40. Ce n’est pas important

For a time, I was surprised that some of the women who attended my mother’s funeral, did. As far as I knew, my mother never saw or heard from Mrs. Littington again once she moved. But that’s not the reason for my consternation at seeing her again. We all knew she’d live on the block only for a while, just as she had in every other place to which her husband’d taken her from Toulon. He plucked her, or so he wanted us to think, from the rubble the Nazis, Fascists and the ones who tried to “liberate” the old quais and cathedral from them, left behind. Ce n’est pas important, she’d say whenever anyone asked her about the war, her family or the town. Or any of the other places, people or experiences of her life.

Toulon, Oran, Aden, Asuncion, Tahiti, this block—those are just the places I remember her mentioning. And oh yes—Montreal. The one place name that aparked herface from the impassiveness that was too expressionless to be called serenity. Apres Paris, il y a Montreal. Montreal, she said, was from le temps perdu, like Paris, la belle cite, which she saw once when she was just a young girl. The sun rose in her chestnut-flecked eyes when she described la claire, l’elegance of the women promenading under belle epoque skies just starting to turn gray, the clouds enfolding from the east rather than the north or west.

Verite and elegance, she told my mother, are all that matter. My mother, who did not use the idioms and syntax of her immigrant grandmother, and knew no language save for what she learned on this block, understood. No one talked about liberte or egalite at Mrs. Littington’s sort-of-bohemian aunt’s house on the Rue de Rennes, near the old Montparnasse station; only verite et elegance.

Mrs. Littington’s aunt had never married, and every day “Madame St. Just,” the tallest woman she’d ever met, came to visit. Madame St. Just, Mrs. Littington said, also had the deepest, throatiest voice she’s ever heard on a woman, aussi des hommes. Her high cheekbones, her thin neck and arms, were fin but not raffine; her bones neither those of a paysane nor of une Parisienne vraie.

But Madame St. Just was full of l’elegance and la verite, Mrs. Littington said. Even in her strangest, crudest gestures—She belched louder and more gratingly than any woman or man in her country!—seemed as inevitable and beautiful as tiles from a mosaic of the gods that were retreating from the darkening post-belle epoque horizon creeping along the curves of the Seine.

Nothing impressed the girl who would become Mrs. Littington nearly as much as Madame St. Just’s mouth, which softened and curled whenever she said la vie or told stories she’d probably told hundreds of times before but filled young Francoise, the future Mrs. Littington, like wines discovered behind doors left unlocked, then uncorked, poured and palated between furtive glances.

Somehow she knew enough not to repeat anything she heard from Madame St. Just, not to her mother or her father, and certainly not to any man—or anyone else—in Toulon. As far as I know, no man on this block has ever heard such stories. All about je/te, she’d tell my mother, not je suis ici, vous etes la or worse, sous moi.

I wish I could remember more of those stories now. But I could just as well try to recall a lecture on quantum mechanics (I have no idea of what it is) or a religious revival my mother brought me to, had she been the sort of woman to attend such things. Wait—I’m remembering now that Mrs. Littington said that her aunt and Madame St. Just didn’t talk about l’amour or make promises about anything, not even about meeting for lunch or coffee in the garden behind the cathedral.

Actually, I recall now that my mother and Mrs. Littington didn’t really talk that much—at least not when I was present. And mother was never reluctant to talk, especially with women she knew. For that matter, I don’t remember her spending as much time with Mrs. Littington as with some of the other women. And, as I’ve said before, once she left, mother never spoke about her again.

But there she was at my mother’s funeral, older but not the wan or matronly presence someone expects from someone her age. Her unwrinkled yet creaseless black pants and jacket fit her as perfectly; she stood like one of those buildings that, in spite of its cracks and peels, doesn’t age much, any more than if someone had painted it a different color.

She’d left the je/tu—as if she and one of her friends had simply been conjugations of the same verb—always unchanged, something she didn’t have to, but could, return to. When one’s stories become je suis ici, vous etes la narratives, returning—remebering—becomes both necessary and impossible.

I don’t think I could’ve understood this if I hadn’t left this block and lived among men, in their world of capricious, pointless deaths—which it to say, their lives. Mrs. Littington never saw Paris again, or any place else in France but Toulon. My mother never saw much of anything but this block, but she seemed to understand, even if Mrs. Littington could never exactly translate into my mother’s idioms.

I don’t know where she came from to see my mother—or at least those other women—one last time. Certainly I didn’t know whether her husband was still alive, whether they’d stayed together, or what became of their children. And of course mother could never know: She remembered only the ce n’est pas important which someone misinterpreted before it reached her ears. So she didn’t stay in touch; in time Mrs. Littington surely forgot much about my mother’s life. That is why she did a double-take, then looked away from me, in the funeral parlor. Sometimes people aren’t sure, after absences of decades, whether the person they’ve come to see had a son, daughter, cat , dog, all of the above or none of the above. Not that it was important—to me, anyway—whether she remembered me, or how. She won’t return to this block, and neither, I hope, will I. We couldn’t, even if someone allowed it.

40-A. Her

Still wonder about that lady, the one whose name I never knew, the one whose voice I heard only once before the funeral. Did she recognize me? Now I’m remembering something else. The day before the funeral, when I walked through the graveyards that separate this block, this neighborhood, from every other place I’ve seen since living on it, the wind—at least I thought it was the wind—flickered across my face and the back of my hands, which I shaved every day at that point in my life. I felt my blood fluttering under my skin and another current of wind rushing over my pores. But—no tingles, no goosebumps—I realized the air was still and the sun, behind translucent clouds and the chill of headstones against my fingertips seemed still, almost neutral.

When I walked under the bronze cross at the top of the gate, she glanced from across the street, a few yards to my left. I hadn’t remembered, at that moment, that she was our old neighbor, but I exhaled fully, wholly, when the step I thought she took in my direction cut to her left and toward a house on the corner.

Didn’t occur to me that it was her—or that she was looking at me—until long after the funeral, after I ‘d left the block for the last time. She’s probably still there, for all I know.

39. Identity

It’s still strange sometimes to be free of obligations. The person to whom I was married has no idea of where I am or what I’m doing. The phone calls to friends and workplaces stopped a long time ago. I’ve not only liberated myself from marriage—It’s easier when you don’t have children or property, as I didn’t—but that somewhere, actually at various points along the way, I’ve shed most of the bonds I had with other people. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but I don’t regret it now.

Now I understand why people stop visiting the gravestones of family members and friends. It’s not just because survivors move away, at least geographically, from the dead. After a while, it’s not possible to mourn, or even to recall or forget. The person you knew no longer exists and can’t come back. In fact, they can’t be replaced: Someone or something merely substitutes for something. I guess we’re all substitutes for something or someone.

