paranoid that any of us should

feel overburdened or have

anything done unwell �

which is to say, imperfectly � she did

it all herself: dishes, laundry;

and spent the sunny hours baking

in bad lighting, where petty

office battles and flourescence�s

endless quarrel with aluminum

raged. she wrote briefs

that wouldn�t let her rest, like

her mother-in-law whose mind

had phased back, over her eighty-six years of

midnites, to the lopsided, clumsily-

formed moon of childhood

Why not American rice? she�d

say petulantly evening after

evening when confronted noxiously

with cous cous. My mother strove

not to let impatience show while we children

snickered.

my grandmother called me “pepi,”

the second name of an unknown aunt

who died young from, my normally unromantic

father tells me, a broken heart:

her husband made her choose between

her ailing, fragile mother,

and him: cruel man: whose heart

wouldn�t give way like a crab under

such a mallet? The subtle lesson

of this was, Don�t intermarry.

I got her name and my mother got

her burden: a mother-in-law

whose damp sighs clouded

the inside of the windows as she and her

dangling armflesh lumbered up and down

the stairs at night, calling “Marge?” Once in my bathroom

on the top floor, she collapsed

and lay like a de-shelled mollusk

on the white tile til the white ambulance came

and white men lifted her onto a white stretcher

and took her away

After that, the waning of her mind accelerated

like a wind-up toy my little brother propelled

toward a wall. She died in a hospital.

My mother never said a word

throughout and if my father grew impatient with

her later, I never doubted he loved her

for that. My mother who lay the

job she wanted, the helping-people job,

on the altar to help us instead

three pampered children who sighed

and bitched and poemed our way

through 13 years of expensive Jewish school

returning home to ask Dad questions

when we had them and inform soapy-

handed Mom what different rabbis

ruled was the proper way to clean.

She invariably listened and she still

feeds the dog first because in sixth grade,

I told her to. Taking advantage of her compulsion

for order, we carelessly left smears and piles

for her to rearrange: in explosions,

sometimes, she reminded us that this

was selfish, and we were contritely diligent

for a while.

she wanted us to be mannered, sociable,

attractive, and polite, but while I hid

from puberty�s invasion in tee-shirt tents,

she allowed me � even as I did

so (reading instead of running, remaining

stubbornly content in my circle

of familiar friends) she called me pretty;

wisely, she kept

her frustrations sheathed.

essentially, she gave me freedom

not leashing me with even modest obligations

to the house

where she whiled away nearly all

of her out-of-office time.

and when I got into my first choice

college, twenty-pounds lighter

between the shedding of weight and angst;

contact-ed, gelled, expressive, Express-ed;

she built a Mayan temple from

the surplus bumper-stickers she ordered

from the school store

but never once said “I told you

so.” I�ll be a mother someday � it�s possible,

even likely, but my generation wasn�t raised

to sacrifice like that; to bite our lips

and bide our time — I don�t know how I�ll handle

motherhood. hopefully better than daughterhood.

and hopefully my mother, a perfectionist

to the end, will instruct me: what rice to cook,

and for how long, and when.