like deflated cotton balloons, dumped out of the yellow plastic laundry basket my mother has had ever since I could remember. Just one of those necessary but underrated items that will always be there. Like mothers.

In the kitchen my mother was preparing dinner and reporting the highlights of my great Aunt Chubby's funeral.

"She was laid out in her favorite muumuu," she shouted to me, stirring a bubbling vat of spaghetti sauce with a wooden spoon warped from age and too many tomatoes. "There were more flowers on her dress than in the entire funeral parlor."

I was in the next room, my parents' bedroom, folding their laundry. I held up a pair of Hanes control-panties, size Mother.

"Did you see Christina?" I shouted back to her. I sifted through her roomy white underwear. She must have gained a little weight. "Is she showing yet?"

"She was there all right, and she looked awful, just awful. Drained, pale, bags under her eyes. So," I could hear her tapping the spoon against the edge of the dented pot, "so of course she'll have a girl. All the mother's beauty goes to the girl. Besides, your Aunt Maria put it to the test, so it's definite."

The wedding-ring-on-a-string test, I knew it well. Put the pregnant woman's wedding ring on a long piece of thread and dangle it in front of her bulging stomach. If it twirled, it meant a son was on his way, if it swung back and forth, a daughter. Yes, my family based the majority of its decisions on draughts and gravity.

I couldn't comment, though. I was more caught up in the underwear, which seemed to be multiplying before my eyes. Mixed in was a tangled web of her voluminous bras. I was afraid to unravel them; it would have required me to open them fully and see the actual size.

I abandoned the piles of clothes on their bed and sat at the kitchen table. My mother handed me the round end of the Italian bread dipped in sauce.

"See, Anne, if you came home more often, you'd get the good part of the bread."

I doubted that, since I always had to fight for it when I was living with her and my dad. Two ends, three people. Living on my own for two years, I ate both ends.

I gnawed on it like a teething baby. "I come home plenty, considering my work schedule, so stop right there. Tell me about school. I bet that after two weeks of faculty meetings you're excited to meet the new batch of fifth graders." I sat back, waiting to hear her annual speech about how doomed the kids were--despite her efforts--because of their parents, most of whom she had taught.

That's when my father wandered into the kitchen from the living room. His hair was flat on one side of his head; he wore the unmistakable pattern of the couch on his forehead, and his eyes were glassy and slightly unfocused.

"Hiya, Annie."

"Daddy!" I stood up and pecked him hello on his sparsely bearded cheek. "I didn't know you were in the back room sleeping. What are you doing home so early on a Friday?" I asked. "You leave work early for the holiday?" It was the beginning of Labor Day weekend. I had come home because I needed a ride to Newark Airport that Sunday, and my father had volunteered. I was flying out to California to visit my boyfriend, David, for a week.

"Your father had another operation two days ago for the problem in his arm. He was in the hospital, but only overnight," said my mom in her everything-is-under-control-because-I-say-it-is voice. "His painkillers make him sleepy, so he was resting on the couch."

"Why didn't you guys tell me?" I turned to my dad. "You must have known you were having surgery when I called last Sunday."

"Your bags out here, Annie?" asked my dad, moving toward the kitchen door to the porch.

"Don't you dare pick them up!" I rushed over to the door to stop him, but my mother pinched my arm to stop me.

"Ouch, Ma!"

She whispered, "Let him, Anne. He needs to exercise. The doctor said he could start today." Then louder, "Go ahead, Peter."

I looked at my dad and then my mom and back again as he shrugged and opened the door.

"No, Dad, really . . ."

"Let him do it," said my mom. "He needs to feel like he can still do things. You don't live here anymore, you don't understand."

My father dragged in my overstuffed suitcase and bulging overnight bag and stopped to rest and flex his arm before leaving the kitchen.

"Geez, Annie. Are you sure you're not moving back home? This is a lot of stuff for one week." He smiled in his lopsided way and winked at me as he'd done for 23 years. My stomach flipped over a few times. "Just for the record, I wanted to get you a U-Haul when you graduated, but your mother insisted on a trench coat."

