Grandma withdrew her hand. "Oh, please..." she said.

Father Duptulski was there, pulling on the sleeve of my dress. "Come on now, missy, let's you and me take a little walk outside," he said.

"Why should I take a walk with you? You don't even know my name. Just tell my so-called ex-father to leave."

"Now look," Daddy said. A smile kept blinking on and off his face. "Be fair, okay? This is terrible for everyone and-"

"Just leave!" I shouted.

Grandma's face was bloodless, too. Father Duptulski's fingers dug into my fat "Come on," he kept nudging. "Come on."

Daddy wouldn't leave. He was whispering at my face with sweet liquor breath. "I can understand what you're going through... not the time or the place... you don't know the whole..."

"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"

I was out on the sidewalk before I unclapped my hands from my ears and stopped yelling it. Father Duptulski kept patting my shoulder. A new mourner arrived, unaware. "What do you think of those Mets, Father? You praying for those guys or something?" Father Duptulski waved him away.

A car jerked out of the parking lot, Daddy at the wheel. He drove past us, braked, backed up. He was crying. "I'm no saint," he called out to Father Duptulski. "But I never, ever deserved--" He turned his eyes to me. "You get yourself some help!" he screamed. "Or I'll get it for you!"

"You stay the fuck away from me!" I screamed back. The car bucked and sped away.

An hour before the funeral the next day, I decided not to go. Grandma, horrified to silence by my behavior with Daddy, didn't push it. "People are just hypocrites," I told myself. From the parlor window, I watched Grandma walk out to the waiting limousine and lower herself in. I would honor my mother in ways that mattered.

The refrigerator was filled with unfamiliar pans and tins from church ladies. Meatballs, baked beans, a turkey, cream puffs. Roberta had sent over a pan of golumpkes. I took a soupspoon and someone's lemon-meringue pie and headed for my room.

On the stair landing I paused at my favorite picture of Ma. She was seventeen, standing on Grandma's front porch with her friend Geneva. Both girls wore pageboy hairstyles and white blouses with puffy sleeves, off to some important high-school function. They stood with their arms around each other's shoulders, laughing at the camera, unce i asKcu Ma who'd taken the picture, but she couldn't remember. Maybe Ma's death took it, I thought. Maybe it was laughing back at her, knowing everything that would happen, as she posed in happy ignorance. In Ma's young face there was no trace that Anthony Jr. would strangle himself inside her. That her husband would leave, that her daughter would become me.

For as far back as I could remember, Ma had gotten letters from Geneva. Geneva Sweet, 1515 Bay view Drive, La Jolla, California. You could tell she was rich from their Christmas cards: oversized foil Madonnas on the front, inside her and her husband's names printed in letters that rose right up off the page, letters you could feel as well as read. Geneva's husband Irving owned an imported-rug business and treated her like Princess Grace, Ma had once said. "But he's shorter than Geneva, a little homely man. Not handsome like Daddy."

The morning before, Grandma had called Geneva to tell her about Ma and she'd asked to speak to me. "Bernice and I have written to each other all our lives," she said. "It's as if the bottom's dropped out of my life. If there's ever anything ... anything!"

In the picture, Ma was the prettier of the two, the one laughing the most. Next to Ma, Geneva seemed plain. What was it that had turned her into Cinderella and killed my mother? The picture kept asking me that question.

I'd ironed my funeral dress the night before and hung it from the curtain rod, expecting until that morning to go to the services. Now, at my bedroom door, I mistook the dress for a person and caught my breath.

The flatiron was facedown on the ironing board. I plugged it in and pushed the button, feeling with my fingers the transition from cool to warm to hot. The pain seemed comforting and logical. The woman at the fat-ladies' dress shop where we'd hurriedly bought the dress had disapproved of my size, had frowned at the way nothing quite fit me. I sat back down on my bed, eating spoonfuls of the lemon pie and marveling at the degree of my exhaustion...

I awakened to the sound of car doors slamming outside. I shoved the empty pie plate under my bed and checked the lock. People talked in the front hall, quiet at first, then louder. That morning, I'd helped Grandma carry the broken stairway banister out to the yard, walking backward down the steps, sure I'd fall. Plates clinked. High heels scuffed up the stairs to the bathroom. I'd forgotten to turn off the flatiron. The air above it wiggled.

Mrs. Mumphy's daughter came to my bedroom door and asked if I wanted to go downstairs and visit. I didn't mind the interruption. Sleep had made me strangely patient.

