"Why not?" I asked.

"I don't know. I suppose they insisted on doing it their way. It seemed to me that the carpenter was the only one who knew what he was talking about, but he left in disgust. The boy drowned, and there was nothing we could do but watch it happen when the tide came in."

As we sit on the wooden bench and the evening dusk rises in a wave of darkness from the horizon, I can see the pain of that memory etched on my mother's face, her hazel eyes looking back at a life vanishing before her eyes.

The director of the Landings is a bully, pure and simple. She's reportedly got the owner of the place wrapped around her perfectly manicured finger. She cruises into work in her Cadillac and hurries off to lunch with her slightly smaller but no less blond a.s.sistant. They are always hurrying somewhere, blowing by in a hurricane of perfume.

Fortunately we don't have much truck with them.

In her little apartment, Mom is claustrophobic and lonely. To combat both issues, she keeps her door open and plays piano, hoping to lure in admirers. She's pretty effective at it. People wander by, hear Bach or Debussy, and stick their heads in the door, curious. Slowly but surely, she makes a few friends.

One of them is a woman named Carol, a retired art teacher. My mother's hobby for many years has been watercolors. Some of them are pretty good. Emmy still has the painting of a clown walking a chicken on a leash that my mother made when Emmy was just a baby. So Carol and my mother decide to paint together. The Landings has an art studio. We saw it when they took us on a tour of the place. What we hadn't noticed is that no one was actually using it. Like so many of the amenities at the Landings, it is only there for show. The tables aren't placed at a convenient height for painting, and my mom, being handicapped, has great difficulty in there. But no adjustments will be made. Still my mother and Carol somehow manage to paint together.

Carol has a daughter my age, and like me her daughter is constantly stopping by to help her mother with one thing or another. Mom gets confused and calls the daughter "Carol's mother."

"Carol's daughter," I correct her.

"Oh, yes. Of course," she replies, but next time she does it again, mentioning something about "Carol's mother." And that's what we are: mothers to our own mothers. I am constantly wiping my mother's face, washing her hair for her, and exhorting her to get out and do things with friends.

Emmy is also trying to find a way to fit in at her new school. She's been pestering me to try to get her into the other private school, but it's not doable. We've already received a scholarship at this place, and it would be way too late to get one anywhere else. She's despondent, but one day she comes eagerly over to the car when I pull up.

"There's auditions for a play," she says, her eyes bright. I can't help but remember the three-year-old Emmy who stood on a fiveinch curb and exclaimed, "It's a stage!"

"Do you want me to come with you?" I ask.

"Would you?"

So I find a seat in the back of the auditorium to watch the auditions. The kids are good, but Emmy's cold reading is brilliant. She's funny and quick. The woman who will be directing the show is not actually a teacher. She's been hired from a community acting group. After the auditions, she bounces back to where Emmy and I are sitting together. Her eyebrows leap to her hairline when she sees me. I'm the only mother there, but she seems friendly and enthusiastic about Emmy.

"You've got a real instinct for theater," she says to Emmy. Then, still smiling, "I'm not going to cast you in this show, but I hope you'll audition for one of the shows I'm doing in the community. You're really good."

Emmy and I are confused. If she's so good, why isn't the woman going to put her in the show?

"It's probably because you're a freshman," I tell her as we're driving away. But later we find out that another freshman was put in the show. It's baffling.

Over the next few years Emmy will have her share of successes and crushing disappointments. For the disappointments, I usually trot out the old story about being a finalist in a screenwriting compet.i.tion and being sure that I was going to Hollywood and then not making it and feeling like the air had been sucked from the planet, or the sun had suddenly expired. And then a couple of weeks later my friend Mikey died and I had to take over his cla.s.ses and be there with my friends to help them as they grieved and suddenly not getting that award and that new life in Hollywood didn't matter so much. I don't think this story helps, but I tell it anyway.

Although Emmy's audition didn't land her a role in that show, it did garner attention from the school's young theatrical genius-a senior.

"Your audition rocked my socks," he told her in the hallway the next day. And as the director of the student-directed play that year, he took her under his wing. Emmy found herself ensconced with the nicest, smartest, most intellectually adventurous group of kids in the school. Hallelujah.

But there are still a few b.u.mps in the road.

One day I pull up to the school to pick up Emmy. She lands in the pa.s.senger seat like a wounded bird.