As he brought the bags toward my old room, I called after him, "Exactly what kind of painkillers are you taking? They're not the addictive ones, are they?"

"They're all addictive, you know that, but your father will be fine," my mother answered me. Then she shouted, "I'll bring you in some tea and cookies, Peter!"

She bustled to the stove, a patchwork apron over her teacher clothes, conservative navy skirt and white blouse with big droopy bow at the collar. Just like the nuns who ran the school where she taught, where I once attended.

"Was anybody ever going to tell me about Daddy, or was I going to have to wait until great Aunt Somebody died to hear it from a distant cousin?"

"Don't be so dramatic, Anne. We didn't want you to get upset before your . . . trip."

"Well, now I get to be upset before, during, and after my vacation. You know, I think I'm old enough to handle a situation like this."

She immediately stopped piling cookies on a plate and threw me one of her killer evil eyes. "Don't start with me, Missyface. I have enough to worry about with you."

"Other mothers wish they had so little to worry about with their daughters."

The sauce bubbled noisily on the stove.

She placed an oatmeal cookie on the table in front of me. "Those are nice earrings, Anne."

I was suspicious that she changed the subject so quickly, but I played her game. "David sent them to me from California. San Diego, I think he said he found them."

"Interesting. The parents of one of the nastiest students at the school gave me a pair of cloisonné earrings similar to those for Christmas last year, but I won't wear them. Cloisonné causes cancer, you know."

Last month, golden raisins caused cancer. Where did she get her information? And was it true? And why did I stop eating golden raisins after she told me that?

"That's great, Ma. Thanks for sharing."

My mother arranged a mug of tea and plate of cookies on a tray. "When your father was in Vietnam, he got hit with a piece of grenade, you know. In the thigh. Nothing serious. One of his buddies was trying to kill a chicken, part of some silly game, and he threw a grenade. Your father doesn't like to go into details. But in the hospital when he was getting fixed up they offered him a Purple Heart. He refused it. He said there were others who deserved it more. Of course, he says it's the thing he regrets most in his life, but he's a good man, your father is. You should find yourself a man like him."

"David treats me like a queen; he cares about me very much. How many times do I have to tell you he reminds me a lot of Daddy?"

She balanced the tray on one hand like a waitress and walked toward the parlor. "No man is like your father, Anne."

"Well, if no one is like him, then my chances of finding one who's like him are awfully slim, aren't they?"

"Don't get smart."

"All I'm saying is that if I can settle for second best, why can't you?"

"You shouldn't settle for second best," she instructed from the doorway, her back to me. "I didn't raise you for that."

It was useless. Everything got turned around so that I always lost. Did she learn to do that, did she practice? Was it a latent talent awakened in all mothers once their babies were born?

"Don't think this is over!" I shouted.

From the living room a voice answered me, "Believe me, I pray for it to be over."

She meant it. In fact, I could imagine it vividly: my mother perched on the cushy kneeler at St. Aeden's every day at eight in the morning, praying to the Blessed Virgin for a miracle, for her daughter to leave the Jew for a Christian. It was an act of desperation; after all, she used to pray for me to leave the Protestant. Now she was happy with anything that hinted of The Good News. Anything, anybody, any man but David.

"Don't step in that big puddle with those flimsy sneakers on. Puddles cause polio, remember that."

"Gee, I can't believe I forgot. Listen, we should figure out where we should go. We can do the Seaport, attend a matinee, roam around the Village. Hey, I bet we could find some earrings that don't cause cancer."

She pinched my forearm through the sleeve of my trench coat. I held the umbrella over my mother's head as we crossed wooden planks and entered the building to buy ferry tickets. We were spending Saturday in Manhattan, just my mother and me.

We bought the tickets and boarded a ferry that had just pulled into dock. The Hudson River looked worse than it usually did: murky water crashed into itself, rising in dirty waves with the wind. We sat down inside the boat on a damp plastic bench. I haphazardly folded the soaking umbrella and then wiped my hands on my jeans. It had been raining for weeks and I had stopped exercising rain etiquette some time ago.