There was the girl my mother once was; there were the people she’d been before she met the one who fathered me; there is what she might’ve been if she hadn’t known him or given birth to me or anyone else. I’d heard stories that she’d had a boy or a girl: someone who’d been taken for her or whom she gave up. I found photographs once of a curly-haired (wo)man/child, wrapped in something that looked like a butcher’s apron with a picture of a tree—I don’t know what kind—painted on it. I guess that rules out the abortion story, which I’d never believed anyway.

She walked in. What were you doing in there? You left them on your dressser, I claimed. What were you doing, looking there? Couldn’t help it: the door opened that faded wood dresser top, I explained. Normally, she didn’t leave anything there, so of course those photos caught my attention. Whose pictures are those? I wondered aloud.

Mine.

Couldn’t’ve been: the face was too round, even for such a young child. Eye sockets too flat. And I didn’t think my grandmother—or just about any other mother—would’ve dressed her kid that way, not even if her husband or boyfriend or whomever chopped meat by day and silk-screened T-shirts by night.

What followed was the one moment of true hatred I ever felt toward her. It’s one thing to finesse one’s way around something a kid might not understand or be ready to hear—or something one simply isn’t ready to explain. But she never did that before, or after, so I knew she was lying. Why?, I still ask myself. Not many things could’ve changed what I felt for her, not even finding out she’d given a child away or killed it. I would never’ve told anyone else about something like that.

I didn’t tell when she thought she had a malignant tumor. Or when she said she’d sung or performed other jobs—That’s all they were, she said—or hinted at whom my father might’ve been. I also never told what I heard of her conversations with any of the women who would attend her funeral. She knew this, and some time in my teen years she stopped gesturing me away when I chanced upon one of her encounters.

I also never mentioned the things she said about a certain man whom I can only assume was my father. They met in school, in a dance hall, or on some long-since-closed ride in a seaside amusement park: The stories varied. Or maybe they just met one evening in some nameless stretch of sidewalk, or another evening somewhere else.

I’d seen him—I’m sure of it. Everything about my face, except for my knobby chin, I got from mother. Her hair was straight and fine, his splayed with an ever-so-short arc from the top of his head down to his ears. So I know I didn’t get my coiffure from the haircutter my mother used to take me to. His dark brown hair differed from hers only when he didn’t shave for a day or two and the nearly orange fields in his stubble reflected the rusty undertone of his hair.

When I was a child, my hair glowed nearly as russet as his flecks. As I grew older, they darkened like tree trunks after sunset. And when he lost the locks from the top of his head, the fringe around the crown just above his ears glowed brighter and curled at his ears.

Mother didn’t have to chase me, even though I always wanted at least a glimpse of him, the way most people choose to view tigers in a forest or sharks on the continental shelf: close enough to know what they are, but at enough of a distance for a head start.

38. Birth

Now that she’s gone, there’s one less date to remember: Mother’s Day. It’s the one and only holiday I cared about in any way. Whether or not you share other people’s beliefs, you’re forced to observe their holidays because stores close, people leave for vacations and other trips that may or may not have to do with the observance of their holy days (What does going to Miami have to do with Yom Kippur, anyway?) and they eat foods they wouldn’t touch at any other time of the year. Christmas, New Year’s Day and the days for saints and about declarations of independence, “discoveries,” “victories” in battle and other forms of homicide and rape—all of those celebrations mean nothing to me.

Mother never told me her birthday, possibly because she knew it’s the one date to which I’d pay attention. And somehow or another I managed to get through those years without knowing the date anyone else came into this world. I might know for a moment—Some kid in school would talk about a party or some such thing—but I’d forget almost immediately.

In fact, I know the date on which I squeezed between walls of her birth canal—I’ll say only that it was a murderously hot day, just as her first hours must have been, I’m sure—I know it only because some teacher—Mrs. Kilmer, the first lay teacher I ever had—said something about how other kids and I who were born during the summer weren’t going to have celebrations in school. Wouldn’t you like to tell the class what day it Is?, she cooed, while looking away from me. I sat silently, my hands folded. Some kids giglgled; she hushed them and waited. Perhaps you need a moment to remember, she sighed. Ten other kids in that class of twenty-nine recited, on cue, the July and August dates on which they’d been born. Then she turned toward me. Maybe now you can tell us….

All that year, I hardly spoke at all. Mrs. Kilmer, it seemed, called on my only for questions about math, Latin and religion. I never knew the answers because I didn’t care about religion and I was simply hopeless in the other two subjects. Then she’d snap and point to someone else and I’d slink back into the dark silence behind my eyes.

Actually, I can remember one other time she called on me. What are you seeing now?, she demanded. A blackboard, you… Should I mention the other kids, I asked aloud: I didn’t want her to wonder aloud whether I wasn’t thinking about her question. Uh, blackboard, wall, American flag.”

What did you see before that?

I stared at her through the glaze over my eyes.

I mean, before you woke up… Some kids tried to conceal snickers. What did you see with your eyes closed?

Nothing.

You never see nothing.

Well, you know, just blackness.

What did you…Realizing it was pointless to ask, she dropped the question.

And—oh yeah—I remember her expressing that cloying, contemptuous form of pity that I later learned to call condescenscion. Don’t be afraid to tell me…Then she’d remember what she was getting herself into. She didn’t accept “nothing” for an answer and I wouldn’t give it. It seemed superfluous, like most things I’ve said and many of the people I’ve said them to.

And so with birthdays. I could never see any reason to demarcate it from any other date on the calendar. At some moment I can’t remember, I left or was pushed from a place to which I couldn’t return, no matter how much I imagined it, if I could’ve imagined. I am in this world and can do nothing about it. I have no control over whether or not I will inhabit any other reality. Why make a big deal over any of it?

Mother would have none of it, either. She never made a fuss about aging, which makes sense when you realize that during my late adolescence she didn’t look any different from my earliest recollections of her. They are, I suppose, what some embalmer thought he or she was seeing before my mother was set before me and those other women from this block.

How could any embalmer or funeral director see what Mrs. Littington, the lady whose name I never knew, or anyone else—including me—had seen, much less make any attempt to recreate it? Now I understand why people—usually women—take at least one look at the face in a casket, then pull themselves away. Trying to substitute some made-up image for the ones you hold in your mind: That’s what’s so intolerable, especially for the people closest to the deceased.

So what are you celebrating, then, when you celebrate someone’s birthday? Or your own, for that matter? Of course, when I was a child, I couldn’t articulate the reasons why I didn’t want to celebrate my birthday. I simply couldn’t understand why it was so important for anyone else. Someone gives you a cake moistened with food coloring; you have to thank people for giving you things you didn’t ask for.

