"Can I go over to Suralee's?" I asked.

"Be back by dinner," my mother said, and turned back to the hairstyle magazine. "Pull the sides of my hair back like that and let me see," she told Brenda.

I started out of the room, then turned around and spoke quickly. "Oh, and can we have a play in the backyard tomorrow night with refreshments? Just a play?"

My mother, distracted, said yes, all right. I looked quickly at Suralee, then away. Outside, we'd celebrate our small victory.

When we pa.s.sed through the kitchen on the way out the back door, Peacie put her hand on her hip and looked from one of us to the other. "What y'all up to?" she asked. "I know for certain you up to something."

"Nothing," we sang out together.

"What's the matter with you?" Suralee said. "You're not even concentrating!"

We were in Suralee's tiny bedroom, sprawled across her pink chenille bedspread, trying to write the play, and I was coming up with exactly nothing. "It's...I'm worried about something," I said.

Suralee turned on her back and sighed. "What?"

I picked up her autograph hound, empty of signatures but for my own. I stroked its ears and sighed. "I think Brooks is trying to be my mother's boyfriend."

"Ew," Suralee said. "What do you mean?"

"He acts goofy around her. He touches her sometimes."

Suralee's eyes widened. "Where?"

"When they're watching TV."

"No, I mean where does he touch her?"

"On her hand. And once he put his arm around her. I saw them."

"Did he ever kiss her?"

"No!"

"How do you know?"

I thought about this. It seemed to me that it would be a terrible betrayal, for my mother to do something I didn't know about. Her life was of necessity unnaturally open to me, and I suppose I believed that as it was my duty to bear constant witness to it, it was also my privilege.

"I'll bet he does kiss her," Suralee said, lying back on the bed and tucking her blouse up into the bottom of her bra. "I'll bet he frenches her. I'm sure he does."

"I'm sure he does not not! I guess I know my own mother better than you!"

"Whoa!" Suralee said. "Touchy!"

I got off her bed and went to stand in front of her vanity table, looked at myself in the mirror. I picked up a new bottle of nail polish. Cutex. "Slightly Peach." I'd wanted that shade, too. I turned to Suralee, holding the bottle of polish up. "Can I?"

She pooched out her lips, sulking, considering. Finally, she said, "Yeah. Want me to do you?"

I came to the edge of the bed and sat down, not looking at her.

"Why are you all mad?" Suralee asked. "Just 'cause I talked about your mom kissing?"

"Can we put on a record?"

Suralee opened her record box, which was decorated with floating notes. "'Blue Velvet'?"

"Okay."

She put the record on and then came back to sit beside me. She shook the bottle of polish, and I spread my hands out flat on the bed. Suralee bent her head over them and started painting my thumb with slow, careful strokes. "You know, your mom is really pretty, and she's still young. Don't you think she-?"

"Don't," I said.

"Oh, all right." Suralee continued with my nails, then said, "We'd better talk about the plot for the play."

"The one where the mom gets killed in a car accident?" I asked.

Suralee frowned, considering. "No. Too sad. We'll have a lot of people there."

"Not a lot," I said. "Just more than usual. How about the one with the crazy saleslady?"

"No," Suralee said, then raised her head quickly at the sound of her door opening.

"Hey, girls." Noreen stood before us in her stocking feet with her sad eyes and her faded lipstick. "What are y'all doing?"

Suralee wouldn't answer, I knew; she would never answer obvious questions any more than my mother would.

"Painting nails," I said. "'Slightly Peach.'"

"Oh, that's a nice one," she said. "I just bought her that. I like it so much I might use it myself sometime."

"Do you want to come to our play tomorrow night?" I asked. "It's only twenty-five cents." Suralee stiffened, but I didn't care. I was going to invite everyone. The more people, the more money. I would invite Riley Coombs and LaRue. Peacie, of course, I had to invite Peacie, and if I had to invite Peacie, Suralee had to invite her mother.