"When I was working in the post office, Anne--I was one of the first female postal employees, you know--I got written up for wearing slacks on the job. But it was a tough job! They had me lugging those big canvas bags with pounds and pounds of mail, just like the men. But they expected me to wear a skirt to do it. Ha!"

I looked at the long khaki skirt she was wearing for our casual Girls' Day Out. "Okay, so we won't go to the post office. How about a museum?"

"Not only that," she lowered her voice and narrowed her eyes, one eyebrow cocked, "I chewed gum and we weren't allowed to. I got written up quite a few times, I did."

"Was it Bazooka? Because if it wasn't sugar free, then I'd really be impressed."

"Of course it wasn't Bazooka! That stuff's made from spider eggs. Even my fifth graders know that."

I said nothing and stared out the grimy window. She nudged me. "You think this weather is bad. You realize, of course, that California just experienced monumental rainstorms."

"That was six months ago."

"It's still fairly recent."

"Frankly, as the region approaches a traditionally wetter season, I'm more worried about the mudslides that typically result from the erosion those rainstorms caused."

"That's not funny."

"I could step off the plane and be swallowed up by a sea of rich California soil."

"Stop it, Anne."

"That's what makes Napa Valley soil so unique, you know. The grapevines are rooted in soil composed of all the bodies of unsuspecting tourists who succumb to natural disasters. So if next year's batch of zinfandel is particularly sweet it's all because of me. And your good genes, of course."

"If you're trying to kill me, it's working."

"As long as the authorities can't link it to me in an autopsy."

"All they have to do is ask anyone who knows me, and they'll point the finger, don't you worry."

I was about to make a comment about pointing my own finger, but her cheeks were flushed and I really didn't want her to have a heart attack. At least not before my vacation.

We always had had fun in museums. My mother had taught me so much as a kid: ballerinas meant Degas, dots were Seurat's forte, broken people belonged to Picasso, splattered paint was all Pollock. Years later, I would study art history in college. Now, she was asking me the questions. What do lion heads mean to Dali? Why are Kirchner's women green? What was Rousseau's inspiration?

I had the answers, and as I explained the politics of surrealism in relation to de Chirico, I wondered if I sounded like the people my mother and I had once, long ago, imitated in jest.

"Why are you talking so softly? I can't hear you, Anne."

I tried to lead her away from works that groups of people collected around.

"Sorry. I just feel like I'm lecturing. I'm embarrassed, I guess."

We were entering Matisse's swimming pool. Cut-out swimmers and brown paper waves surrounded us.

"You were never embarrassed to be with your mother before." She inspected a crudely cut diving board.

"Ma, that's not it. It's just that my observations also include a great deal of my opinion, and I don't want to sound like an authority."

"I don't know about you anymore. Sometimes I wonder what made you like you are now."

"What do you mean? What am I now that I wasn't before?" I asked through clenched teeth, anticipating her response.

"I don't know, I don't know." She roamed amid the waves, working her way around the perimeter of the pool, which encircled a small room.

"Can't you just say what's on your mind, Ma?" I was surprised that the paper fish weren't floating upside down in the cardboard water, boiled from the intense heat rising from my body. "Can't you admit this is about David?"

"That's not true."

"Oh, really? Remember my junior year in college when I told you I planned to march at that prochoice rally? It took you a month before you stopped sending me pictures of fetuses in garbage cans. And remember last year when I planned a vacation with some friends for Brazil? It took you two weeks to stop sending me newspaper clips about guerilla warfare."

"But you didn't go to either of them, did you?"

"They cancelled one because of bomb threats, and Brazil was hit with a major earthquake a week before we left! We weren't going to traipse around disaster areas."

"Hmmm."

"My point is, eventually you get over things I do that upset you. But this has been here, at the root of all our arguments for two years, since I first told you about him. Are you ever going to be happy with me again?"