"Can I make you up a plate then?" she called in.

I smiled. "No, thank you."

I was involved in a contest befitting a mother killer. I licked my palm and held it to the hot iron.

"It was a beautiful ceremony," Mrs. Mumphy's daughter called in.

The skin hissed on contact; the seeping heat made my hand shake. I held it there. My ring became a circle of deeper pain.

"Just beautiful."

By the six-thirty news, the last of the lingerers had done the dishes and left. Grandma got into her housecoat and fell asleep in the parlor chair. The astronauts bobbed in the ocean, safe, waving to the cameras on their way into quarantine. I watched Grandma's slackened jaw, her bobbing head. In her sleep, she was uttering sounds: part speech, part gurgle. "Take it back," I whispered to Grandma's sad-eyed, sacred-hearted Jesus. "Make her the one, not Ma."

I went upstairs to Ma's room-the first time since she'd died. The clothes she'd worn the week before were laundered and folded in a stack on top of her mother-of-pearl hamper. Outside, rain drummed against the garbage cans. Grandma had stripped the bed.

I sat down at Ma's desk, not sure of what it was I wanted to write. A suicide letter? Who would I write it to, other than Ma? My hands were blistery and sore from the iron, the pen painful between my fingers.

Dear Kippy, I can't wait to meet you. Either my parents or my boyfriend mil be driving me down to school. The bedspreads sound fab. How much do I owe you? We seem to have a lot in common!! This was what my mother had wanted for me: a Tricia Nixon life. I'd create one for her, a gift. Maybe I'd lose weight. Or maybe Kippy was fat, too. I saw us walking to class, two jolly fat girls, sharing a joke-my mother's death successfully hidden.

I knew I'd lose my nerve if I waited until morning to mail it. I took Ma's trench coat out of her closet and put it over my shoulders. Smelling her smell. Shaking from love.

I was short of breath by the time I got to the mailbox on Terrace Avenue. It was the farthest I'd walked in months. People drove by, staring. A car of laughing boys slowed down. "Hey, Tiny, I'm a sperm whale, you want to get laid?"

one of them called. I was immune, my head filled with a clarity as sharp as pain, as hot as the face of the flatiron.

"I love you, Ma. This is for you. For you, Ma. I love you." I chanted it over and over, like a Hail Mary. I dropped the letter in, heard the soft sound of it hitting the bottom.

That night I slept on Ma's bare mattress, her trench coa over me like a sheet, and woke up smiling from a dream just missed remembering.

JLJ Y AUGUST, GRANDMA HAD LOCKED HER JAW AGAIN, RELO-cated her sense of purpose, and begun the tissuey flipping of yellow pages.

A carpenter came to put up the new banister and, while he was there, replaced a rotting porch step. Two middle-aged women materialized to shampoo the rugs-look-alike sisters in pink rayon uniforms who giggled and called to each other over their whirring machinery.

It was as if Grandma could obliterate pain by scouring it away. As if she could wash and wax sorrow, hire strangers to suck it up a vacuum hose. In this confusion of cleaning, Grandma allowed herself the luxury of forgetting about me. I kept startling her, just by walking into whatever disinfected room she'd placed herself. She was seated at the kitchen table Brillo-ing silverware when I told her.

"I've decided to go to that college after all. Like she wanted me to."

Grandma looked up accusingly, trying to read a joke on my face. Then she left the room.

All that day, she slammed things. She finally spoke at supper. "If you're going anyway, then what was all that fuss about? Why did you have to plague her?"

Her face looked confused rather than angry. My announcement had genuinely confounded her. For the first time since Ma's death, I felt as sorry for Grandma's loss as I did for my own. But when I tried to speak, something locked in my throat. "It was between her and me," was all I said. "It was personal." Her face darkened and she got up to leave the room.

"Well, nuts to that," she said.

I sat paralyzed, staring at the doorway through which she had just walked. I heard again the awful crash of that rented typewriter as it hit the floor, saw Ma's flushed, warring face after she'd cut the television wire.

I rested my face against the cool tabletop. I deserved this pain-deserved more, even, than what I was feeling. It was me who deserved death, not Ma.

The next morning, Grandma handed me the bankbook in which Ma had been depositing my college money. Two fifty-dollar bills were sticking out of both ends: cash she'd never had time to deposit. The first entry was for $ 12, made in September of 1962, the month after Daddy had left us, The end ones were for larger amounts-$75, $100-made every fourteen days-every payday -right up through th< hell I'd put her through.

