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the wings of her nose to her mouth. One day I told her I liked her more the way she looked before. For a long moment she gazed at me, an exclamation mark of grease on her forehead. Then she said, “Too bad.”
    Her biggest project during this period was refinishing the dining-room table. She and Steven carried it out to the screened porch and put newspapers on the floor. For the next two weeks, my mother stood out on the screened porch at night in all kinds of weather, first sanding the tabletop by hand, then each of the legs, then staining the whole thing twice, and after that adding a coat of clear varnish. The table became a lovely cherrywood color that glowed on evenings when she decided to light the candles. She called the table her “piece de resistance.”
    For the first few weeks of my parents’ separation, Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire called my mother every day. “Oh, hi,” she’d say in a toneless voice that let me know it was an aunt, not someone for whom she had to sound cheerful. “No, I’m okay.” She was usually on the telephone with one or the other of them in the afternoon when I came home from school. While I opened the refrigerator, my mother would watch me fromher kitchen chair, one elbow on the table, swinging the long phone cord like a jump rope, slapping it against the floor.
    If around this time she noticed the little shrine of snapshots on top of my bureau—photos of my father doing yardwork, my father eating a hamburger at Uncle Roger’s restaurant, my father paddling a canoe on the C&O Canal—she never mentioned it. Perhaps she guessed my secret: that I was beginning to have trouble picturing him whenever I wasn’t with him. I would close my eyes to concentrate and after a few moments I would summon his ginger-colored sideburns, then his small ears, then his aviator glasses, then at last his long face would come into focus, smiling apologetically, his blue eyes small and indistinct behind his glasses. If I made myself look hard enough I could catch their expression, which was sometimes distracted and sometimes kindly and sometimes slightly cold.
    In an attempt to remain loyal, I also tried to remember the things he cared for and review them before I went to bed. Every morning in the shower he liked to belt out several bars of “Singin’ in the Rain.” He loved thick socks and the melancholy light of evenings in late summer. He loved to mow the grass because he said that mowing released the lawn’s tender smell. “Nectar and ambrosia,” he often said when he sat in his chair before dinner with his glass of Scotch and a bag of corn chips. He celebrated little necessities and comforts in a way that reminded you that nearly anything could be transporting if you put your mind to it.
    He was a true voluptuary, in his own modest way, with a voluptuary’s genius for softening the world around him. After he moved out on that cold Tuesday morning, our house began to seem drafty, full of hard surfaces and stale smells.
    The separation was hard on him, too. One Sunday, about six weeks after he’d left our house, my father and I were sitting cross-legged on the floor in his apartment eating grapes while he watched a football game on TV. The twins lay reading old
TV Guide
s on the sofa bed, whispering to each other. With the puritanism of teenagers, they had taken my mother’s side almost from the beginning. Between themselves they referred to Dad as “Dud,” although they stayed rudely polite while they were with him.
    Outside, the sky had turned the color of an old pie tin. The wind lashed up the bare branches of the horse chestnuts across the street and drove sticks and candy wrappers across the sidewalk.
    Meanwhile I was pretending that we were Polish refugees, and that my father’s apartment was a boxcar. We were heading for the border, where my father had figured out a way to save us all, and even Julie was