"What's wrong?" I ask her.

Immediately she begins to sob, heart-wrenching, wheezing, mucus-manufacturing, chest-heaving sobs. The story emerges in fits and starts.

"There were these boys . . . in one of the cla.s.srooms . . . and I had to go in there to get a . . . book I'd forgotten."

Blood begins pounding in my head like African drums.

"They saw me and they started laughing. One of them said . . . 'It's that girl . . .Emmy . . . she's so weird.' . . . and they kept laughing at me."

"What did you do, honey?"

"I turned and ran!" she screams at me.

So there are a lot of things worse than being laughed at, but at that moment, with my child sobbing in my car, I'm wanting to go kick some juvenile a.s.s. Rage seethes through me like red-hot lava. I'm p.i.s.sed off at these unknown boys but even more p.i.s.sed off with myself for letting her come to this school full of rich a.s.sholes. (I know. Many of the parents turn out to be incredibly kind and some of these kids will become her lifelong friends, but none of that is registering in the moment.) I can't do anything except try to stifle a terrible memory that suddenly surfaces.

Our paths only crossed once. She was on a blue bike riding across the newly built wooden bridge that spanned the Willow Branch Creek. She didn't have a "cool" bike with a banana seat like we did. She was not cool. She was blond and pale and plump. She wore the plaid skirt and plain white shirt of the Catholic School. My friend Carmen and I spied her. There were two of us and one of her.

"Fatty Patty," we taunted. She tried to ride past us, but as soon as she crossed the bridge and was on the concrete walkway, we closed in. "Fat b.i.t.c.h," we called her. One of us grabbed her bike and the other pushed her and she fell to the ground. Perhaps she skinned her leg or the palms of her hands as she fell. But there she was on the ground while we stood above her. Tears streamed down her face in helpless impotent rage. She screamed at us to leave her alone as she stood and lifted up her bike. Tears streaked her red face. Even as she rode off on her blue bike, pedaling furiously to escape our insults, I knew she was-at that moment-far superior to us. My throat constricted. I wanted to call out, "I'm sorry. Please. . . ." I doubt I could have articulated what was in my heart. But if I could have, it would have been "forgive me"-anything to erase the sudden shame I felt. I was a kid with a heart full of pain and she was my mirror.

I guess I figured that I'd see her again somewhere and I could make it up to her. But I never did see her again. She was probably afraid to come through the park after that-that beautiful city park with its old oaks, its thick carpet of gra.s.s, and the playground and basketball court just past the azalea bushes.

My karma wasn't exactly instant, but it came. In December Carmen and I and the park boys rode our banana-seat bicycles on a mission. We were headed to the barbershop that belonged to Harold's grandfather, located in what we then called "colored town." This was in the late 1960s, and the good folks who divvied up the tax dollars neglected to fix the roads in this area of town. When the front tire of the bike I was riding hit a pothole, I flew face-first over the handlebars, grinding my lips on the gravel road.

Hours of plastic surgery restored my lips but left me looking freakish with oversized lips on my small face and a scar running down my chin.

"You'll grow into the lips and the scar will fade," the plastic surgeon a.s.sured us.

It didn't matter what the future held. I became a pariah among the park kids with Carmen as their ringleader. They called me names. They laughed at me. They told me I was ugly. I had not yet read The Metamorphosis but I knew how it felt to wake up one day as a c.o.c.kroach. Unlike the girl on the blue bike, I did not lash out angrily. I suppose I thought they were right. I was hideous to look at and not worthy of their company.

Eventually I found a new friend. She also earned the disapproval of the park kids. She was a "rich kid," they accused. But they kept their taunts in check because already she possessed something, some aura of redneck aristocracy that alarmed the boys and cowed the girls.

Soon Carmen concocted an excuse for a fight. She claimed I was after a boy that she liked. I had no interest in the boy and I didn't want to fight Carmen though if it came down to it, I thought I could win. Carmen was soft and plump, and though I was small, I was wiry and came equipped with a gut full of rage.

It came down to it. My new friend and I were playing tetherball, the one game I was really good at because I could smack the h.e.l.l out of that ball, when Carmen showed up, like a gunslinger in a Western, and issued her challenge. I reluctantly followed her to a gra.s.sy spot behind the azalea bushes. The other kids circled around us, all but one of them rooting for Carmen. I felt like a fool standing in the circle. I wasn't mad at Carmen. I didn't hate her. But I was supposed to beat her up or get beaten up.

