_My father says that my mother turned into a goddamned feminist the same year that I turned ten.

What he really means is that she stopped cooking for us. For him.

One morning that year, as the biscuits rose in the oven, I read aloud to her the first page of Moby-Dick, and then she asked me to read it again, and I’m not sure why, but that was the last meal she ever made.

On my way home from school that day, I had daydreamed as I meandered along the unimaginative grid of streets that crisscrossed the neighborhood. There was something about the monotony of the walk that lent itself to reverie. Over one block, down one block. Over another block, down another. Over a third, down a third, and I would be home. But instead, I discovered my little brother Jacob, who was not old enough to be alone, hopping up and down at the corner of our street, his cheeks red with cold and a look of wonder battling with fear on his face. His shoulders were scrunched up to his ears, and his small hands waved wildly as the words spilled out.

I found my mother roosting in the dead and yellowing grass of the front yard, cross-legged. She wore her academic robes, with long, white stripes stretching down her sleeves. She leaned forward and rifled through the pages of a book as if the answer to some urgent question lurked inside.

Debbie from next door, who didn’t work and collected car parts and scrap metal in her backyard, stood silently on her porch. A battered Chevy idled in the street, and a boy from school named Patrick, who put his mouth on the water fountain when he drank, hung halfway out of the passenger side window.

I called to my mother from the sidewalk, but she did not lift her head.

_My mother had woken me early one morning, a couple months earlier, when the heat of summer had mercifully yielded. She pinched my shoulder, peering at me with owl eyes that gleamed yellow in the light from the hallway, and when she crept away, I knew I was supposed to follow. I crawled down from the top bunk as Jacob snored softly into the wall below. The kitchen windows were rimmed with darkness, but a hint of deep blue at the horizon warned of the looming dawn.

“Will you read to me while I make breakfast?” she asked.

She wore sweatpants and a ragged shirt with holes at the collar. Cursive lettering on the front read SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME! in faded ink. My mother was a small woman, and already we looked eye to eye. One of her hands clutched a spatula and the other a serrated knife. A log of breakfast sausage crusted in ice sat thawing on the counter. Her eyes were pleading. It was a supplication, as if from a schoolgirl, friendless in a new classroom.

That first morning, I read aloud from Great Expectations, and while there was much I did not understand, the images endured. Shadowy criminals lurked in the pantry. Rotting wedding dresses hovered in place of aprons, and creaky prison ships emerged from the misty suds in the sink. I looked forward to Pip’s inheritance as if it were mine, dreamed that it was.

All the while, my mother opened the fridge, rustled about, and closed it. She clicked on burners and brewed coffee. I sipped from her cup now and then, unable to reconcile the rich aroma with the flavor on my tongue. It seemed a great deception, this drink that was so thin and so acrid.

When she turned to the biscuits, my mother’s fingers were nimble, and her hands were sure, and she only ever measured things once, if she measured at all. Flour wound up in random nooks and crannies, crusted onto the tile floor, stuck to the fiber of my socks, blended into her hair.

She interrupted at haphazard intervals to ask questions, questions that arose from mysterious places between the scooping of flour and flipping of pages.

“Did you know your father pitched a perfect game once in high school?” she asked.

I did.

“And then his coach made him pitch another game that afternoon for the varsity team?” she continued. “He got clobbered, he says. Almost threw out his shoulder.” She smiled at this.

“Yes.”

She sawed through the frozen sausage like a lumberjack and paused to run her hands under warm water.

“Did you know he had to spend some time away when he was younger? Away from his father, I mean.” She said it into the sink, into the water. Then she returned to the stove and placed the meat on the skillet. “He was about your age. He had to…go away?”

In our tiny house, my parents’ bedroom door connected to the kitchen, and behind it I knew my father slept, the curtains pulled tightly shut against the new morning.

“To stay with another family. Somewhere out west,” she said, and she gestured with the spatula toward the window, as if west simply meant outside, meant elsewhere.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“I didn’t either,” she said.

I began to read again. She cooked the eggs in the sausage grease, and she showed no pain as they sizzled and popped and flung burning fat onto her arm.

“He tries,” she said. “Harder than you know.”