So I’ve never done birthdays. Now, Mother’s Day, that’s another story. Why that date among all others? Well, I’ll say that I try to be as unsentimental as anyone can be in honoring or making some attempt to honor her. Honestly, I never quite knew how to do that, or how she’d feel if she knew that I’d wanted at least one day of the year that was about her, and only her. I had my own reason: I knew I couldn’t always, no matter how hard I tried, obey the few rules she had for me. I also knew that I couldn’t satisfy her unspoken wishes—after all, I did leave this block and I’ll never have children.

One of the few dictates I’ve heard from a religious person that I’ve made the effort to remember came from the priest who presided over the wedding of Mrs. Rolfe’s daughter. Remember, the commandment doesn’t say obey thy mother and father. It says to honor them.” I got the idea, although I never did figure out what sorts of actions honored one’s parents.

If nothing else, I came to realize that a parent, whether or not he or she is biological, is the first person you see in your earliest recollections. And the last you see when you close your eyes to this world. There’s nothing you can do about that; you can only acknowledge it, or better yet, celebrate it. You never need anyone else, really. I guess that’s the reason why I’ve never worried about spending this moment, the next moment or my last, alone. It’s also the reason why waking up in a cemetery didn’t disturb me. The people in them (assuming, of course, they’re there) were as ephemerally a part of my life as anyone else was. And the dates on their tombstones simply mark the moments when they moved, like an empty railroad car from a yard toward the first station or the first point of collision, and when they exited, like that empty railroad car, from the last parts of their trip and returned to the colorless, soundless solitude.

So Mother’s Day, I decided, is the only day that should be differentiated from all the others. I try not to talk to anybody unless I absolutely have to, but on her day, I’d speak to her, and only to her. Actually, if I could’ve I would’ve probably spoken with nobody but mother until the day of her funeral. Maybe I’ve succeeded. The few people with whom I’ve spoken since her funeral were women.

Sometimes I get the feeling they talk only to members of their own gender, too. They may answer, or respond to, men’s questions—or at least those of their husbands, sons and nephews. Those neighbors and friends of my mother hear the stories of conquests, of wrongs done by bosses and family members, of injuries caused by accidents and fights. But when they say I’m not well, it’s that time or simply I want to lie down only they could understand each other in the way my mother did.

I’ve tried. It’s all I’ve ever known how to do.

37. Crossing

There comes a day when you realize you’ve lived your entire on this block. It could come some Tuesday afternoon in the office. Or you may see it when waves roll on some shore you didn’t grow up with. And you realize you couldn’t have done anything vut take those steps down to the bones, the foam, the stones and perhaps the sand that are inevitable once you’ve crossed the place where an avenue and a boulevard collide at oblique angles with the street that you’ve lived on. No one ever tells you what’s on the other side; they only tell you not to go there.

You wake from a dream and somebody asks you about it but you’re not sure why. You’re not even sure of what you’ve dreamed; no one can tell you how those stories end. You only know that you begin some place you thought you’d forgotten and proceed through people you haven’t thought about since you left the block. Or even before that.

It all puzzles, frightens, infuriates and annoys me. Now I understand why mother stayed through all those years, alone, with me, alone with me alone. And why she kept me, even when she couldn’t afford to replace the clothes I’d just grown out of, much less the Catholic schooling she provided until there wasn’t money for anything else.

She knew something that men very often act upon but women understand intuitively. What other kind of understanding is there, anyway? What other kind of understanding does anybody need? Anyway, she told me this once: Any memory is paid for. Those recollections that people use to comfort themselves: That’s all they are, re-collections. The pieces, the shards, all picked up and rearranged, whether by reflex or design, into the stories other people use to acquit themselves or the world they’ve lived in. Things could’ve been better or worse, or they are. Either way, people sill conclude that they’re where they’re supposed to be or that they’re going there and that God, or whoever, is leading them there and providing them with everything they need along the way.

I don’t long to go back to some Garden of Eden that I never saw in my life. By the same token, I don’t regret anything. That’s helpful, in a way: I expect nothing of the future, not for myself or anyone else.

There are a few indisputable facts about my life, and they’re not on any certified documents. And they’re not the sorts of things that someone will find by making inquiries or by questioning me. Even knowing me, whatever that means, wouldn’t be enough. Of course I was a child and I grew. And what of it? What other incontrovertible facts are there? Oh, I was enrolled in school X for however many years, but how much did I attend, and how much did I learn? Even that’s not something I know for sure. I’ve never completed any sort of diploma, and to some people that means I don’t have any education or intelligence. Maybe I don’t. But that doesn’t worry me now, and I won’t argue the point with anybody. Maybe I’ve learned a few things; maybe I haven’t.

And what of it?, I ask again. If I have an education, it explains some of my life; if I don’t, it explains other things. Mother was protective, mother was domineering, mother was projecting. And….I was sensitive, I was a sissy. Which label suits your explanation of me? Or mine of you?

Someone, somewhere always has a label to stick on you. Once they’ve named you, they’ve tamed you. That’s what they know about you, and if they think they’ve tamed you, they also think they’ve solved you.

The name, the label is a lot easier to carry, to remember, than what’s been named or labeled. But some—most—people confuse it with a memory, which is an experience remembered. Mother told me that, or something like that, once. That it’s all about pain: the method of payment extracted for true, precise memories. Pain: that which can’t be transformed, transmitted; that which no one can take away. I don’t think anyone can ever share it. Pain is always solitary despite—actually, because of—all those people who devote themselves to muting it in other people.

What of all of those people who visit strangers, or even friends, in hospitals and nursing homes? Or the ones who try to feed and teach the children in the gutters of places no god would ever go anywhere near. Now, I know I never lived in such poverty, and somewhere along the way I stopped feeling guilty over the fact that I never did. Actually, I never had such pangs, not on my own anyway. There was somebody, usually a priest or a nun (when you’re a kid, that person is an adult) who resents you for…existing.

Some people don’t remember their own pain, don’t feel it. Even after suffering t hrought he deaths of people they’ve known, or their own selves, they only have some story, some name that someone else gave them to describe the experience. And what someone else told them to feel. I guess that’s a pretty good definition of guilt: what someone else told you to feel.

So that’s how rich girls end up in the gutters of Calcutta. And how people end up at the bedsides of people they barely know, or don’t know at all, mouthing platitudes when what the person in bed needs, more than anything, is sleep. Or at least rest.

And so they recollect someone else’s suffering, or more exactly, some image of it. Or some way, perhaps in which the person expressed his or her suffering. Out of naivete, out of ignorance, sometimes out of condescension, disrespect or contempt for the other person, they try to quell their cries, their bodily contortions, the look in the eyes of a person in pain.

Truth is, the only way you can end another person’s suffering is to kill him or her. And even then I couldn’t tell you for sure: What happens when a person stops functioning in ways we’re accustomed to seeing? I don’t know. But I do know that a person’s pain can end only when it’s run its course. There’s nothing anyone can do to change that.

