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tomatoes have been lined up to ripen. These could have been her cookbooks, original copyright 1942. My mother seemed to always be angry at her, said she could have been a piano teacher or she could have been a librarian if she hadn’t always been taking care of Him. But I liked my grandmother because she was calm and smelled of baking and swayed on her feet and hummed all the time.
    My mother says she was never allowed to get ambitious about anything. Just when she was beginning to achieve mastery—debate team, drama, piano—she was hauled off to do something else so she’d be well-rounded. Wanting to be a lawyer, actor, concert musician; not realistic. It was a danger for a girl to cut herself off socially, to find absorption and intensity in pushing herself. My mother is still frustrated, and she doesn’t think I’m serious enough. She wants me to go into some hard-core men’s profession—electronics, architecture, industrial engineering—not anything as typically female as teaching or nursing.
    The book advises: “When company comes at odd hours, don’t be trite. Serve something that justifies your reputation as a smart hostess.” Company picnics, company dinners, a new foreman. How many Liberty Bell Cookies did my grandmother bake, Deep Dish Peach Pies, Blueberry Drop Biscuits? My own mother could transfer crust into a pie dish from wax paper without so much as a fissure and press a perfectly fluted edge in record time. Baking pies conjures all the right associations, makes a woman safe, and she knew that when she baked them and took them to my school functions. But in the summer, she covered the garage door with butcher paper, so I could make mud prints with my whole body. My friends all wanted to come to my house. Buttock prints, hands and feet, we even made our heads into mudbrushes. My mother was the most fun.
    Even as I say that about her I have to contradict it. The familiar boil of bile and dread in my intestines. Before Angie lived with us, there were days she didn’t dress and the dogs slept in her bed, and I’d stay home to try and run the front desk so people wouldn’t see her in that maroon velour house dress, unzipped and covered with dog hair. Beneath her eyes two blue half moons floated like boats, the marks of sleeping with her mascara on. I didn’t know what depression was then. She was asleep when I left for school, and asleep in the afternoons when I came home. The maids took reservations in the morning, and I returned calls when I came in. I knew how to make my voice slow, melodious, and womanly.
    She used to leave money under the butter dish and I got off the bus downtown to do the marketing. I shopped with a bitter heart, no one to care for me, and I bought whatever I wanted: Pop-Tarts, Spaghetti’O’s, Captain Crunch, fruit rolls, canned pudding, beef jerky. When my mother appeared in the the doorway, I’d look up, guilty yet praying she’d be angry with me for doing such a dismal job of caring for myself. But she ate whatever she could find, pulled up a chair in front of a bowl of Sugar Pops. Are you going to go to school today? Her question was perfunctory; mine was unkind. Are you going to get dressed today? She brought her fist down onto the table. The spoons danced, the demons out between us now. You look like your father. You act like your father .
    I’d threaten to leave forever, with each step toward the door making a proclamation. I’m leaving. I’m going. I didn’t ask to be born .
    Go then! she shouted. I put you back where I found you! I quit!
    I hid in the garage once, where we had an old chest freezer, and I ate one popsicle after another listening to her scream my name. Jess? Godamn you. Jess?! My heart was hard as a peppercorn. I wanted to hear fear and repentance. The screen door slammed twice before I heard the slap of her slippers on the drive and the jangle of keys in her hand. I