"Oh, I don't know," Noreen said. She turned her head away, scratched at the base of her neck, then moved her fingers up to the top of her scalp, scratching mightily. She did this often, attended to herself as a monkey might, oblivious to whoever was before her. Once, I'd seen her sniff under her arms. She picked at her toes when she watched TV.

"A new man will be there," Suralee said in a singsong voice. "And he's handsome as all get-out. He looks like Elvis."

I knew Suralee's attempt to persuade her mother to come was her natural contrariness-if her mother had said she wanted to come, Suralee would have tried to talk her out of it. But I hoped Noreen would come. I had a certain compa.s.sion for Suralee's mother, the way she did for mine. If Noreen came, she could feast her eyes on a real man, rather than the sad specimens she sometimes went out with: bald or fat or poorly complexioned men who honked for her at the curb and took her to cheap places for dinner and then somewhere to have s.e.x, according to Suralee. "Your mother told you that?" I'd asked, horrified, when Suralee had shared this information, and she had looked pityingly at me.

"Do you do the laundry in your house?" she'd asked, and I'd said no, Peacie did. "Well," Suralee said. "I do it in this house. And if you do the laundry, you know."

"Know what?" I'd asked. "What do you mean?"

She'd said never mind, another time.

"What new man are you talking about?" Noreen asked, and Suralee looked coyly down at my pinky, where she was carefully applying a second coat of nail polish. It looked good.

"If you come, you'll see," Suralee said.

Her mother laughed. "All right, I'll come. What's the play about?"

"It's a secret," Suralee said, and told her mother to get out and shut the door behind her, we had work to do. Then, while I waved my hands in the air for my nails to dry, Suralee changed the record and we talked about possibilities for characters until we finally had two we both liked. "Will LaRue come?" Suralee asked.

I said I thought he would.

"Do you think he'd be willing to read a few lines, just a few, at the very end?" she asked.

I told her yes.

"Good," she said. "I have an idea for him. Okay, that's the cast. Now we need to finalize the plot, and get our lines memorized." She handed me a tablet and a pencil. "I'll act the whole play out; you write everything down."

I held the pencil just so, and felt inside myself the swell of pride I enjoyed only with Suralee.

At five-thirty, Noreen, wearing a stained pink silk robe, brought us in bean-and-bacon soup, peanut-b.u.t.ter crackers, and cut-up apples on a TV tray. Folded paper napkins, I noticed, decorated with pink roses. Wasteful. "Why don't you call home and tell your people you'll be eating here?" Noreen asked. It was odd, how she referred to Peacie and my mother that way. She didn't approve of either of them for reasons I felt but did not understand.

"Would you you?" Suralee asked her. "We're busy."

"I don't think I should," Noreen said.

Suralee looked up at her. "Mom. We're busy busy in here." in here."

Her mother gently closed the door. "She'll do it," Suralee said, and she was so confident I believed her.

When I arrived home at nine-thirty, my mother was furious.

"Where were you?" she asked, her voice even lower than usual. She was seated at the kitchen table; behind her, Mrs. Gruder dried the dishes with elaborate care, then noiselessly put them into the cupboard.

"Where's Brooks?" I asked. She wouldn't do much if he was there.

"Brooks has gone home. Answer me. Where were you?"

"What?!" I said. "I was at Suralee's!" I said. "I was at Suralee's!"

"And how exactly was I supposed to know you were there?"

"Mrs. Halloway called you!"

"Mrs. Halloway did not not call me." call me."

I sat at the table opposite her. "Well, that's not my fault. She was supposed to!"

"It was was your fault," my mother said. "You are responsible for you. If someone says they're going to do something for you, it's up to you to make sure they do it. I was worried about you. I had no idea where you were!" your fault," my mother said. "You are responsible for you. If someone says they're going to do something for you, it's up to you to make sure they do it. I was worried about you. I had no idea where you were!"

"Well, you'd have to be pretty stupid not to figure it out."

"Give me your finger," my mother said.

I stared at her.

"Give me your finger!"

I put my left pointer up to her mouth, and she bit me. I drew in a quick breath but did not cry out.

