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next week. Twenty-five years later, she wrote to me in vicious recall of that ruinous afternoon. She told me that what she remembered of our acquaintance was that she hated me. My mother, before the weekend was out, had forgotten the episode, had no sense of its effects.
    One weekend, one scotched friendship. That’s not why you lose your mother, not why you and your sister stop speaking, but it’s partly why, the exhaustions of hope at last overwhelming, the dramas of close women so incendiary. You are accustomed to telling yourself to try again, and you try again, again. Finally, you can’t, and you stop.
    When I was twenty-three or twenty-four, I went with a few friends—men—to a party and was pushed with great crowdenergy from the door into the swell of the party, a central room pressed to the walls with people, mostly known to me, men and their girlfriends. No one was married yet. I was living with roommates then, two women I hardly thought about. Men were my focus, for flirting, sex, information, example, and for friendship. I could observe them, advise and hector them, be mentored and trust their harmless ways. I’d never been taught to know their dangers. Noise rose from the garbled talk on the couches, bounced off the walls. Guests had their arms and elbows lifted to pass, glasses held under their chins, and I was suddenly face-to-face with an older woman.
    â€œI know you!” she shouted. “Your mother ruined my life!”
    â€œJoin the club,” I said, thinking she was funny, but she was disgusted.
    â€œIt’s Mina,” she said. “Remember? Your awful mother ruined my life.”
    I remembered Mina, though this gloomy, worn woman bore no trace of that celebrity. I’d never seen her away from Barbados, where we used to go a lot. My grandmother had had an estate, a grand and annexed villa built into the coral cliffs above the sea, and Mina was part of my mother’s set, the collection of young English and Americans who drew together each holiday. Once when I was a child, Mina had made an entrance at a Christmas party dressed as a present, sheathed in gold lamé and sashed with red velvet tied in a bow at her hip. My mother adored the nerve. “Look at Mina, everyone! Darling, you’re sensational !” and they hurled into obvious conspiracy, whispers pierced by malevolent surges of volume.
    Staring at me, Mina waited, a grim challenge. She’d called my mother “awful,” and meant it, and I had an instant of schoolyard alert. I could tell she wanted me to hear, and I did want more, those specific, missing clues to the dominant woman of my life,my mother who pulled and pushed, evaporated and materialized, careened, undid things, brambled my intentions; but, also, I didn’t want that. I wanted to stop looking for her. Another report of her petulant explosions, her indifferent betrayal, her absolute disappearance? She was a prism against the window, rainbow shards copious but intangible. Who could sort that out? The object—cut glass, the play of beveled edges—wasn’t mysterious; it was the sorcery of light and sway that beguiled. My mother’s friendship with this briefly favored woman had ended, and we never heard Mina’s name again. Shamed, I had the instinct to apologize, to say to her, “I was not as aware as I should have been,” but that wasn’t my line. I excused myself and struggled through the crowd, away. Whatever she had to tell me, that burnt story of her brief fashion, how convinced she was they’d mattered to each other, how she’d been absorbed, then drained, cast off, her secrets used against her—I didn’t need the news. It was in my blood. Women, my young mother had shown me, are the festival. Women are like this: fierce, supreme, capable. And devious and cunning. We lie, we win. And we’re this: alluring, witchy. Women make throaty appeals, rant purely, persuade. We