My new friend stood in the crowd of park kids, arms crossed, green eyes narrowed, waiting to see what I would do. So when Carmen came after me, I balled my fist as if I were getting ready to smack the tetherball, and I hit her. Soon all was a confusion of yells, slaps, and punches. Then Carmen began crying, her face turned red, and the tears made a snotty mess of her face. She yelled that I had hurt her.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"You go to h.e.l.l!" she screamed.

There was nothing I could do. My green-eyed friend and I walked away.

That was a long time ago, and yet I still have pockets of shame and guilt. The girl on the blue bike is one of them.

FOUR.

AUTUMN 2005.

My Uncle Dave died in the summer of 2005. He was the second of the "Field kids" to go. We didn't go to his service. It had been many years since Mother had seen him, but she was saddened by his death. She had often told me the story of how he had searched the waterways around their town in a rowboat after the hurricane of 1938, trying for days to find a friend of his who had disappeared with his boat. The boat was found, but not the friend.

In early September, in a year of hurricanes and floods, Hank and I decide to strip and re-varnish our back deck. We've been putting it off for several years while humidity, rain, snow, and neglect take their toll. We can wait no longer. The wood is turning green, and I worry it will soon begin to rot beneath us.

We have the television on constantly that weekend. Hurricane Katrina is battering New Orleans and the vicinity, and like most people we are horrified and fascinated at the same time. Coming from Florida, we have a deep respect for hurricanes. We feel the same way about alligators. They're scary and unpredictable and yet they somehow define us-or at least they did. We no longer live in Florida or anywhere near a coast, and we do not envy the people in the path of this storm.

The weather is balmy in Charlotte-perfect for working outdoors. While I stand on the front porch admiring the clear Carolina blue sky, a large cobalt-blue b.u.t.terfly with black trim etched on its wings comes dancing in front of me. Though I come from a family of rationalists, I tend to believe in signs, omens, messages from the G.o.ds. This b.u.t.terfly making hieroglyphs in the air makes me think of transitions and transformations. Mother's health, physical and emotional, is so erratic, that I wonder if the universe is sending me a warning. But when I speak to her later that day, she sounds fine.

Hank gets out the power washer. The work is long and laborious, and the green gunk so ingrained that I have to hold the hard, pulsing power washer just inches away from the wood. I shred much of it. It's good to have something to do besides watch the bungling in New Orleans that's costing people their lives. I am full of outrage, but like most people I don't have much to offer besides a paltry monetary donation.

The hurricane pa.s.ses and, though it was a bad one, it seems not to be as devastating as had been feared; the country will soon resume business as usual. Our televisions will return to their regularly scheduled programming, or so we think.

My life, at the time, seems to be on an even keel. A week earlier I went to a "radical forgiveness" workshop. The afternoon of the workshop I was piled on the floor with about thirty other people like puppies, everyone touching two or three other people in a human chain. Somehow in that moment I managed to let go of forty-something years of anger toward my father. I did this by letting myself remember how I felt about him when I was a little girl. Because he'd left us when I was so young, I didn't know him well, and yet at one point I had loved him. I had loved him because he was my daddy and I didn't know any better. I had loved him unconditionally. This was something I had not allowed myself to feel for him in all these years-simple, uncomplicated love. It didn't matter that he was a s.h.i.tty father. It didn't matter whether he deserved it or not. I simply let myself feel what I had once felt for a brief time in my younger life, and it was good-like something black and putrid had been scrubbed from my insides.

On Monday the levees break in New Orleans and the poorest people in our land are left to drown before our eyes. My husband and I have the deck stripped and next we have to apply coats of varnish. At night we can't work and so I stay glued to the TV, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. We are all culpable in this travesty.

Eventually I turn away and go to bed. I wake up at 3 a.m., completely alert. Hank, who is often up all night, is nonplussed when he finds me working at my computer.

"What are you doing?" he asks.

"I can't sleep. For some reason I'm wide awake."

And so I work until morning when I take Emmy to school and then go to Mom's apartment to tend to her needs. I wash her feet, put ointment and Band-Aids on her toes, and put on her compression hose. Then we sit in the warm light from the windows, talking about hurricanes. One family story is that my mother's favorite grandmother, Gammie, was so frightened by an enormous hurricane that hit Connecticut in the summer of 1938 that she died of a heart attack soon afterward.