My mother was at the edge of the water, looking at the little white card filled with particulars about the artist. "Who says I'm over the pro-abortion thing?"

She drifted off toward the Waterlilies, while I stood in the middle of the room, drowning.

"I have to sit down or at least lean against this building. My feet hurt."

"Ma, if we miss the next shuttle, we'll have to wait for an hour."

"I'm also hungry."

We were on the corner of 5th and 57th. The sun had come out a bit, and there were throngs of people along the streets at midafternoon.

"Look, there's a hotdog vendor on each corner."

"Anne! Do you know when was the last time those men washed their hands? Do you know what's in those hotdogs? This is New York, Anne. Those are New York hotdogs!"

We stood against the side of an uptown store. In the display case in the window were emerald watches, silk gloves, diamond rings, platinum clutch purses. We were arguing about hotdogs.

"Didn't you tell me once that Grandma bought you a pretzel from one of these guys and when you bit into it there was kerosene on it from, like, the chestnuts roasting on an open fire, or something like that?"

"What does that have to do with anything, Anne? Sometimes you go off on these tangents . . ." She shook her head.

"You were pregnant with me, right? And you freaked because you thought the kerosene was going to make your baby deformed. And, if I'm not mistaken, Grandma told you to stop acting silly and eat the pretzel."

"It was an old wives tale she was talking about. It would give the baby good spirit or strong will or . . . I don't know, Anne. Here, take this money and get two hotdogs. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you give me this, you do!" With two fingers, she tapped her forehead to indicate a headache or the jerky beginning to the sign of the cross.

"What do you want on yours, Ma?"

"Nothing. The fewer germs, the better. I don't even think I want the roll."

"Are you coming with me or not? You can pick the cleanest looking vendor on the corner. And you'll eat the roll."

We steered through the crowd and inspected the vendors. We chose one.

"One plain and one with mustard and sauerkraut," I said.

My mother pulled my elbow. "Do you see the sauerkraut?"

"Yeah . . ."

"It's right out in the open. People walking by could sneeze, and God knows what bacteria . . ."

"I don't believe this."

"Can you just get mustard, maybe? For me?"

"Four dollars!" barked the vendor.

"Too late, Ma. You wanna share a Coke? We can use separate straws if you don't want my cooties."

"Smart aleck."

I suddenly remembered the time I called her from college to tell her I had gone to see the AIDS quilt. "You didn't touch it, did you?" was her only remark.

We walked back to our corner and quickly ate the hotdogs, hoping the shuttle wouldn't arrive before we had finished. The sauerkraut on mine fell in bits to the sidewalk with each bite I took.

"Anne, will you watch? You're littering."

"Calm down, it's biodegradable. A pigeon will eat it in two seconds, anyway. Look, here comes one now."

"You know," she said as she watched the pigeon wobble over, "when I was growing up, your grandmother told me to stay away from pigeons. 'They peck holes in people,' she told me. Once, when your father and I were first married, we took a walk in a park and came upon a bunch of pigeons feeding. I tried to lead your father around them and when he asked why I told him, 'They peck holes in people.' Your father thought I was crazy. Nineteen years old I was, and I truly believed pigeons pecked holes in people. I found out later that a pigeon once pooped on your grandma's leg when she was a little girl. One of her brothers told her that pigeon poop was like acid and disintegrated skin. She was so scared--she thought she was going to have a hole in her leg! Of course we all know it's good fortune to have a pigeon poop on you. But she was young. Oh, it was a big family story for years. At some point, though, it got warped into this pecking business. She never really let it go."

"And like a good daughter you listened to your mother, right? Lesson understood." I wiped some crumbs from the corner of her mouth then looked up and down the street. "I think we have a minute or two. Do you want to split a pretzel?"

She sighed and looked heavenward, shaking her head. She didn't say anything, but later when I offered her a piece, she took it.

I grasped her elbow and helped her up the dock. She held my arm tightly. Boarding the ferry to Weehawken, I asked, "You want to go up to the top? The sun's out."

"Sure. That'd be nice."

