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apricot, like spoiled fruit. Petechiae rashes, fungi. Tumors lit up by green and vermillion dyes, like fire-works. Such vivid reminders of the body’s frailties, and my father was determined to protect us from all of them.
    First, he had my mother to save. He haunted her with articles gleaned from the geneticists at Creighton, urging her to have a hysterectomy from so early on I can remember no time when the word ovary wasn’t linked for me to a sense of doom and inexplicable grief. Long before we’d gotten our periods for the first time, all three of us had been catechized: Grow up; have children fast; and get those things out of you.
    Time bombs , Sara called them.
    Ovary . The word was beautiful, like a poem—like things that open or encircle: overture , oval , ovation , but it was a sinister, destructive beauty. I pictured my ovaries inside of me like milkweeds, whispery, white pods ready to burst, and the slightest ripple or heartbeat might blow their seeds out, poisonous, to disperse their terrible harvest deep inside me. In between other things I wanted—for the Vietnam war to end, to become a judge, to write poetry—I wanted the curse on my family to be lifted. I wanted not to worry. I wanted to forget, to live my life the way other people did. And I tried. Though never exactly carefree, I pushed away worry the best I could. I had boyfriends, forgot our story for a while, then (shuddering) welcomed it back. Then pushed it away again. If I didn’t think about it, it wouldn’t happen. Couldn’t the fates leave us alone? All the old relatives were dead, and my mother had never had a sick day in her life. I never even saw her sleeping. She was always up before us, awake after us; sharp-tongued, sharp-sighted; planning, cooking, reading, making lists. Maybe Sylvia had broken the curse and set us free.
    Then in 1983, my second year at Oxford, studying metaphysical poetry and living in a mushroom-colored building without heat, my mother’s only cousin—Gail, Pody’s only child—was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. She was forty-seven, only two years older than Pody had been when she died. The prognosis was bad. My mother described it all to me on the phone. “She woke up one morning and it was like she was eight months pregnant,” my mother said, her voice trembling. Her whole abdomen filled with terrible cells. Gail—sweet, loving Gail, who loved discount shopping, who let me store my sagging couch in her basement each summer when I was an undergrad at Northwestern, whose vivid snapshots were glued right down in our own family albums among the living, not stuck up on a wall with the dead. Gail wasn’t part of the past, she’d taught me how to make poached eggs and introduced me to Marshalls! She was part of the here and now.
    My mother was out of her mind with grief. It’s like Sylvia all over again for her, my father told us. Like posttraumatic stress.
    I was twenty-three by then, and forty-seven didn’t seem all that old anymore, and it clearly didn’t to my mother at forty-nine, because soon after learning about Gail’s diagnosis, she finally let the doctors “take everything out.” She had a complete hysterectomy: her uterus and both ovaries removed. She wasn’t taking any chances. Why leave anything behind to tempt the fates?
    This wasn’t like my mother. I knew she must be terrified.
    She didn’t tell any of us about the operation until it was over. I found out on the pay phone in the back of the Middle Common Room at Pembroke College, feeding octagon-shaped fifty-pence pieces into the octagon-shaped hole at the bottom of the phone. They hadn’t wanted to worry us, my father explained. “And there was nothing you could do—from over there,” my mother added. “It’s much better telling you now it’s over.”
    My father said the surgery had been “successful.” The pathologists had gone over the tissue and it was all clean. Not a single cell awry. They’d gotten everything out