Any attempt to end another person’s suffering and pain is therefore an act of the basest sort of arrogance and self-righteousness. What right have I, or anyone else, to deprive another person of his or her experience, of memories—the only things that a person can truly claim to own?

Mother understood all this, I’m sure. And that’s why she never left this block. You never realize you need to hold onto anything until you have recollections. And the more you describe them to yourself, to anyone else, the further you stray from them. And the more you try to base your relations with other people on them. Really, you can only have a memory of the present, however long that moment may be. On the block where I grew up, it lasts until you leave. Until that moment when you cross that intersection, traffic circle or boulevard, and see a side, coast or any other boundary you’ve never seen before, you don’t have a past. And, of course, when you don’t have a past, you don’t have a future. To remain on this block, you don’t need either one: In fact, they’re burdens.

Once you make that crossing, you see that your street and others end or continue under different names. And another street, avenue, boulevard or perhaps a highway opens in front of you. Then there’s no choice but to follow it.

Mother really was right. She’d always told me—no, wait a minute, she never did that; she just somehow made it known to me—that I shouldn’t cross, that there was nothing but trouble on the other side. As if she should worry about trouble! She, raising me by herself, told me never, ever to answer the door. Or the phone, not unless I was expecting a call. There’s no telling who’s on the other side, who’s lying in wait.

How did she know? There is always trouble, only pain on the other side. Suffering: It’s what nobody and nothing can prepare you for. Some can warn you, but only about what they’ve known. They can never tell you what your own individual death—which is to say your life—will be. Nor can they describe their own in any way that will help you, that will change the outcome of your tribulations. All anyone can offer is his or her recollection.

Now I understand why I feel uneasy on those rare occasions when someone who’s never seen this block asks me to describe my experiences or my dreams. And why I came to distrust them much more intensely than anyone I knew on this block—that is to say, all of the women, including my mother, in the funeral parlor. I’ve never met anyone away from this block whom I needed or who needed me. The things they told me, I could’ve heard anywhere, really, even from the men on this block, however briefly they stayed. And anything I’ve told anyone since those days could’ve been uttered by anyone, anywhere. The stuff they could understand, that is. And that doesn’t include mother or anyone who came to her funeral.

And the women at the funeral: Could they’ve steered, consciously or not, some piece of me—whatever they grasped, for whatever reasons? The one whom the teachers kept after school: Most of the time, I didn’t understand why.

36. Naming

Having an “illegible scrawl” is not such a bad thing sometimes. I’ve never liked putting my name on any kind of list. But how can I not name myself as one of the people who attended my mother’s wake and funeral. At least my mother, if she could see it, would recognize the long loop underneath a staff that contracts into the sharp joints of a seismometer wave. She’d know it anywhere—even in death, I believe—but no one else, not even my father, I’m sure, could ever read it. Not that it would’ve mattered. Something occurred to me as I signed guest book at the entrance to the funeral parlor: If anybody else could decipher that blue gash I sliced across the page, it’d be the lady whose name I never knew. I don’t know why I thought that—well, I didn’t know at that moment, anyway. But somehow it would make sense that she, who’d never before that day done more than glance at me while she spoke with my mother, could decode that scrawl, or many of the other things that, it seemed, only my mother understood. After all, she seemed to notice, as I did, mother’s mouth, firm but delicate with a top lip like a crossbow, the lines darting and disappearing around it into the soft but unyielding curves of her cheekbones. And, I thought, if anybody besides my mother could recognize my voice after not seeing or hearing from me for generations, for lifetimes, it’d be the lady whose name I never knew.

She short-circuited the sigh I was about to heave when she avoided looking at my name by staring at me. Besides her, only mother could’ve done that.

And then a dream—one of the few I’ve ever made any effort to remember—came to mind. I don’t remember when I first dreamt it, but I’m sure it was long ago, probably when I was still on this block. Could’ve been a daydream, for all I remember. A shadow descended—quickly, at first—but its plunge fluttered to a glide as it neared the ground like sand skittering under ripples spilling into foam in the horizon. Long, silky strands unfurled as the shadow touched the ground.

It swirled in the wind like clouds and whirled more furiously around something I couldn’t see; it was like the eye of a storm. In the distance, the wind stuttered the tail of the shadow. It was a mare — Don’t ask me how I knew; you just know certain things sometimes in dreams. – that skipped in widening loops through tall reeds flickering where I would’ve seen a dusk—or a dawn—if the gray tide of the sky hadn’t spilled against the line of that shore.

The long strands of that shadow, turning brown and silky, writhed and wriggled in the wind, which was winding along curves I couldn’t see and wrapped themselves around cumulus curlicues.

I followed one strand, softening in a wind, that seemed to be falling off a line at the edge of that land—I wasn’t sure whether it was a tidal marsh, a beach or simply a cool, damp , windswept field.—until I saw her face. In my real world—that is, my everyday, waking world—she’d never had such hair. But in the dream, it was hers; it couldn’t’ve been anyone else’s: it was soft in a way you can only remember, like a light in a room where you spent your very first days: a light you never can experience again, except in your dreams

Mother and I never talked about dreams, and only rarely about other people. I can’t remember a conversation about “the future” or my future. For that matter, she never mentioned the past, hers or anyone else’s—and this doesn’t surprise me now. Somehow it never occurred to me to ask her if she envisioned herself at a kitchen table with me, or with any one child—I am her only one, as far as I know—and no one else. No man, no friends—neither mine nor hers—nor any other sentient, conscious being.

I can’t remember her uttering any forbiddance of bringing my friends to the house. It would’ve been superfluous, anyway: I had no contact with the other kids beyond the school hallways ant the paths we took along the sidewalks and streets to and from our homes and school. And my mother talked to Mrs. Rolfe, Mrs. Littington and that lady who followed me to the bathroom and the sign-in book when they passed each other’s houses or when they met surreptitiously in a store or some other place.

I doubt she’d foreseen coming to know any of them, any more than I can envision this person whom I’ve become, who came to mourn her. Perhaps this was the reason she—and, as far as I could tell they—could only see themselves in that eternity of their own lives: that moment called the present, which of course they never named. Giving a moment–or any person, place or thing—a name, or calling it something, makes you as separate from it as my mother’s (and presumably their) God from the word, the light, the water, the garden and Adam and Eve. And those names for the way people acted, for circles of friends, for neighbors: Once you use them, they separate you from them or them from you, the way foods you ate when you were growing up become memories when you learn the names other people call them. I learned that mom’s eggplant salad was called caponata; the tomato sauces she made were called marinara, boulognese and so on. Once I learned those names, those foods—even though I still love them—were no longer mine or my mother’s.