I wrote Kippy a long letter, inventing a life for myself part-time counter girl at McDonald's, treasurer of my senio: class. My mother ran the hospital gift shop; my father was< pediatrician whose office was attached to our house, Ufa Marcus Welby. By our third exchange, I had a boyfriend Derek. I made him British for practical reasons; he could b sent back quickly to England for those "fab" double date and "groovy" college weekends Kippy began referring to.

I composed the letters sitting on the stairs, a clipboar resting diagonally against my big belly. The fresh woo smell of the banister was a comfort somehow. "Raw wood the carpenter had called it. But Grandma was planning on mahogany stain and varnish; she was eager for it to matcl She said it was high time to rewallpaper, too, and took dow the stairway photos, even the ones of my mother, especial those. She wrapped the pictures in newspaper and stacked them in a cardboard box, leaving rectangles of vivid pink flamingos amongst the faded ones along the staircase wall. Grandma couldn't remember how old the wallpaper was, but Grandpa had hung it, so it was before 1948. Why did I ask?

"No reason, really," I shrugged, doing the private math that placed my mother in her senior year in high school, about the time she'd locked arms with her friend Geneva and posed on the front porch in her white dress.

That afternoon I took the photograph from the upstairs closet, brought it back to my room, and held it against Ma's painting of the flying leg. What frightened me was the chasm between the two-the distance between Ma's innocent black-and-white smile and the disembodied winged leg she'd painted during her crazy days. This was what could happen to you: you could end up this far from where you thought you were going. That was what scared me about college... but my fear didn't matter. I brushed my lips against the cool, flat glass that covered my mother's face, brushed my fingertips against the dips and rises of the hardened paint. I told Ma that I loved her and missed her and was going to college to make her happy.

Kippy's letters were confessions on Snoopy stationery. She hated her parents sometimes, her mother in particular. She was still a virgin, technically, though Dante, her boyfriend, was pressuring her. Derek was pressuring me about the same thing, I wrote back, but the last thing I wanted was to end up pregnant and living in England, having to wear old-lady hats like Queen Elizabeth-ha-ha. In my letters, I was someone Ma would have liked, the kind of person she called "a hot ticket." Maybe I'd somehow manage to slip into this created girl's life. Or maybe Kippy would love me for my letters, forgive the rest.

Each morning when I woke up, I knew by heart the number of days left before Freshman Orientation Week; just passing the kitchen calendar created waves of nausea. After I mailed my letters, I'd come home and throw up in the toilet, gagging quietly with the water running so that urana-ma wouldn't hear.

A month before Ma's death, Grandma had put down a $25 deposit on a four-day bus trip to Amish Country with her old-lady friends, the St. Anthony's Travelettes. Now Mrs. Mumphy called Grandma daily to coax her into going, in spite of everything.

"Well, I don't care if Father Duptulski thinks it's a good idea for me to go or not, Judy," Grandma argued back. "That wallpaper hanger is coming that week. What if they serve spicy food? And besides"-here her voice became sober and throaty-"there's the girl."

She always referred to me as "the girl" when talking to her friends, always with that drop in her voice, as if I were a monster kept under wraps-Mr. Rochester's crazy attic wife in Jane Eyre. I'd written on one of Mrs. Bronstein's essay tests once that I liked that lunatic wife better than I liked boring Jane. Mrs. Bronstein had handed the comment back circled with a string of question marks.

"Grandma, go!" I told her. The thought of three days alone in the Pierce Street house excited me. Free from Grandma's attempt to clean my mother away, I would instead call up the remaining evidence of her life, poking my way through attic cartons and closets and bureau drawers until I had the whole of who she was, or as much of the whole as possible-until I'd reconstructed the steps that led her from Grandma's front porch to the highway where her life had ended. "Take some extra Pepto-Bismol with you! And don't worry one second about me!" I insisted.

Grandma chewed her lip and scowled. "You wouldn't let the wallpaper man in. You'd pretend no one was home and I'd get back here and find nothing done. After I've set my heart on a change." She nodded toward the cellophane-covered rolls leaning against the telephone table. She'd chosen a pink scallop-shell pattern against a coffee-icecream-colored background. "And besides, it wouldn't be right. People would criticize me for going gallivanting so soon. Or be overly nice to me. It would get too quiet. I wouldn't be able to sleep and then I'd have to sit there and think."

"Grandma, not going would be like taking twenty-five dollars and throwing it down the sewer."

