The week I started middle school, my mother told me she would be late picking me up on Thursdays. On Thursdays, she said, she would be taking frozen yogurt to Benjamin, a boy whose family lived out near the Air Force base. I gathered he was very sick, possibly dying. Is it cancer? I asked. Something like cancer, my mother said.
She said that frozen yogurt was one of the few things he liked that he could digest. She was always putting herself in the way of the sufferings of others. When I was eight a prostitute came to live in our pool house. Her name was Nan. There was also a goat that roamed from room to room, leaving droppings on the floor. One of the deaconsβonly men were allowed to be deaconsβphoned my mother.
Jamie Quatro on the dual lens of memory. The following day I went out back and Nan was there, standing beside our pool, smoking a cigarette. Her thighs were tiny, the size of my own, the skin loose and wavery. She stubbed out her cigarette on the pool deck, sat on the diving board, and crossed her legs, hooking them together with her foot. You have an angel for a mother. Four days later she was gone. All costume, my mother said, the poor woman. Then there was the time my mother called to me from the kitchen.
Something in her voice made me run. I found her opening cupboards and putting cans of soup and boxes of cereal into paper grocery bags. Help me carry these, she said. We loaded the bags into the station wagon, the babysitter from three houses down arrived to watch my little brother and sister, and my mother and I drove to a stucco house near the university.
I waited in the car while she went up and rang the bell. The door opened; my mother came back. From the shadowy interior a toddler emerged. She was naked except for what looked like a pair of concrete underwear, a molded cast around her private parts.
