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matter of my conception, so I responded by jotting down a favorite stanza from one of Dr. Vic's
poems:
    If she were a toaster, Yd make a toaster-coaster
If she were a toaster, Yd be a toaster-boaster
    As she wrote, my mother pressed down so hard the pen made a whining sound. What does any of this have to do with him? He's never done a thing to you. Although it would be hard to blame him if he did.
    I hated the way she underlined things. You're a blackleg .
    You're a little shit , and furthermore, you don't have the first idea what that word means. You're just reaching for the nearest pejorative, George. This isn't the legend of one of your grandfather's strikes. This is the story of a little boy who still has a hell of a lot of growing up to do.
    At the end of the table Dr. Vic sawed morosely at a chicken breast. He dabbed at his damp face with his patriotic tie. "I
feel like I should get a notebook," he said, but no one answered.
    While she awaited a response, my mother maintained a posture of nunlike serenity, hands folded, long black hair tucked neatly
behind her ears. Her first streak of gray had appeared that spring; a fine, silvery tributary of her part that I hoped was
a biological reaction to her agonized conscience, although to this stage she had conceded nothing. A few mornings, in the
bathrooms of those crummy apartments in Orono and Blue Hill and Waterville, after a night of drinking with her friends or
her lover, I held that hair back while she vomited.
    My grandparents had taught me about sides, about the line that separated one side from the other side, and the impossibility
of straddling that line. You were either in, or you were out. Until Dr. Vic came along, the men in my mother's life had always
gone about trying to get on our side. But when it came to Dr. Vic, my mother told me that some things were not open to negotiation. All the years of moving
from one town to another while she made her hiccuping way toward a bachelor's degree, all the years of crummy apartments with
three fuzzy channels and hose showers and cat hair in the corners, all of it had been an alliance of convenience. Now I saw
that the two of them, Emma and Dr. Vic, were on their own side, and I was on the other, and there was a very real line separating
us. Now she looked at me like that, with her hands clasped and her back straight, like a study hall proctor.
    " . . . And I've come to realize that the only way to talk to these monsters is to speak in a language they understand." That
was the way Papa had put it.
    I wanted to throw gravy in her face.
    He let Nana die, I wrote and sent my notebook skidding across the table.
    Later that night, she knocked on my door, and when I opened it, just stood there. Her cheeks were stained with tear tracks,
and her eyes seemed to be directed at a point somewhere over my shoulder.
    "Well?" I asked.
    Her hand flew up, and I heard the report of the slap before I felt it. The sound seemed to expand, to fill the entire house,
to carry across the lake and into the wooded hills, like a gunshot. I didn't even take a step back; I was too startled.
    My mother's expression never changed. Her gaze still focused on that place behind me. Emma reached into her pocket and threw
a balled up note rattling across the floor. Very softly, she closed the door.
    When I was alone the memory of her tear streaks gave me solace, even as I forced myself to cry a little. The note said, Someday, you will be ashamed of the way you acted tonight.
    I was further comforted by the slamming of doors downstairs, and the echoes of my mother yelling, and of her lover—my late
grandmother's oncologist and my prospective stepfather, Victor Lipscomb, M.D., Ph.D.—trying to calm her. His deep voice pleaded
up through the heating vents: "Emma, honey," and, "Come on," and, "We just have to keep working at this." Nor was I unhappy
to register, as I drifted to sleep, the quiet of a night without music.
    I awoke from a nightmare at dawn, gasping