“Yeah,” I said, but I was still thinking about what lay out west.

“My first letter home to my mother about him, I called him a jerk,” she said. “An arrogant Yankee.” She laughed through her nose. “A proud New Yorker.”

“You’ve told me that before,” I said.

“I can’t believe I said that. I came around though, didn’t I?” she said. “Did you know your father used to take me on dates to the public library?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I came around sure enough,” she said. “Didn’t I come around?”

She smiled at that and then tapped the book on my lap with a floured finger, and her fingerprint stuck to the page in a swirl of white dust.

_“Worth all the effort,” my father would exclaim at dinner from his chair at the head of the table, chewing a mouthful and rolling his eyes into the back of his head, transporting himself to a shoebox apartment in Brighton Beach thirty years ago. “Just like I remember.”

Some of these dishes took hours to prepare, but only moments to eat. My father would slump back when he was finished, as if he had melted into the seat, as if he were the one who was spent, his arms dangling to the floor, a boxer resting between rounds.

“Glad you liked it,” my mother would say.

Dinners were always in the dining room. We served ourselves in the kitchen and brought our food to the table, where we were forced to salivate until everyone was seated. If I took a bite before we said the blessing, my father warned me that I would choke, and for a time I believed him. I wondered how many dead children must be slumped over their plates around the world. We hastily crossed ourselves, and my mother murmured the prayer like an incantation, and then we crossed ourselves again. I was unaware for a long time that other families did it differently, that not everyone had a ritual, that meals could be perfunctory.

At one of my mother’s birthday dinners, my mother’s sister and her family drove in from Covington, and we all crammed into the dining room. Half of us sat on folding chairs. We ate on mismatched dinnerware and the kids drank from oversized plastic cups from Garibaldi’s, the local pizza place. When we finished, plates full of chicken bones sat in front of us, and the tablecloth was spotted with crumbs and globs of a thick, yellow sauce.

My father leaned back in his chair, hands crossed over his stomach, and said to the room, “Back when we got married, you know how much I paid for our marriage license?” He looked solemnly around the group. He settled on me. “Seven bucks,” he said.

“Seven whole dollars,” my mother said.

“Is that expensive?” I asked.

“Nope. That’s my point,” my father said. “Your mother’s the best purchase I ever made.”

My aunt groaned and my uncle’s laugh boomed off the walls.

My mother said, “Haha.”

She scraped a handful of crumbs into her hand and deposited them on an empty saucer.

_A few mornings after she introduced me to Dickens and Pip and all of his expectations, I woke early and wandered heavy-lidded into the living room to find my mother in her chair, a neat manuscript cradled in her hands, and I recognized it immediately for what it was. The top page was pristine, all bright paper and black ink. The pages beneath did not appear to have been read, stacked neatly and compactly as they were, each corner aligned as if a fresh ream had been placed carefully into her arms like a baby.

I knew that she woke at four-thirty in the morning but did not start cooking breakfast until six. In that span, she read the newspaper, or more often, graded essays. She cocooned herself in her armchair with a steaming cup of coffee on a dinner tray and a stack of papers on her lap. She slogged through words crafted by some new generation of English majors, or, God forbid, business majors. If I got up to use the bathroom, I might hear her sigh and scratch at the topmost effort with her red pen, muttering under her breath, “Lord have mercy.”

Sometimes, though, she actually prayed, and I would later find her rosary sunk into the cushion of the recliner, stashed away like some furtive child’s contraband.

But that day it was her own work that lay heavy in her lap, and she considered me, standing there in shorts and a baggy t-shirt. I could see in the corner of the top page her name, and our address, and our phone number, and somehow that stack of paper felt like ours instead of just hers. She looked as if she would rise and give me the manuscript, and we would go to the kitchen, and I would read it to her while she bustled about. She would listen intently, editing in her mind while her muscles and her bones took care of the food, the recipe worn into her hands like creases into aged skin.

“What are you going to do with that?” I asked.

She fingered the edges as if she were about to shuffle it like a deck of cards.

“Send it off, I guess,” she said.