Now I know that people—some’re called psychoanalysts, others call them priests, fortunetellers, soldiers or any number of other names—have their names for my home, my mother, the clouds and everything else in the dream, and for the dream itself. And for whatever part of my brain, or whatever it was, that made the dream happen. I don’t know those names now, and maybe I never did or never will. Somewhere along the way I stopped getting an education (with a capital E). You spend enough time in school and everything becomes a type or a category—here or there, this color or that color, the past or the future. But not the present: there is only Time. (Yes, with a capital T.) Everything on this block—all of the people, the houses we lived in, the funeral parlor where we met, probably for the last time—are all moments out of Time. Until the moment when that lady followed me, I’d been living in Time, never in any moment, because all those other moments were gone.

But that lady didn’t know my name, the one I chose for myself. Nor did anyone else in that funeral parlor. If they’d wanted to, they could’ve talked all day with me and they’d’ve forgotten it by now because they didn’t know my name. I wouldn’t’ve minded that, really.

35. Behind Them

Someone gives the respectful yet truncated stare one directs toward, but not quite at, someone she vaguely recognizes. And she’s not sure she wants to find out. Barbara Fabriaferro, nee Moskowitz, the lady who lived two doors down from us. I used to spend afternoons, evenings and sometimes weekends at her house when my mother was out fulfilling obligations I wouldn’t understand until much later.

Mrs. Fabriaferro had a husband—Did he father her sons?!—who went “around the corner for a pack of cigarettes” and was never heard from again. Willie, the oldest boy, was my age and would never talk about him. Gerald and Tomy, the younger ones, never talked at all—not to me, anyway. Willie spent most of his time in school and away from it starting fights with other kids. Except for me. So we had no reason to acknowledge each other.—actually, he had even less use for me than I had for him. If Willie wouldn’t fight you, no other kid in the neighborhood would. I wasn’t worth hitting, especially not for him. Even under his school uniform—which, even though I saw him every day for years, I still cannot picture him in it—he seemed wired together, ready to pounce at any moment. I would never’ve tried to fight him back: My pituitary gland had done its work early, leaving soft flesh on the parts of my body where sinews twined with muscle on his. In those days, I wasn’t much of a runner, either, so there wouldn’t’ve been any thrill for him in a chase or capture.

In other words, Willie, though he seemed born to fight, was not the school or neighborhood bully. Although he won every fight—that I heard about, anyway—he only fought kids who could fight him. No question, he fought to win. But he always seemed to know whose reflexes matched his, and who could land a punch as quickly as, or faster than, he could.

I, on the other hand wanted to—could—fight only in self-defense. It wasn’t a matter of pacifism or pussilamnity: The fight itself and the opponent’s combat-readiness never interested me. If I were ever to throw punches, only death would stop me—or my enemy.

And the one time I had any reason to strike back at anybody, nothing in my mind or reflexes would’ve been enough: I didn’t get the chance to hit first, hit hard or hit at all. Not even to kick or throw something: from behind, he clasped his hand around my mouth and dragged me. But Willie never knew about this, at least as far as I know. Nor did his mother, or anybody else. He could just as well’ve been there, photographed it, remembered it. Then again, if any of the boys in the neighborhood could’ve seen it, it could just as well’ve been him. Then again, if he had, he might’ve fought that man. And, well, who knows…

Anyway, his mother, Barbara, came to the funeral. Was she remembering those afternoons, those Saturdays, when Willie sat taut and motionless on the edge of the couch while war movies rattled the television and I slumped at the other end of the sofa, reading or just staring? Or does she realize that up to this day, the eve of my surgery, I’ve had hardly even a scar, or even a scrape, mainly because of Willie. Had she known, would she have extorted an expression of gratitude from me—for her son’s contempt, even disrespect of me?

He wasn’t there. Nor were her other two sons. After I left this block, I never heard about them again. Or for that matter about Mrs. Littington, who said something—troppo malo-I didn’t know she spoke Italian—to a woman in a black nun’s veil.

And what of Mr. Littington, who met her during the war in Toulon. Came back, never looked back, he said. She followed. When he didn’t understand her, which was most of the time, he’d promise, “N’aura pas de faim.” Apparently, he learned just enough to know that they say “Je t’aime” only in movies and first-term French classes. When Phil first brushed his epaulets against Francoise’s black dress, she said something about how he’s an American who thinks life is “just like een ze moo-vees.”

Glancing at me, she arched, then lowered her high fine brows—some things don’t change—then turned toward the casket and clasped her hands. I thought I heard her whisper, “Sacre Dieu, ce ne’est pas important” or something like that. Then again, I might’ve been remembering something—that was her response to anything he couldn’t answer with “N’aura pas de faim.”

Once, after she’d moved away—something to do with Mr. Littington’s work—she wrote to Mrs. Rolfe, whose earliest memories followed her to and from the camp where she and her family were imprisoned with other Japanese-Americans. Mrs. Littington wrote about the place to which she’d moved: some town with mediocre, expensive coffee shops and a theatre that showed Dirty Harry and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Mrs. Rolfe described the letter to my mother. “She asks about you. And she says ‘but it is not so important.” My mother never spoke about her again. But I remember Mrs. Rolfe mentioning her to another woman the rest of the neighborhood saw only when she picked up her mail from the curbside box or planted or pulled from the patches of rock and dirt between her house and lawn.

That lady came to the funeral too—the only time I’ve ever seen her away from her house or wearing anything besides pastel-colored smocks. Her black dress, also a smock, hung in loose folds from her shoulders to her calves, where even her support stockings couldn’t smooth away the wrinkles.

Even she—until and after that day I didn’t know her name—glanced with furtive recognition. I didn’t know why she’d remember me, except for the fact that I lived on the block. In fact, I don’t know whether she knew anybody else besides my mother, Mrs. Rolfe and perhaps Mrs. Littington: I never saw anyone go to or come from her house. Years later, at the funeral, I recognize her the way I can recognize just about any woman: by her voice. Especially hers, which I’d heard only once before the day of the funeral. One of those sounds that’d never change, ever: rather low, but not throaty; rather like my mother’s—and mine. Even though they don’t echo, I hear them again and again, because somehow I return to them when I’m not thinking about them.

Now I realize that she and my mother probably hadn’t been talking about me, or anybody on that block. In fact, the one time I can recall hearing her speak to my mother, she said something like, “They will not come back.” At least that’s what it sounded like: She spoke in a way I hadn’t heard before or haven’t heard since. It wasn’t her accent because she came as anybody I’ve heard to speaking without one. And, although the phrase came out seamlessly, it was too taut, too terse to seem smooth or polished: It had none of the effected restraint one hears in the uninflected speech of actors and academicians.

I only heard her that once. Any other time I walked by when she and my mother conversed, my mother’s stare would glance off her, in my direction, then just as quickly back to her. I’d immediately head for our house, school—any place but there. Of course I wanted all the more to hear them, but no matter how quietly, how softly I walked, my mother’s face’d dart in my direction as soon as I’d gotten close enough to see what either of them was wearing.