Around eleven that morning, the phone rings at my mother's apartment. I answer it. It's my brother Jo.

"I need to tell you what happened," he says in a gentle voice. "You can decide when and how to tell Momma. You know whether or not she can handle it. Daddy is dead. He died in the hospital this morning at 2:45 a.m."

I hang up the phone and something completely unexpected happens: I burst into tears. "Daddy's dead," I say. I kneel down and place my head in my mother's lap, and I let her comfort me. My father, whom I hardly ever thought about, is gone.

We drop our plans for the day and drive over to a coffee shop. As I sit there with my cup of cappuccino, I feel such grief. My mother also grieves. She grieves for the years she lost to this man who demeaned and vilified her, this man who slept with his students and brawled with men whose wives he took a liking to. She grieves for the brilliant young woman she was, whose musical talents overshadowed her husband's, much to her chagrin and his rage.

She starts to tell me one of the stories, but I stop her. I've heard them all-the burned ma.n.u.scripts, the master's degree she earned at Yale but didn't take so as not to be his "equal," the sly insults that came from his charming mouth. I do not want to drink from that bitter cup on this day: Tuesday, September 6, 2005. We go to my house. I head upstairs to work, leaving her on the front porch to enjoy the weather. When I come back out, she's sobbing.

A couple of weeks later, my brothers and I meet in Jacksonville for my father's memorial service. He always said that when he died, everything he had would go to me and my brothers. He didn't have a lot when he died except for the Steinway. What else there was of value (a Cadillac and a condo) belonged as much to his wife as to him. We thought it might have been nice to have some of his books (he had an extensive library) or some token to remember we actually had a father. Then, after the service, a middle-aged man we have never met before comes up to us and tells us our father "had been like a father" to him.

"Well, I'm glad he got to have that experience with someone," I respond, glancing at the widened eyes of my brothers.

"When they moved to the beach condo, he gave me all these books," he tells us. "I didn't know what to do with them so I donated most of them to the library."

What I learn is that my fate at fifty is to be needed but not necessarily wanted. Is there any cliche my life is not fulfilling, I wonder, dabbing hormone cream on my neck each night to prevent the heat coil inside me from glowing red. I spend my evenings playing Scrabble with my elderly mother so she's not lonely. Mornings and afternoons I drive my teenage daughter to school in a seven-year-old station wagon that makes a horrible squeal, which no mechanic can identify. I stand in the checkout line at the supermarket with an enormous package of incontinence pads, resisting the urge to explain to the cashier that they're not for me. I get a perfunctory kiss and squeeze from my husband before I totter off to bed each night.

This is not how I envisioned my life. Perhaps that's the problem. I didn't have a real vision. I didn't make a plan. I set goals for various accomplishments, but I didn't really have any idea beyond "write and publish a novel."

Lest it seem as if I do nothing but measure my life in coffee spoons, I should add that morning drives to school with Emmy are respites of light and laughter. We blend in with the morning traffic, and I explain "lane science" as I shift from one lane to the next. We listen to her music-CDs by Bright Eyes or the Almost Famous soundtrack. Early on, I explain what's going on in Conor Oberst's lyrics in the song "Lua" when he says to the girl, "[You] just keep goin' to the bathroom, always say you'll be right back."

"She's doing drugs in the bathroom, baby," I tell her.

We have a special street we like to look down as we crawl past it. It's called English Gardens and it looks like it leads to some lovely alternate dimension where no one has any worries.

We also talk about whatever she has to do that day. One day she begins to recite the "5 C's" of public speaking. When she gets to "confidence," we spontaneously break into The Sound of Music: "I have confidence in me!" We're laughing like lunatics by the time she gets out of the car to go to school. Then I go over to my mother's and she's a crying wreck.

I'm going through my mother's things. She's always wanting help with "all these papers." So many letters. So many people who admired her over the years. I open one of the cards from one of her Lost Colony friends and begin to read.

...I've been listening to our performances of '80 & '81: Vivaldi's Gloria and Faure's Requiem. Although the recording quality pretty much sucks, the phrasing & musicality, artistry & pa.s.sion, still shine through profoundly. I want very much to obtain recordings of us doing Haydn's "Ma.s.s in Time of War," Vaughan Williams's Serenade to Music that we sang in the gardens for Princess Anne. If you have copies of these, could you, would you make a copy for me and send it? I miss it all so much.

