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observant themselves.
    For the wedding, my mother wore a paisley minidress; my dad wore jeans and a jacket with a Nehru collar. Right around this time my mother was informed that her teaching contract wasn’t being renewed. Helen didn’t care. She’d hated teaching kindergartners anyway. So Rick and Helen, both up for an adventure, decided to go back to Berkeley, with a quick detour to Minneapolis so my dad could check on his mother.
    Between Minneapolis and Berkeley, just outside Livingston, Montana, there was a car accident. My dad was driving. A bee flew into the car, ping-ponging itself against the windshield, trapped by the glass. My dad swatted at it. Right as his hand came down on the glass one of the car’s tires blew out.
    The car swerved, out of control—they flipped down an embankment, then tumbled over and over and over again. When the car finally stopped moving, Rick and Helen said each other’s names, asking,
Are you okay?
They both answered yes. My dad’s hand had been on the outside of the car, cradling the window shell; the tip of his middle finger was crushed, permanently forming the nail into the shape of a bird’s beak. But when he looked down at my mother, lying still across the car’s frontseat, he knew something was seriously wrong. The base of her spine was bent backward—what should have been concave was convex.
    â€œHelen,” my dad said, “are you sure you’re okay?”
    â€œI think so. I don’t feel any pain.”
    And then they heard the sirens.
    Other drivers had seen the accident and called for help. Rick and Helen were pulled from the car and the bystanders were shocked that the people inside had lived.
    At the hospital in Livingston, my parents were informed that my mother’s back was broken. The doctor wanted to perform surgery to fuse her spine, but there was a problem: me. They couldn’t do the surgery while she was pregnant, nor could they put on the body cast that would be necessary for six months after the surgery. So they put her in a brace and said she’d have to be as still as possible until I was born. Then she could have surgery.
    Helen was in the hospital for a month in Livingston, then my parents carefully drove the rest of the way to Berkeley.
    Within a week of my birth, my mother had the surgery to fuse her spine and then the full body cast applied. My parents went on welfare so my dad could take care of my mother and me.
    Because of the body cast, my mother didn’t hold me until I was six months old. Even though I know that’s true—both my mother and father have confirmed it—I still have a hard time believing it. It’s too easy, too heavy-handed, too forced a metaphor for my mother’s inability to provide maternal warmth or comfort: not when I was a baby, not as I grew up, and not now. My mother has told me that when I was a baby—this must have been after she was out of the body cast—and I was in my crib crying, she’d stand there, unable to decide what to do, and simply let me cry. She makes no connection between thosetimes and her earliest memory, when she was left on the back deck. She’s said that when my brother was born, a year and a half after me, she considered him her chance to make up for the things she’d done wrong with me. Though when I ask what she did differently, she can’t think of anything.
    WHEN I WAS about a year old, my parents brought me to a protest at People’s Park in Berkeley. The University of California was planning to turn People’s Park, which had become a hippie campsite of sorts, into a parking lot. The protest turned violent. My dad dropped my mom and me off at a church basement where a makeshift nursing station had been set up; we waited there while he drove through the protest picking up people who’d been hurt and delivering them to the nursing station. While we waited for him, tear gas, thrown by the