I wondered where you sent such things and to whom and how long until they came back all bound up in colorful jackets, ready to display in bookshops and on shelves. As I stood by her chair, she did not try to shield it from me, but she safeguarded it in the same way that I remember her holding Jacob when she brought him home from the hospital, her face full of desperate hope.

“And then we can read it?” I asked.

She smiled but was silent for a time, as if speaking would jinx the whole endeavor. She looked away and spoke both to the paper and to me.

“How about you go start another pot of coffee first?” she said. “Looks like this cup sprang a leak.”

When I came back, the pages were gone. She sat quietly in the chair, her eyes on the blank wall, with her hands in her lap as if she were at church, and soon the coffeepot started bubbling in the kitchen.

_She grew up on a farm outside of Jackson, Mississippi, and she resurrected her drawl when one of her five sisters got her on the phone. In the tradition of Southern women, she became the custodian of recipes handed down from mother to daughter, generation after generation. An old cookbook, thicker than a Bible, presided over our kitchen, its pages long since gone the color of browned butter, spattered with grease and gravy. The recipes were written in a way that only real cooks could comprehend, with a wink and a nudge: a handful of this, a couple scoops of that, a pinch of something else.

She counted among her repertoire buttermilk biscuits, beef stew and dumplings, fried catfish, and hushpuppies. Pecan pie and apple pie and poke cake. After marrying my father, she learned goulash, chicken paprikash, and sour cherry soup, dishes that his mother had made him when he was growing up. My father’s mother, the grandmother I had never met, died when my father was just a teenager, before his growing up was complete. I imagined his mother wearing a shawl over her head, even when it wasn’t raining, and saying things like “the old country,” and rolling her Rs and attacking her Cs.

I didn’t understand until later that my grandmother was from Galway, and she grew up eating cabbage and potatoes, corned beef, and soda bread. She learned those other dishes for the same reason my mother had, for her husband, my grandfather, who was born in Budapest. I never met him either, but that was its own sort of blessing.

_My mother came home from teaching late, and my father and I sat at the table.

He worked at the bank and arrived home in the late afternoon. Sometimes I did my homework and he read the paper. My brother watched TV, sprawled out on the floor like a scorpion, writhing about in that way that restless children do. Other times we played chess, as we did that day, and my father drank Heineken or St. Pauli Girl. The green bottles lined up along the kitchen counter like soldiers awaiting inspection. The dishes from breakfast still floated in the sink in dirty, tepid water.

My mother let her bag slip from her shoulder onto the couch, and it landed with a soft thud before it tipped over. A heap of manilla folders spilled onto the cushions, and she left them there.

“A knight on the rim is dim,” my father instructed. He was always teaching me something. He took his own knight and placed it triumphantly in the middle of the board, using his large hand to twist it into the checkered square like a stubborn screw. Even I could see that from there it sucked up all the air in the game, serving the dual purpose of attack and defense, blocking my plans, advancing his.

My mother came over, placed a hand on his shoulder, and observed. When she leaned into him, he put his arm around her waist. She took in the kitchen counter and the glass of golden beer at my father’s elbow.

“What’s for dinner?” he asked.

I studied the game for a moment and then looked up again and saw that she was watching me as I deliberated. I pushed a pawn two squares, its simple forward motion one of hopeless optimism.

“I’m not sure,” she answered. “We have some leftover rice and chicken. I’ll sauté veggies maybe? Make it into stir-fry.” A pause. “I’m tired.”

My father cut across the board with a bishop and nodded his head slowly, deliberately, just once.

“A stir-fry. Very exciting,” he said. His eyes were small behind his glasses, scanning back and forth over the squares before settling on me. “We call that a put-up job,” he whispered. He wiggled his mustache as if to let me in on the joke. I looked away, contemplated his troublesome knight.

My mother withdrew and went wordlessly into the kitchen. I could not see her, but after all our mornings together, it was easy to imagine each drawer as it opened and shut, the silverware clinking as she removed it from the dirty water, the click click click as the stove struggled to ignite.

