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play when they were young, or they see a dog go down the street that reminds them of the one they used to have when they were a kid—a Boston terrier maybe, or a collie. For a moment, she looked like my grandmother, the day she heard Red Skelton died, and like herself, the day my father had pulled up in front of our house with the baby in his arms, that he called my sister. He’d been gone over a year by the time that happened, but that moment when she saw the baby—that was the worst.
    I forgot how little babies were, she said, after he’d left. There was that melted look on her face then too. Maybe the word is crumpled . Then she recovered. You were much cuter, she said.
    Back when she used to take me places, she also told me stories while she drove, but once she started staying home all the time, dinners were when she told me her stories, and even when they were sad I never wanted them to end. I always knew, after I set my fork down, the story was over, or even if it hadn’t ended—because these weren’t stories with endings—and her face changed back.
    We’d better clear away these dishes, she said. You have homework to do.
    The real ending came when my parents moved back north and sold the hot-dog wagon. They didn’t have that kind of show on TV anymore, like when we were growing up, she said. With dancers. They had driven all the way across the country without ever noticing that The Sonny and Cher Show and The Glen Campbell Hour had been canceled. But that was just as well, actually, because what she wanted most was never to be some dancer on television. She wanted to have a baby.

    Then you were on the way, she said. And my dream came true.
    My father got the job selling insurance policies. His specialty was injury and disability. Nobody could calculate faster than my father how much money a person got for losing an arm, or an arm and a leg, or two legs, or the bonanza, all four limbs, which, if they were smart enough to have bought a policy from him before, meant they were a millionaire, set up for life.
    My mother had stayed home with me after that. They lived with my father’s mother then, and after she died, they got the house, though that was not the place we lived after the divorce. My father lived in our old house with Marjorie now, and Richard, and Chloe. He took out a second mortgage on that one, to buy my mother out, which was the money my mother used to get the place we moved into. Smaller, without the tree in the yard where my swing had been set up, but enough room for how our family was now, the two of us.
    These were not stories she told me over dinner. This part I had pieced together on my own, and from Saturday nights with my father, when he and Marjorie took me out to dinner, and sometimes he said things like, If your mother hadn’t made me give her all that money for the house, or Marjorie would press her lips together and ask me if my mother had applied for a normal job yet.
    My mother’s problem about leaving the house had been going on so long now I couldn’t remember when it started. But I knew what she thought: it was a bad idea, going out in the world.
    It was about the babies, she said. All those crying babies everywhere, and the mothers stuffing pacifiers in their mouths. She said more too—about weather and traffic, and nuclear power plants and the danger of waves from high-voltage lines. But it was the babies that got to her most, and their mothers.

    They never pay attention, she said. It’s as if the big accomplishment was giving birth to these children, and once they had them, the whole thing was just a chore that you got through the best you could by pumping them full of soda and sitting them down in front of videos (these were just starting to get popular then). Doesn’t anyone ever talk to their children anymore? she said.
    Well, she did, all right. Too much, in my opinion. She was always home now. The only person she really had any interest in seeing now, she said, was