Wherever science dug shafts, cleared away layers of earth, penetrated caves, it always encountered this goddess in the distant strata. —Christa Wolf, Cassandra, 195 A wild woman, you can only raise your arms in perplexity. It is a different kind of logic that comesfrom her. —Ibid., 301 I A bright July morning. We sit at the round breakfast table, Monteverdi on the radio. I have made scrambled eggs. It is Saturday. She has been here with me all week. The air conditioning in her house has been broken for a decade and she wfll not pay to fix it, or let us do it. I have been as tender as I am able. Each time she begins to teU a story for the fourth or fortieth time, I breathe deeply, try to slow my synapses down, relax, smile, loosen my vocal cords and jaw. I have not had the chance to work for days. My back and shoulders, my arms and fingers long to be at my desk, my eyes to meet the green gaze of my computer screen. Somewhere inside it are words demanding my attention , but I am breakfasting with my mother, whom I love very dearly. I want to write about her. The problem is only that I cannot stand being with her very long. A carton of milk I bought yesterday is on the table. I had been out of milk for my coffee. Is that for me? she says. Recently I reprimanded her for not drinking her powdered milk, which she buys because it is cheaper than whole milk. Naughty mommy Her diet when she is home alone has become increasingly reduced to carbohydrates. She snacks on saltines, of 101 102Fourth Genre which she has perhaps a half dozen boxes on the floor ofher kitchen at any given time. She keeps her cans and boxes of food on the kitchen floor instead of the cupboards, and has cartons of things she will never eat, along with many cleaning products and gaUons ofsoft drinks bought because they were on sale. They grow flyspecked and covered with cobwebs, but it is her hope that my husband and I wfll use these items, obtained with coupons assiduously saved and sorted when she could stiU see weU enough to read. Saving coupons for herself, for us, and for her neighbors was a major activity for many years. She assures me that she eats vegetables, but I doubt this. It has become too much trouble for her to cook on the hotplate I got her after they turned offthe gas on her grease-covered stove. Opening cans has become difficult also, and she has lost successive can openers in the webby rubble ofher kitchen. She complains of being unable to chew most foods. On the sly she spoons from containers of chocolate icing, her current favorite addiction. It was peanut butter before that. She is eighty-six. The past was different. In the past she used to enjoy chewing bones, chicken bones especiaUy. When my mom was done with a chicken, that chicken would be truly gone. She did a better job on a carcass than crows or ravens. Now we pursue a slow meandering path that travels ultimately downhiU, toward infant feedings. She has no teeth left ofher own, and does not like to wear her dentures. The dentist tried to adjust them twelve times but they continued to hurt. She wears them sometimes for show, for parties at our house, or when the grandchüdren come, or when she wants to impress someone. When she is wearing her teeth, she puts on a diffident look and a gracious girlish smile. Sometimes she forgets to take the teeth to the event. Deep in her marrow, like the marrow of the chicken bones she used to greedily chew and suck, she does not care what anyone thinks. I do my own thing, she says. ? While I eat my eggs the familiar reaUties gUde by like figure skaters perfecting their loops, their figure eights, their signs ofinfinity and zero. This portion ofmy life is difficult and inevitable, I remind myself. It is my destiny to resist her, to care for her...