She frowned at that. "Judy Mumphy thinks I'm foolish not to go. What if that wallpaper man is unreliable? He sounded sleepy over the telephone."

"He's probably overworked. Exhausted because he's so good. I can handle things." To prove my point, I grabbed the Electrolux and started vacuuming the stairs. I was sweating and panting by the time I reached the top, in a lust for her absence. From the bottom, Grandma watched me distrustfully, her hands on her hips, searching for the catch.

Later on, dusting the living room, Grandma kept pausing absentmindedly on objects. "What is it?" I asked her. "What's the matter? Are you getting a dizzy spell?"

"Dizzy spell? Of course not." She sat down in her big chair, her bony hands curving around the stuffed chair arms. "I was just thinking," she finally said, "about Bernice. About how she always loved a trip. She and Eddie both, but Bernice especially. When she was a little girl, we used to have our big meal at noontime on Sunday. Then their father would take us all out in the sedan for a drive. Bernice used to close her eyes and stick her whole face out the window to catch the breeze. By the time we got to where we were going, her hair would be a nest of snarls."

I held my breath; if she took notice of me, she might stop talking, and her talking about Ma was like salve on a wound. Grandma's smile was far away.

"When Eddie was a baby, she used to follow me around like a shadow-used to beg me for jobs to do. 'Course, later on she got so moody. You'd ask her to do something for you and she'd put on a face like you insulted her..." She turned and looked at me, puzzled. "It's peculiar, though, isn't it?" she said. "The fact that I've lived longer than them both- that baby and that helpful little girl."

For a quick moment, I saw Grandma as she saw herself: a decent woman whom God, for unfathomable reasons, had chosen to punish. I almost loved her for her bewilderment I almost touched her. "No kidding, Grandma," I said. "You deserve a little fun."

"Those Amish people don't even let you take their picture," she said. "You have to hide somewhere and trick them. They're odd ducks." Her eyes narrowed back to normal. "I'll tell you one thing," she said. "I'm not about to use one of those bus toilets. They'll just have to stop and wait for me whether they like it or not."

At eight A.M. on Thursday, Grandma stood waiting at the front door, armed with an ancient brown suitcase. She had written a check for the wallpaper man and hidden it in the bread box beneath the milk crackers. "If he looks shifty, just don't let him in," she said. "To hell with it." She nodded at her own curse, pleased with herself for having added it. Then the familiar honk of Mrs. Mumphy's daughter's station wagon sent her hobbling down the walk. Abruptly, I was alone.

I had intended to start investigating right then, to begin in the attic and work my way down through Ma's things, but instead, I drew the shades, flopped back on the couch, and turned on "Morning Matinee Theatre." The movie was black and white: The Miracle of Marcelino. People's lips moved separately from their translated voices, finished ahead of time. A mysterious orphan boy was found in the desert and taken to a monastery to live. After a series of events that were either miracles or coincidences, the boy was bitten by a scorpion and then touched by God, who spoke down from heaven, reclaiming him. Marcelino ascended through the monastery ceiling on a ray of bright light. "Bullshit," I reassured myself, switching the station, even as God's dubbed voice explained the logic of the boy's death to the dumbstruck monks.

With Grandma gone, lunch could be any time you felt like having it. In the kitchen I set the oven at 425 and read the directions on one of the Hungry Man TV dinners I'd chosen. You had to remember to peel back the foil fifteen minutes before the end if you wanted the chicken to come out crispy. Things were never as carefree as commercials led you to believe.

Mike Douglas's cohosts were the has-been Kingston Trio. I had all day to get to Ma's stuff. There was no hurry whatsoever.

The mail came: circulars, a letter from Kippy, a large manila envelope addressed to "Miss?Price." Kippy wrote that Dante wanted to make love as a way of sealing their future, of making sure they'd stick together. I thought of Jack's sticky slime on my legs that day. "Should I or shouldn't I?" Kippy asked.

I ate my way down a tube of Ritz crackers without relief and imagined Kippy and her boyfriend heavy-petting, his hands poking and fumbling with the snap on her jeans. "Playing with fire," Dear Abby called it.

Met her on a mountain There I took her life Met her on a mountain Stabbed her with my knife As the Kingston Trio sang in their choirboy voices, it abruptly occurred to me that the wallpaper man could turn out to be Jack Speight with a different name. Or someone like him. Some man just as bad.