My mother was the valedictorian of her high school, and published stories in the local paper. At Emory, her professors scribbled notes like “oh my” and “excruciating” and “gut-wrenching” on her work, all of which were compliments. She received a PhD in English literature and she could read poetry in Old English, her voice crooning like an ancient bard. Her dissertation “Body and Soul: The Physical Representation of Shakespeare’s Women” resembled an encyclopedia, and it sat menacingly on a living room shelf, covered in dust.

On days when her classes went well and ended early, she came home manic and swept through the house as if on roller skates. She pulled novels and books of poetry from the shelf, read them aloud, and left them open on tables and chairs and even on the floor. She scratched wildly in her notebooks and stabbed at her typewriter like a frenzied woodpecker.

“People can die of mere imagination!” she said once with a flourish at the dinner table. We waited for her to finish, but she did not continue.

“Ah, Shakespeare?” my father said. He leaned over his goulash, his elbows guarding his plate as if it might run away.

“No,” she said. She chased a slippery noodle around with her fork, stabbing at it ferociously. “Not Shakespeare.”

She told me that she sent poems to literary journals before I was born.

“But then,” she waved her arm, encompassing the kitchen, the house, the cosmos.

Soon after, I found one on her desk titled “Hestia’s Lament,” and I stared wide-eyed at my mother’s handwriting. In its final lines, concealed like a hibernating bear, was the word fucking.

_Over many mornings, we had finished Great Expectations and then Swiss Family Robinson. Tigers had prowled the backyard. Pirates swung from the gutters. The last time I read to my mother was the middle of November, and she had forgotten to wake me up.

The day before had been Veteran’s Day and my father stayed home because the bank was closed. My school was open, as was my mother’s university, a great consternation to us both. My mother dropped off Jacob at daycare before taking me to school and then going to work. When I got home that afternoon, my father was in front of the TV, and images of fluttering flags and grainy black-and-white photographs of soldiers from different eras paraded across the screen. Colored video of men trudging through the jungle appeared, cigarettes dangling from open mouths and unbuckled helmet straps swaying beneath their chins. He raised his glass and said, “To us,” then sloshed some of the golden liquid onto his jeans and the floor.

I snuck past him, went into my bedroom, and closed the door. I heard him get up and go into the kitchen to dig around in the fridge, clinking bottles together until he chose one. Then he shuffled into the living room, where the muffled voices of the newscasters welcomed him back.

At dinner, our knives and forks carved at soft beef and muted vegetables. They swam in a dark gravy, like ships in an oil spill. Heavy white bread sat in a basket on the table and a stick of butter drooped on a saucer. My father said nothing, offered no compliments and no complaints. We ate and drank in tense silence. Attempts at conversation quickly drowned. Halfway through the meal, my father grunted and wiped at his mouth with his napkin. The legs of his chair scratched at the hardwood floor as he shoved it back, and he left the room with just a finger in the air to solicit patience. My mother stared warily at the doorway through which he had disappeared, her owl eyes wide. I continued to eat, but somehow the dripping meat had grown dry.

Returning, he slammed a stack of papers onto the table, rattling our silverware. The pages were in wild disarray, the corners misaligned and jagged. He set the top sheet to the side, on top of his bread plate, and immediately the butter began to bleed through in a translucent dot. I could see my mother’s name in the top corner of the page, our address, and our phone number.

“Let’s see here, let’s see here,” he said, the edges of his words disappearing and sliding into one another. “This is just wonderful, just wonderful.” He repeated phrases like someone stalling for time. “Did you know your mother was a writer, Jacob?”

“Where did you get that?” my mother asked. Her voice was urgent, quick. Jacob ate on placidly, lost in his own world, safe inside of it.

My father raised a hand and waved it to quiet her.

“Hold on, hold on. Let me find it,” he said. He licked his fingers each time he turned a page, leaving a sticky fingerprint at the margins. Each one he turned, he let drop onto the table, and the pages littered the space in front of him, slowly covering his plate and the serving tray like a pile of snow-white leaves. But soon they swam in gravy and grease and grew limp. One fluttered down and inclined against his sweating beer glass, and the moisture shone through the soggy paper.