Talking to that lady whose name I never knew, my mother’d lose or leave something, some force, that kept the corners of her eyes and mouth horizontal and parallel to lines I didn’t see but seemed to radiate from her jawline into the air around her. Whether she listened to or interjected in that lady’s talk, her cheekbones arched and furled broken swirls underneath her eyes and around her lips, which would seem softer. She didn’t seem older or younger—indeed, at those moments, my mother and that lady seemed to be unbound by time and undefined by age. Perhaps this was the same look that Mrs. Littington said when she declared that my mother was “pretty” and “sympathique.” I don’t think the man who fathered me, or any other man, saw her that way.

I think the one other time I heard the lady whose name I never knew speak, she told my mother, “You look very pretty today,” even though that day she hadn’t brushed her hair and she wore beige stretch pants and a T-shirt that didn’t conceal the weight she’d been gaining. Perhaps my mother looked less like an anonymous housewife than other mothers, but I don’t think that’s what that lady liked about her. Maybe it was something in the sound of her voice, or more precisely, the expression in her speech.

She gestured, in my direction, by the foot of my mother’s casket. I jerked my head away and turned toward the door of the airless, climateless funeral parlor. Out the door, to the left, a few steps down the corridor to the bathroom. Wrong move: She followed.

Relief! It’s a single stall, and I got to it first. Why do they always assume that in a room full of people, especially women, only one will have to go at a time? And doesn’t anybody ever clean these things? You can go to nice restaurants, libraries, opera houses—all those places where people are supposed to be, or at least appear, civilized, and they all smell like they’ve been power washed with piss, and the seats and bowls are always stained, streaked and marked. I mean, women are better about picking up after themselves and cleaning themselves up, but how is it that our bathrooms are dirtier and smellier than the ones for men?

But at least the door closed on this one—before that woman got to it!

Not that I didn’t trust her. Or more exactly, I couldn’t think of anything she could use against me. I didn’t expect to see her or anyone else in that room, ever again, and of course there was nothing she could tell my mother. My mother’d’ve probably reacted differently to anything that woman could’ve said if I could say it too.

But for some reason I became curious. How would that pale gray lady see me? What would she find in my eyes, in my face, that she couldn’t find five, ten, twenty years ago? She hadn’t changed much, except that she seemed a little heavier even though, as far as I could see, she hadn’t gained any weight. And she still had those austerely, nakedly feminine jawline and eyesockets I remembered. Hadn’t heard her voice, though. What could she say to me?

After combing my hair, brushing my face and smoothing over my clothes (One good thing about black: It doesn’t show wrinkles too much.), I opened the door to the narrow, colorless alcove where she stood. Didn’t look like she’d turned her head, or even flinched, while she waited. Her gaze, then as in my childhood, always seemed turned in my direction. Whether she noticed me or not seemed to depend on what she’d been thinking about. However, if she wasn’t looking at or noticing me, no movement or gestures could bring me to her attention.

She stared, her nearly black eyes not meeting mine but sweeping a tide of chilly crystalline light under my skin. “It’s good that you made it,” she intoned. I nodded, thinking of all I could’ve said, none of which would’ve mattered: Wish we didn’t have to be here. Should’ve come to see her sooner. I know, it does seem odd that I could talk to mother every week but still manage not to visit her. Other people I could write off if they didn’t come to see me. And I did, even though I made it next to impossible for them to find me.

“I’m sure she would’ve appreciated you her”…her tone fit the moment too well for her to have been relieved. “Perhaps you can sign the book.” She gestured toward black leather covers opened to one of a dozen pages.

34. Destinies of Choice

She doesn’t know I’m here now. I’ve never believed in ghosts, spirits or anything that’d wander whatever someone’d just left. I’m not saying there’s no existence after or before this one, and I’d never argue with someone who believes in reincarnation. But I’ve never experienced déjà vu as far as I know, and for that matter I’ve never had any wish to find out that I inhabited someone else’s body in Ancient Greece or some village just outside the farm where my great-grandfather was born. It would’ve been useless information to me—actually, very few facts and almost none of the ideas I’ve encountered could’ve changed the course of my actions.

Yes, my actions. I won’t try to explain them as the results of any other person’s actions or words, or any other force outside my own body. I killed. Yes, I killed. I could’ve claimed self-defense but I never have; I don’t expect to. None of it matters anyway: Nothing has changed the fact that someone is dead. Someone, perhaps the state, could’ve imprisoned, tortured or killed (Don’t you love that euphemism: Execute?) me, but it wouldn’t’ve brought him back or made his family—actually, his mother—whole again.

Anyone who’s ever taught—In fact, anybody who’s had as much time as I’ve had to see people from the other side of one-way mirrors—knows that the fear, the anticipation of punishment doesn’t cause someone to reconsider the action he or she is about to take; the actual punishment, once the act is done, is useless. It didn’t take long for me to realize that whatever ostracism, whatever abuse, I might run up against for killing him wouldn’t change the fact that he’s gone, that other people knew—or simply believed, which on this block is the same thing—that I’d aborted, cut down, short-timed, snuffed out, or whatever descriptive phrase they used to avoid saying “killed,” someone they might’ve treated even worse than they treated me.

So it’s not even a matter of how or who you kill, whether the victim was intended or not, a friend or an enemy, or a relation of any kind: I’ve paused longer for the deaths of people I’ve never met, or of whom I’d never heard except for their deaths, than for the one whose life I terminated. Even the death of Mother Teresa, whose work I always detested, left a hole in me no one else could and that couldn’t be filled with anybody or anything else. Some people can’t, won’t or don’t mourn their own fathers; others dissolve like rainclouds over the loss of a non-sentient being.

I’ll admit some guilt: I never stopped to grieve my father. The fact that he wasn’t there for me to grieve doesn’t explain or rationalize my lapse any more than necessity, whatever that may be, excuses my killing.

Of course he knew, if only for a moment, that when I had the power of life and death over him, I made the only choice, consciously or not, that could hold any meaning for him. Our lives did not intersect, as some would say: They never could have. Instead, he existed on one side of an opaque window. I began on the other side. Nothing in the life he lived has changed, or will be changed, by actions I or someone else have taken since his death.

So why, then, did I attend her funeral. She’d never know I was there; even if she did, she might not’ve recognized me. No, not even she—she’d only see what was, who was, in a moment called the present only because nobody’d yet decided what to call it, in a new suit of clothes—or at least something she’d never seen me wear before.

She, as much as anyone else could, or at least would, see someone who hadn’t killed—not even a “yet” attached to my story. I would not be the one who left, who ran. I’d still be that child who crept by the door and peeked through the window when she didn’t want me to know what she’d seen or heard outside. To her, I’d still be the one who wasn’t supposed to know the truth about Adam’s death—about Death—years after poking my nose through a curtain and lifting a slat of the Venetian blind. I still wasn’t supposed to know, or at least let on that I knew.