There were enough hazardous knives and ice picks and sharp-tipped meat thermometers for every room in the house. It took me half an hour to get them all planted. He was due at eight the following morning. If he touched me, I'd plunge first and ask questions later. I wondered how far Grandma had gotten. By now she must be in a different state.

I opened the big envelope last: "Miss?Price," in handwriting painstaking and oversized.

Inside was the front cardboard panel of a cereal box. On the back, Scotch-taped to the gray cardboard, was a bank check for $500 and a family photograph of people I had never seen. "Pay to the order of Miss?Price" the check said. When I shook the envelope, a loose-leaf-paper letter dropped out The handwriting was the same as the outside address: ... have sold a piece of his Daddy's property on Hickory Lake... a little something for all your troubles... and if he could write I'M SORRY on every single grain of sand in the ocean, it wouldn't show one tenth of his sorrow... has not been able to sleep through the night since it happened... am sending this picture so you can see he is a CHRISTIAN FAMILY MAN, not some crazy alcoholiac. Sincerely your's, Mrs. Arthur Music.

It was one of those discount-store portraits with a fake hearth in the background and everyone's hand resting unnaturally on someone else's sleeve. She had written their names in ballpoint pen on each shoulder. "Earlene (me)" she wrote against her turquoise sleeveless shell. The boys had wide crew-cut heads and looked like the kind of children who got beaten.

I looked at him last. He wore heavy black glasses, white shirt, oily Elvis hair. He was so skinny, his pants crimped up beneath his belt buckle. I wanted to keep believing some driverless truck had killed her, not a person with a face and a family.

By the time I could get up and walk to the kitchen, the TV-dinner foil had blackened. The room was thick with heat, the food ruined. I put the check in my pants pocket and walked over to the stove.

The family browned and curled at the edges, then caught the gas-jet fire-like the screaming paper-doll girl in Mrs. Masicotte's kitchen. Mrs. Masicotte had paid us off, too: with presents, a pool.

The yellow flame licked and shriveled Arthur Music's serious smile, but I knew as I watched him go that it was no good-that the burden of his face was mine now, like the burden of Ma's death. Mine to carry, mine forever.

The face of my mother's killer. Jack's face.

My partner in crime.

All the dead bolts and pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth. And I sat there and closed my eyes and felt Jack again, ramming himself into me-felt that blind, never-ending pain, over and over, on the afternoon we'd killed Rita's baby.

When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.

I.

JESS WHO?" THE WALLPAPER MAN SAID, HOLDING UP A.

basket of paint-splattered tools. He had curly, shoulder-length hair and bib overalls with no shirt underneath. One of his eyelids drooped. His smile was gap-toothed: Howdy Doody on drugs.

He kept walking in and out the door, up and down the stairs, whistling "Lady Madonna." Grandma was probably somewhere in a roadside coffee shop, nibbling a com muffin and receiving bad vibrations.

"Yoo-hoo," he called up the stairs. "You guys got a radio or something I could listen to? I work better with tunes."

"In the parlor," I said, calling down the directions to Grandma's old cabinet-model radio. "Whoa-a golden oldie," I heard him say. "Dig it."

"Plug it in first. It has to warm up." Static crackled, stations whizzed by at top volume. He settled on a screamy song I didn't recognize, one I didn't think Grandma's radio was even capable of playing.

"Yoo-hoo again," he called up over the music. "I'm going to be putting up staging, so I don't want to trap you in up there."

"There's a butcher knife waiting for your heart if you try," I almost shouted back.

The cuffs of his overalls were frayed; the seat was embroidered with mushrooms. I watched from the doorway as he bathed the old flamingo wallpaper with a sponge, staining it with big, swooping strokes, and making little rips in it with a can opener. The hallway smelted of vinegar. I was supposed to pay him for this vandalism?

"You know how flamingos get pink?" he said as I tiptoed past. He peeled off a long shred of paper, like sunburned skin. "Shrimp. They eat shrimp. It turns them pink."

He smiled broadly at me. That droopy eyelid threw his whole face out of balance. If it was a joke about the shrimp, I didn't get it I went out to the kitchen and chain-smoked, filling the drain trap with butts the way Grandma hated-waiting for the nicotine to rev up my blood. I'd lived in this house for five years and never whistled like that.

"Pucci, F.," the phone book said. "102B Marion Court." He'd offered to talk any time. Leaving the house open to this hippie would horrify Grandma, I thought, with some satisfaction.

He sang along with every single song that came on. I had to wait for a commercial just to get a word in. "Excuse me. Do you happen to know where Marion Court is?"