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shock treatment improperly done, the mouthpiece the wrong size (Corb).
    The eight to ten hard drinks a day she consumed, in addition to the tranquilizers and sleeping pills she ingested (Evan, my mother’s nurse who stayed on after she died).
    How, if a doctor wouldn’t give her a prescription, she’d drive all over town until she found one who would (also Evan).
    Her suicide was the last of three attempts. In the first, she saved up pills in the hospital, then took them all at once. In the second, at home, she slit her wrists, then got into bed. My father found her early the next morning, drenched in blood. An ambulance was called, we children told nothing, her bedroom cleaned while we were at school (Evan again). I remember getting dressed for Brownies that day, long after the ambulance left. I remember the ambulance arriving, the medics having trouble getting the stretcher around the corners of the hallway. Go back to bed, my father said, everything’s fine.
    Also not my own memories, but ones I’ve collected, are the things people said about her, anecdotes, facts.
    When she was a baby, she spit peas all over the walls of the kitchen. This is the only memory her sister, Aunt Lyla, has told me. I knew nothing about their parents, my grandparents, only that my grandmother died before I was born and my grandfather later on, when I was four or five. We didn’t see him much, only on occasion. There were no pictures of these grandparents displayed, nor were there any of my mother and Aunt Lyla together as girls, although I believe some existed once upon a time.
    Other things people said about my mother:
    She was afraid of horses.
    She was beautiful. Smart, talented. They mentioned her skill in Japanese flower arrangements, her lovely thank-you notes.
    She was president of the women students at Stanford and graduated magna cum laude.
    She rolled bandages for the Red Cross. She volunteered as a docent at the Henry E. Huntington Library.
    Her table manners were flawless.
    Then, there were the things left behind when she died, which themselves seem like memories. Items sorted through by my father, some kept, others discarded—no particular logic to what was saved or not. A few dresses in the closet, some shoes: flats in different colors, with a T-strap over the instep. Specially made for her, my father said; she had difficulties with her feet.
    Costume jewelry. Chunky beads, clip-on earrings, pins. An empty striped hatbox. A notebook on Japanese flower arranging, from a class she took once, plus a few black metal trays, heavy as skillets, affixed with sharp metal combs onto which I would sometimes, in an attempt to reach my mother, impale a few select flowers, anchored by dark green modeling clay and smooth black stones.
    Her recipe box. Her linens, an array of tablecloths, placemats, napkins, guest towels, all folded and starched into packages with cardboard on the back, clear plastic in front, a slip of paper with the contents listed neatly in her handwriting. The linens, her crystal and silver, went to me since I was her daughter. I used to pore over the stuff as a child, trying to find clues about her, occasionally coming across a slip of paper I hadn’t seen before that might say, in her own handwriting, “silver melon pitcher.”
    Two cabinets, each with a delicate brass lock. One is the liquor cabinet; the other, a cabinet in the bathroom, well stocked with bottles of prescriptions long gone bad.
    This last item exists because of her death: a package of condolence letters sent to my father, tied with string and kept in the bottom drawer of a chest standing in our living room. As a child, each time I read the letters—a secret project, my father didn’t know—I had to redo the string so that in the end it became tangled and knotted.

T HREE
    St. Nicholas …
    It’s morning and I’m at my Powerbook, a whole day ahead of me, trying to get caught up with work before