I’m sure she knew—Mother wasn’t stupid—but somehow I never wanted to tell. I never wanted to disillusion her. And what is disillusionment but the loss of one’s prerogative not to know that his or her life up to that point was an illusion, a dream. So what did I do but keep up one last illusion, even though she wasn’t there to notice.

Even though I knew it wouldn’t make any difference, I went to her wake and funeral out of respect for what I perceived to be her wishes. She’d’ve wanted me there, I told myself. And still tell myself. Me—or at least a memory of me—that’s who was in that room, along with my memory of her. Of course nobody goes to a funeral to remember: One only transports and transposes a memory of someone onto the corpse in the coffin. I couldn’t see her any more than she could see me. But nothing has ever seemed more imperative to me than to stand before that amalgam of wishes, dreams and fevers, frozen in an embalmer’s moment, encased in silk from the neck down.

I lied to her, disobeyed her, even stole from her, though I see now there are some things even I couldn’t’ve taken from her. Her half-hearted attempts to inculcate me with a faith she never questioned but never really believed did not take. Her more serious efforts to instill conventionally correct notions of sexuality and family in me proved even more fruitless.

I repeat, I’ve never been free from hypocrisy; probably never will be. I want to honor feelings my mother had now that she can no longer have them. For years, many years, whenever we could’ve gotten together, I made some excuse or found another obligation. Or I simply managed to be in some remote part of the world with no convenient way of getting back to this block to see her. Certainly we didn’t abandon any thought of each other: through all those years, we talked every week, usually on Sundays. She could sense, over the phone, that I’d changed, that I was changing. She’d never mention the differences she’d noticed in the pitch of my voice or the speed of my speech. She’d simply demand, almost plead, “Is everything OK?” How could she not know that I was trying to comfort her, or at least not worry her, with my evasions: “Yeah,” “Could complain, but won’t.”

Everyone learns not to tell a parent what he or she already knows, or at least believes. I learned that lesson after I’d been away a few years, when I told her I’d smoked back in the days on the block. I’d never again reveal what she never want to know. Not married, no kids—“You just haven’t met the right girl yet. Some day, maybe.” Right, mother. “You’ll find your calling, your purpose.” Of course, I’d never tell her I wanted any such thing, or believed anyone had one.

There was only one thing I ever wanted—myself, now, becoming. I killed only because I thought it’d bring me to the one I know now, who would never know him. And she would never know me in this moment any more than the women—There were only women—at her funeral knew me, or would know me.

33. Names

I don’t remember them, really. Probably nobody else does, either, which is why they’re here—or what remains of them, anyway. Some might still be more or less intact, in body anyway. Others have become the grass that’s cut—every day, I guess—during the summer. And the rain, the mud that drowns the flowers before even a branch, a finger, can poke from the ground—it all becomes their bones; it becomes them.

And I’m here now, with them. I’m all they’ve got, and they’re all I’ve ever had. Someone once said that God is the only friend the poor have. What about the dead? Do they need friends? Do they have any?

Well, I’m here and I can’t honestly say I’ve ever been anybody’s friend. Maybe I couldn’t’ve been, even if I’d wanted to, even if anybody’d wanted me. I never mentioned my own name, or at any rate whatever name I was using, to anyone. And I rarely asked anyone’s name: All names have been lies, or at least inventions. They’ve never, ever described the person, place or thing or animal to which they’ve been attached. Nothing and nobody ever can, or will.

I’ve come to see a woman I called mother. To my knowledge, nobody else did. She almost never used the name she gave me, or any other name at all: not when we were in the kitchen together, not when we were on the opposite ends of a telephone line. And the name she called me—on those rare occasions when she used it—wasn’t the same as the ones I’d use later. And how would they’ve known that they knew me by a different name from the one mother first gave me?

So there were two facts mother knew about me for certain: that I was born to her, and the date on which I was born. And one day there’ll be one other fact, incontrovertible, she won’t know about me—unless, of course, she’s going somewhere neither of us knows about. That fact, of course, is the date of my death.

And there they were, the only certainties on a tombstone I saw this morning: October 31, 1918-December 23, 1969. What it didn’t mention: He died on this block, and ocean and part of a continent separating him from the shtetl where he was born inside the walls, and the fence he managed to slip through, only to end up on this block. Now that mother’s gone, I may be the only one who remembers the name to which he introduced me: Adam Melnyk.

And here’s another—one of whom I knew only a name—November 15, 1934-April 14, 1953. I’d heard he’d won a medal of some sort for leading a charge—and trying to save someone whose name he didn’t know—on a hill he knew only as a pair of numbers on a chart, in a country whose name he’d seen only in a geography textbook when he was a kid. Then he came back to this block.

But there’s one other. Now that mother’s about to become another marker in that cemetery, I’m the only one who knows that this one has not a single piece of accurate, much less true, information, except for the date of death: June 18, 1992. The date of birth is given as August 5, 1967.

First of all, I know that I was more than 25 years old on the date to which this person’s death was assigned. So he was certainly older than that.

Not only that, nobody knows the exact date of his death—except me. On the day on which his death was recorded, rainy, unseasonably cold weather was also recorded. I know that’s right; I was there. For that matter, I’d have to say he died on June 18, 1992. But the coroner, or whoever else was responsible, accepted this as fact only because the body was found and someone decided he hadn’t been dead more than a few hours.

Although I know he died that day—I was there—the others, full of their arrogant belief in gathered data, can be no more certain that June 18 was the date of his death than that it was the day the universe—what anybody knows of it, anyway—began.

And the birthdate: It had no more to do with him than I did with his. That date came from a driver’s license I’d taken from one of my customers. I almost felt bad about it: Somehow the curly dark hair and the cheek and jaw line, sharp even under layers of flesh—somehow, I thought I’d seen them as often as my own face. And I could rub my fingers, up and down his chest, along his arms and legs, all around his cock, it seemed, without rippling any of the coarse hairs that covered his body. And I was making no more of an effort to please him than I did for any other paying customer.

At the time, I knew that license would be useful—not for me, of course. But I didn’t know how until I got back to the block and encountered the man whom police and the coroner would assign the birthdate on the license.

He didn’t look much, if at all, older than the image on that license. And that was the story about him on this block: somehow he didn’t change; maybe he’d gained a few pounds and lost a few curls of hair, or grew some hair. But he never seemed, in any story I heard, to grow older or younger. And I heard he had another son, possibly by the woman I call mother.

32. What They Say

Something’s making sense now. Actually, a few things, all of them having to do with why I left this block and won’t come back—at least I don’t expect to—once I’ve buried mother.

