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She introduced Danni as her eldest, which I overheard the first time with the feeling of being batted off a cliff. When I protested my mother called me selfish, and said “Danni has no one but us.” Danni got the room meant for me, and Danni and my sister grew inseparable, and in the next years Danni, my sister, and my mother shared the champagne, went out together, traded men’s attentions. The three of them lived, it seemed to me, like a huddle of enormous mice, all warmth and squeaking enthusiasms. With no power to explain, no effect of my hurt, I started to uninvolve myself. I’d act polite at the news of Danni—her teaching certificate, her job interview—but fumed privately. She married and had daughters, whom my mother called her grandchildren, but, then,I’m the one who decided to break daughterhood, who kept my children away.
    The last time I overheard my mother’s voice, I was on the phone to my grandmother. My mother was with her, wedging herself into the conversation, although no one was talking to her. My grandmother, whose concentration at ninety-six was fading, kept trying to stop her, sweetly and with exasperation, so that she could hear my answers to her questions. Finally, giving up, she said, “Is there anything you want to say to Mummy?” “Tell her I love her,” I said. It just flew out, uncatchable and a complete truth. I hadn’t seen my mother in years—since the summer of 1998, and now it was late 2006—refused to myself that I missed anything of her. “She says she loves you,” my grandmother said. “I know she does!” my invisible mother sang, echoey, deeper in the room. “Tell her I love her, too.” I know you do, I thought. My mother’s perpetual now, tempting me with possibility. Weren’t we silly, she might say? What was the matter with us? Let’s be close again. My doomed and complicated longing surged, and I had to hang up.
    The two of us had no now . Our furious fires had burned everything to the ground. As I’d grown, each time I brought my mother in, called for her, or let her advise my course, I was ruptured. She came up to college the first October weekend, for instance, and hit it off with my roommate. The girl, Amy, was athletic and suburban, a type I’d never encountered, but we’d steadied each other the first disoriented weeks, stood side by side in the uncertain gaggle for registration. I liked this potential, the reliable connection, not too intimate, born of random assignment. Just right. Amy and I didn’t talk of her marketing major or my focus on Renaissance literature, but at night, while she toweled her hair, I flipped through the spiral bound face-book and we mock-imagined dating prospects. It was fun.
    Then my mother showed up. She held my face to hers—“Oh, Sue, my bunny”—her searing gaze that always turned to sweet tears for both of us. Finally she looked at Amy, and wanted to know her secrets. She was so good at that, able to convince anyone that they were meant for each other. The girl gave away real truths about her mother and father and desires she’d never spoken of to me in our enforced rapport. Yes, Amy admitted, she was having sex with her new boyfriend, or was very close—“You are?” I said—and my mother went into high gear, how we were going to Planned Parenthood— they were—this very afternoon, getting her on birth control. The pill? A diaphragm? A little flustered, my roommate flashed me the your-mom’s-great look I’d seen cross the faces of my friends. “She’s cool,” they said. “I wish my mom was like her,” they said.
    It seemed a good plan, whatever my mother organized, until later, when my roommate’s parents appeared, and my mother, enjoying her dorm-room dominion, reassured them that she had seen to their daughter’s contraceptives. My roommate moved out the