I climbed slowly behind her to the upper deck. We settled in a bench near the back.

"Feels good to sit."

"I guess so," I said.

We looked behind us at the city as the boat pulled away. We stayed silent for a while.

She turned to face me. I wondered if now was a good time. I hadn't had the courage to tell her that months ago, before David left New York for his new job, he and I had discussed me moving out to the West Coast. I was really going out there now to interview for some jobs and make plans to move in with David.

We looked at each other for a minute or two.

"So you love David," she said.

She hadn't posed it as a question, more like a statement. My immediate reaction was to avoid an answer, or to say the answer but to hide it in a lot of extra words.

"Yes."

"And he loves you."

"Yes."

"And you know this."

"Yes."

She turned from me and looked down at the water. I spoke to the back of her graying hair. "Neither one of us is going to convert or anything."

"Why not? Think of your children."

"Children? We haven't even discussed having kids."

"Whatever." She waved her hand in the air, dismissing the topic. "It's not about the religion anyway."

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I took a deep breath and tried again. "What do you mean it's not about religion? It's been years . . . I thought . . . what are you saying?"

"Look, maybe it was about his faith in the very beginning. But I got over it, like I get used to everything, as you say."

"Then what's your problem?"

She didn't say anything.

"Are you ever going to tell me anything?"

"Anne, you don't live with us anymore. You don't go to the funerals or sit in the hospital waiting rooms or count out pills each morning. You don't read the obituaries first or have trouble climbing stairs or forget the names of people you see everyday. You don't understand."

"I don't understand? I don't understand?" I was shouting. People on the ferry were looking at us. "I understand perfectly: you lived in a shack in Texas when you were first married and Dad was in boot camp. You had plastic curtains and scorpions, and you were dirt poor. You hated every minute you were there but you stayed for months just to see your husband one day a week on his day off, even if all he did was sleep. I understand that."

She shifted on the bench, and looked out over the railing.

I continued, moving my hands in loud, agitated gestures. "I understand that a year later you took a second job just so you could afford to fly 13 hours to meet Daddy in Hawaii when he got a week's leave from the war. It was your first flight, and you didn't eat a thing because you thought you had to pay for it and were afraid to ask the price of the in-flight meal. You were terrified."

I paused and took a deep breath. She said nothing.

"So now I want to go across country and be with the man I love. I've been scraping together money so that I can be near him, and I'm scared to do it all on my own. What I understand, Ma, is that we're not so different after all."

My heart was pounding fiercely. The ferry's horn blew loudly to announce our arrival into port, punctuating my outburst.

"Maybe not," she said.

"Well, congratulations. That's what you've always wanted," I said.

"No. That's not true."

"Then what is it, Ma? What the hell is it?"

I was practically jumping out of my seat with frustration, and she was just sitting there looking wistfully at the Statue of Liberty.

I stared at her, waiting for an answer. I noticed she had dark circles under her eyes, and her hair was flat from the water's mist. She looked awkward sitting there clutching her purse to her chest. Her breasts sagged toward the elastic waistline of her skirt, where her stomach jutted out. Her mother's watch, tight around her pale thick wrist, gleamed in the setting sun. Support sneakers swung limply almost an inch above the deck. She was squinting against the sun, and there were a hundred tiny wrinkles around eyes that looked as tired as she probably felt.

The boat docked.

She didn't have an answer. Instead, she offered me her arm to help pull her to her feet.

I remembered this same trip taken years ago, holding the hand of a woman with a long auburn braid who wore bright clothes, long billowing slacks and tight blouses. She moved like a Calder mobile as she walked fearlessly and swiftly through crowded New York streets with me in tow. The woman who stood tall and straight against everyone else, who laughed loudly and always sang so sweetly in church. The woman who once had all the answers.

I slid out of the bench and waited for my mother to follow. As she stood, I took her arm and helped her down the stairs. I didn't let go until I had to.

Copyright © 2000 President and Fellows of Harvard College.
All rights reserved. Comments. Last modified Fri, Apr 29, 2000.