As for me, I'm doing better. Time has been the only thing that's dulled the pain of losing Jose & I can tell it's finally working. My health is still holding up okay. I take 5 doses of AZT every day which gets tiresome, but I figure the alternative is less than acceptable!

You're a great lady, Roz. You've been a tremendous influence in my life & continue to be one to this day. I love you.

There's no date on the card. The writer is probably one of her many gay friends who died of AIDS. She gets sad when she thinks of them. I don't show her the card, but I can't bring myself to throw it away. I place it in a box of other letters and cards-a reminder of who she is.

She needs reminders because in her present circ.u.mstances she feels like a nonent.i.ty.

Emmy has the same problem. Her second year of high school proves challenging. The seniors who had been her saviors the year before have graduated. She tries to find friends in her own grade, but most of them simply don't know what to make of her. Emmy sometimes imitates the girls' reaction to anything that doesn't conform with their idea of the world: "Different . . .is, well, different ." And different isn't a good thing to be. She does find some friends but they are not among the "double-names"-the pretty girls who all wear their blond hair parted on the same side. One boy manages to really get under her skin. As they sit outside after school, he brags about all the expensive cars his father owns. And then I pull up in the carpool line in my station wagon with the annoying squeal and the two fist-sized holes in the back b.u.mper where an SUV rammed me; instead of fixing the car, I used the insurance money to pay for one month's tuition.

But Emmy manages. The theater continues to be her refuge and her source of friendships. We ultimately realize why this school is worth the money: the drama program is innovative and exciting and driven by the students themselves. It is there that Emmy is introduced to experimental theater with its intellectual and artistic challenges. There she finds her metier.

While we are obviously different from the other families there, Emmy is generally happy with her two strange parents, both of whom work at home. She considers us more interesting than the lawyers and surgeons and CEOs who parent the other kids. She can let drop that her mother is a writer and that her father has an Emmy for his television engineering work on the Olympics. In her political science cla.s.s, she is far more knowledgeable about the issues and the different stances of the two main parties because she grew up hearing us argue about Clinton and Bush, same-s.e.x marriage, the Iraq invasion, global warming, or whatever is the cable news outrage du jour.

And she still has the Charlotte Children's Choir. I spent my childhood entertaining myself while my mother was in one rehearsal or performance after another. I am spending my daughter's childhood in much the same way. The highlight happens in her tenth grade year when her choir is the featured choir in a concert at Carnegie Hall. As Hank and I sit up in the balcony of that enormous ornate hall and listen to those angelic voices, I think of my mother, who also once played in Carnegie Hall as the guest pianist in a symphony orchestra. My thoughts are sentimental, I'll admit, but musicians seem to me to walk with a lighter tread than the rest of us, and we live in a better world for their presence. Even my father gave his gift to the world. He played jazz his whole adult life-in bars and restaurants, with combos or alone. His music and his big toothy smile probably lifted the spirits of many an unhappy soul.

FIVE.

SPRING AND SUMMER 2006.

I try to incorporate my mother into my life whenever possible, but the divide between her world and mine is on the Grand Canyon scale. Once, while going through old newspaper clippings about her life, I found a cartoon showing a conductor with raised arms hovering over a p.r.o.ne long-haired individual holding a guitar. Above the drawing there was this quote: "The tight-lipped comment made by musician's musician Rosalind MacEnulty when a fellow conversationalist opined that maybe cla.s.sical music would come back now that the public had gotten a surfeit of rock 'n' roll: 'It never left.'"

Perhaps she never appreciated rock music, but rock musicians appreciated her when they came into contact with her. On her mantel for many years were four beautiful Faberge eggs given to her by the drummer of Pink Floyd, so the story goes. Now I have them.

One day in the middle of one of our rambling conversations about life, I ask my mother, "Do you feel complete?" I want to know if she's okay with having reached the end of her life. Is there anything else she needs to do?

We're sitting at the round table in her apartment where we always play Scrabble, and she taps her fingers nervously on the wood.

"I don't want the requiem to die when I do," she answers.

I think of the box of ma.n.u.scripts in their tattered black folders-that box of poltergeists that follows us everywhere-now sitting on the shelf of her closet. The score needs to be put in computer format if we're ever going to send it to a publisher and that will cost a few thousand dollars. And would anyone publish it?