“The husband is my absolute favorite,” my father said as he looked over his glasses at my mother and then at me, and he grinned, his lips wet with spit. “He’s so…he’s so…what’s the word…” He continued to search and to lick his fingers and finally, he found what he was looking for and jabbed a wet fingertip down atop it. “Loathsome!” he shouted. “Loathsome.” He leaned his head back and trumpeted the word at the chandelier.

“Yes, he is,” my mother said. She watched Jacob eating and gripped a saltshaker in her hand.

“That word feels sticky to me,” my father continued. “It’s sticky, isn’t it, Jacob? Like I’m stuck in a swamp. Stuck in the mud.” He shuffled some more papers. Picked up dripping sheets from the table and put them back into the pile. “Or slimy. Yes, I think it’s slimy. Who knew that a word could make you feel like that?”

I felt a collision within me. The slow impact of two weighty forces shoving up against one another like tectonic plates. My father continued to talk using words like pretentious and dull, struggling sometimes to extract them from his brain, repeating them over and over once he did. My mother’s eyes sought mine only once, but I could not hold them after I saw what was there, and I stared down at my food, leaving her to weather his storm alone. Reality seemed a great weight as I watched those papers soaking up our dinner, and as my father regurgitated loathsome again and again. My mother shifted her eyes to Jacob, and Jacob continued to spoon messy bits of beef into his mouth and onto his shirt.

_Rain pattered on the windows the next morning and roused me when she did not. I grabbed a book from the shelf, the fattest one I could find, and met her in the kitchen, where the smell of sizzling bacon already filled the room.

She looked at the cover of the book I had chosen and turned back to the stove. I held Moby-Dick in my hands, and its weight felt like the promise of time.

A small metal step stool served as my chair, and my feet perched on the only rung. The top had been yellow once, but rust had fed upon it for ages, and now I sat atop a grim, gray-brown surface, shot through with specks of canary-colored paint. Next to me was the butcher block, my head even with its height. Flour hung in the air and floated down like fairy dust. Her cookbook lay on the counter, open and ignored. The words were nearly illegible, the ink blending into the stained pages.

She wiped a hand on her pants and scratched five white streaks down her leg.

“Just the first page,” she said. “Just the first one.”

I began to read and tried out a smile when Ishmael grumbled of the “damp, drizzly November in my soul.” It was November and it was damp, and it was drizzling. I boomed out a manufactured laugh at the idea of Ishmael standing in a mountain of overturned hats. I finished that first page and stopped at the sound of a cough and a groan from my parents’ bedroom. The bedsprings creaked under a shifting body. That is when my mother asked me to read it again, as if she had missed it the first time, as if this time she would pay attention.

The coffeepot hiccupped as it brewed its endless bitter fuel, and the rain continued to spit from above, but the sky lightened all the same. After peeking at the biscuits in the oven, my mother returned to the stove, and I chanted Melville’s words a second time into the morning air. I finished the page and noticed that she clasped the spatula upright like a wand, her other hand on her hip, while the eggs burned in the skillet. She had gone rigid, her body tense and stiff. Her eyes stared out the window into our backyard.

I stood abruptly, and the book flopped to the floor with a flutter of thin pages. In the yard, nothing moved except the drizzle. And for a moment, that’s all there was, a spiritless stretch of green and brown in the dreary light of a rainy morning. Our wire fence still curled at the top and threatened to collapse entirely, but soon I saw the crumbling ramparts of the backyard stronghold that had defended us against criminals and crooks and pirates and fierce, wild animals. A mass of unraked leaves camouflaged the pit traps in which snakes had slithered and tigers had paced those previous months. A neglected above-ground swimming pool, frogs and scum floating together on its murky surface, separated us from the marauders next door, revealing itself to me as the moat in which many of them had gurgled and drowned.

“What are you looking at?” I asked, admiring it all.

She turned and took in the paperback on the floor, the cookbook on the counter, the rusted step stool, and my lanky, childish body yearning to see whatever it was that she saw.

She shrugged and said, “Nothing.” She cracked the oven door again, and it creaked in a high-pitched whine. After grabbing a single biscuit with a bare hand, she scooped the eggs and the bacon onto a plate. “It’s all here.”

Her eyes were dull, and I could read nothing in the lines of her face. She let the spatula drop to her side, and it wept shiny grease onto the tile.