I’m seeing now they’re all related—or at least I can explain them in the same way I never expected this. I think I understand now why I don’t watch TV or read newspapers or magazines, or why I hardly ever read novels. And why I don’t think I could ever develop a taste for opera, or most theatre. True, I’ve been to only one opera: something about a girl who kills herself when her parents forbid her from seeing the boy she thinks she’s in love with.

And I’ve been to a few plays, of which I now remember only two: The Tempest and Macbeth. They’re the only plays I’ve ever really liked, and I’ve read them a few times even though I never learned how when I was in school. But the productions I saw of those two Shakespeare plays got them wrong in the same ways most teachers do. One made Lady Macbeth into Cruella de Ville without the 101 Dalmations; the other showed Caliban as a slave (and Prospero as a slave master) with frilly collars. As for Lady Macbeth, there had to be something more than wanting her husband to become king so she could enjoy the spoils to her if she stopped herself from killing the king when she had the chance because he, in his sleep, reminded her of her father. The production I saw left that scene out! And Caliban—I mean, what can I say for a character who is trapped in the wrong body, who says, “You have taught me language, and the profit on’t is, I can curse”? You learn, you get an education, you understand, you explain, and what does it get you? There’s no escape, my friend, as Adam would say. No escape from this block, from my mind, from my bones. In the production I saw, that line sounded great; so did his “The Isle Is Full of Noises” speech. Yet—maybe this was the actor’s fault—it didn’t sound right coming from him, as it does when you read the play.

The other plays I’ve seen, I don’t remember at all, not even how I came to see them. Someone might tell me that it’s unfair, based only on those plays and that one opera, to write off all the others.

Which isn’t what I’m doing. I simply have no need for any of the others, or for newspapers, magazines or TV. (When I hear “TV,” I think of what many people think I am and will be until my surgery is complete.) And, for the same reason—I realize this just now—I’ve never had any affinity for children or anyone much younger, chronologically or emotionally, than me. This, of course, rules out almost any male I’ve ever met and most folks who fancy themselves as artists.

And my explanation, I’ve just come up with it. It’s something Adam might’ve told me if I’d been a bit—actually, quite a bit—older. It’s something mother might’ve told me if she could’ve expressed it. Then again, she couldn’t’ve, unless she’d gotten off this block. Here it is: A fish, even one who’s learned to talk, could never tell you it’s in water. Take the fish out of its element and it dies. But to tell anybody where you’ve lived, or what you’ve lived in, you have to get away from it.

And what I just realized now—The reason why I’ve never tried to describe mother, Adam, Mrs. Littington, the woman whose name I never knew or any of the other people who lived on this block, who stayed, who left, who were driven away, is this: Tragedy is romantic only when you’re not going through it. The dead can’t aggrandize their sacrifices or mourn their mistakes. People who never knew there were any other paths besides the ones they followed can’t trouble themselves over the turns they took; women who know only bearing and rearing children, and men who know only how to beat, leave or forget them never tell stories—not their own or anyone else’s. Some may simply tell people they know, which is not really the same thing.

So I don’t need—or want—those contrived tragedies about star-crossed young lovers. If Adam’d made movies, Sophie’s Choice wouldn’t’ve been one of them any more than the boys who fight each other , beat the other boys who couldn’t fight them, harassed and raped the girls—and me—could’ve come up with another West Side Story. One was more than this world ever need; I say the same for Sophie’s Choice or anything that’s been written, sung, acted or made about people dying in flash of glory and youth. Even the least intelligent women I’ve met know better than that; almost no man does, or can. Adam was one of the few exceptions I’ve ever known—perhaps the only one.

Now I realize why cemeteries don’t disturb me—why, in fact, I feel more comfortable in them than almost anywhere else. And why one was the first place I visited when I got back to this block, and was in fact the only place I could’ve gone to before I came to the funeral parlor, the only other place to which I could’ve come back on this block. No one can inflate, deflate or conflate, much less exaggerate, the bones inside the boxes there. The dry ground is blistered with white slabs etched with the years, the dates of births and deaths of the ones who’ve become them when there was nobody to remember their names. Some bear crosses, others the Magden David; most of them, in the final hours before they turned to numbers and months in limestone, professed—if they hadn’t already—faith in God, Yahweh, Allah, Ha’Shem or one of the other 99 names of the being who remembered the one thing they took from the cradle to the casket: what their mothers called them. Everything else—including the lives to which they gave birth of from which they took one additional breath—decomposes before their bones. And they had only names: their own and one of the ones in which I—and sometimes they—never learned to believe.

And once I bury my mother—when I leave this block for the last time, I expect—I’ll have no more reason to use the name she (Or was it the man who fathered me?) gave me or the one her father left her with.

The graveyard at the end of the block furthest from my mother’s place was the one place where I knew I wouldn’t see or hear misconceptions, distortions or outright lies. Or so I thought until I saw a tombstone with these dates, August 5, 1967—June 18, 1992, under a name—whose? I’d heard it before; it was even mentioned when people spoke about me or my mother. My first name—my old one—no middle name (like me) but not the same surname mother and I shared.

The date of death: the last day I spent on this block. Cold and rainy; there were always days like that just before the summer officially arrived but after a heat wave that came too early for the season. I was on this block and nobody—except for one person, who wasn’t my mother—knew about it. At leas I don’t think mother knew: She never mentioned it.

But the birth date: Where did that come from? It didn’t belong to anybody I knew—too late to’ve been mother’s, much less Adam’s. And it’s more than two years before Adam’s death, the date of which I never could forget: December 23, 1969.

I recall some of these times: the summer when it seemed that all the boys that were too old for high school but too young for just about anything else disappeared from this block. And another man, whom I’d seen before, appeared. He wanted something—I didn’t know what—from mother, which I didn’t think she gave. And I was glad about that.

Mother’d never tell me who he was. She’d only snap, “You’re asking too many questions!” When he wasn’t staring at mother, he was gazing at me, especially at parts of my body I couldn’t understand why he wanted to see. Why did he peek through the peephole when I peed? Or stand by the bathroom door while I changed from my school uniform into dungarees?

One drizzly overcast afternoon, he’d somehow gotten in the house. I don’t remember hearing a knock, a ring or him arguing with mother. I heard the door click. Usually, it meant mother, but somehow I knew that day it wasn’t.

Before I could scream, he clamped his hand over my mouth and unbuttoned my jeans. “Tell your mother and I’ll kill you!” he rasped.

And on that last day on this block—the one mother doesn’t know about, I over to the cellar of a house just down the block from the one where mother and I lived. People my mother once knew were no longer living there, nor was anybody else. When he was inside, I crept down to dust and a ray of haze that entered the broken glass of the portal.

“Freeze!” He did.

“Don’t turn around. “ He didn’t.

“Put your hands behind your head!’

“Don’t say a word.”