"Is the skin broken?" she asked.

I looked. "No."

"Go wash it out anyway."

Mrs. Gruder, her face hanging low in sorrow, moved to help me, and my mother said, "Eleanor, don't help her. Let her do it herself."

Mrs. Gruder watched me as I washed my hands. I knew that she was in awe of the power my mother held over me. Suralee, too. More than once, Suralee had said, "Why do you just let her bite you like that? Why do you put your finger there? What's she going to do if you just walk away?"

"I don't know," I always said. I really didn't. But my mother, who on that sad day in the iron lung had vowed to use whatever power she had left, did exactly that-with a vengeance. She listened more carefully than anyone: to music, to birdsong, to the wind and the rain, but especially to people-she heard not only what they said but what they felt. She could tell when something in the oven was done by the smell alone; from across the room, she could tell which wrapped box under the Christmas tree held dusting powder. She taught me about good food by her varied and dramatic responses to the taste of it. Most amazingly, she transformed the look in her eyes into her entire body. In anger, those eyes were her grabbing you and holding you down, bending your will to her own. Though she could do nothing but stare at me, I feared her, mightily and distinctly. If she had told me to slap my own face, I would have.

"Now go to bed," my mother said, and I did.

In the morning, I awakened full of energy and bolted to my window to check on the weather-cloudless, I was happy to see; we'd have a nice evening. Then, like a soft punch to the stomach, came a familiar realization: My mother would never again be able to do this, fling back the covers and leap out of bed. Go to the window of her own volition. Go anywhere anywhere of her own volition. Of course I knew this, knew it in my brain, anyway; but I was nonetheless reminded of it in my heart in these unexpected and most random of ways. I can only describe it as the way you touch something bare-handed that you of her own volition. Of course I knew this, knew it in my brain, anyway; but I was nonetheless reminded of it in my heart in these unexpected and most random of ways. I can only describe it as the way you touch something bare-handed that you just took just took from the oven. Impossible as it seems, every now and then I would simply forget my mother was paralyzed. I would hold something out to her. Or I would call her to come over and look at something. I would point at my own mouth to indicate that she had a crumb stuck at the side of her own. from the oven. Impossible as it seems, every now and then I would simply forget my mother was paralyzed. I would hold something out to her. Or I would call her to come over and look at something. I would point at my own mouth to indicate that she had a crumb stuck at the side of her own.

She understood this phenomenon; she'd had plenty of experiences with other people having what she called "brain skips." One summer night, when she was sitting outside with my mother, Brenda felt a June bug land on the back of her neck. Brenda was deathly afraid of June bugs. She'd leapt out of her lawn chair and started dancing around and around, shrieking at my mother, "Get it off! Get it off!"

"Yeah, okay, in a minute," my mother had said.

I once asked my mother if she herself ever forgot her circ.u.mstances in this way. "I don't forget," she'd said, "but sometimes I have dreams. And then I have to wake up."

"What kind of dreams?" I asked.

She seemed reluctant to answer. But she said, "Well, I dream...it's the simplest things, really. I'm waving. I'm hanging out the wash. I'm just walking down the street, and it feels like floating." Then she said, "I don't want to talk about this anymore, Diana."

This morning, my sorrow at my mother's inabilities was tempered by my anger at her for biting me. I'd gotten up twice to a.s.sist her in the night, and beyond her telling me what she needed, neither of us had spoken.

"If you up, get on down here," I heard Peacie call.

"I'm not not up," I yelled, and moved back into my bed. up," I yelled, and moved back into my bed.

"Get down here anyway; I need some help with your mother."

I lay still for a moment, full of a flat kind of hate, then started downstairs. When I left here, when I lived on my own, I was not going to have so much as a cactus to take care of.

I found Peacie in the kitchen, washing dishes. I sat at the kitchen table. "Peacie? Can I ask you a question?"

"You just did."

"We're having a play tonight, and I wanted to know if LaRue could be in it. All he has to do is read a couple of lines at the end."