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By Root 660 0

the biology of cancer to me, how cells went haywire, I imagined my mother’s lungs crusted with fat slimy coils, like snails without shells. It was no wonder she had trouble breathing and had to be under a doctor’s supervision. Because I knew that my mother had had me in a hospital, and because, like all children, I was not rational, I had the idea that the two events, the birth and the cancer, were linked, and that I was responsible. I’m not sure I’ve ever really forgiven myself for her death. My father and I ate chicken potpies in silence, night after night for the nearly eight months it took her to die. I went to school, and after, climbed the stairs by twos up to my room and shut the door. I read, and worked on my map of the world. I felt well hidden in our cavernous five-bedroom Victorian house with three stories and four-and-a-half baths.

On the afternoon of the death my father came home and went into the study, and before he shut the door I slipped in and stood by his desk. I had made up my mind to find out why there was a flood of food coming in from the neighbors at the back entrance. My father, I later learned, had discouraged them during my mother’s illness, but now, with the official word, they could restrain themselves no longer. Something had changed. I was slightly more frightened of the change than I was of asking him for an explanation, so I took a deep breath and tried to frame the question.

Before I could get the words out he looked up and said, “Mother’s gone.” He took a flat square box out of his drawer and handed it to me, as if I had come in expressly to fetch my present. There was a tape reel inside. The doorbell rang then and he came past me. I made for the yellow case in the hall closet that held the tape recorder. It was heavy, and I had to stoop to pick it up with both hands. I managed the stairs to my room, closed the door, and then barricaded it with my dresser. It was no easy task to push the white bureau from one end of the room to the other. I threaded the tape, and then lay down right next to the small silver holes around the middle of the box. When I reached over the top of the machine and turned the lever to the ON position, a voice I’d always known said, “Hello, Alice. I’m going to read you some of this book that I love, and that you love too. Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. ‘Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house.… ’ ” Her voice was coming off a shiny ribbon. I understood, all of a sudden, what my father had meant. My mother wasn’t just gone to the hospital. She was dead. With my face down on the rug the voice came right into my ear. It was as if there was a rough hand grabbing me by the scruff of the neck and carrying me to a new place. There was nothing to do but lie perfectly still, no way to fend off the gripping hand. I closed my eyes and saw under my lids the yellow daylight going dimmer and dimmer. The voice went on, one tangled word after the next, until the end of the second chapter, when my dead mother said, “Good night, Alice. You make me so proud. I love you. Good night.” I lifted my head. It was midafternoon. Why hadn’t she recorded the rest of the book?

When the tape finished it went around and around, the end unmoored and flapping. It flapped while I got up and stood in the center of the room, waiting for something, anything, to happen. It flapped while the neighbor woman, Mrs. McCrady, banged at my door and demanded I come downstairs. By the time she managed to push through I was out my window, up on the roof. As a last resort she left a dish of canned peaches with Miracle Whip on top, on the window ledge, and I remember laughing a little at her, to think I was like a mouse who will come in to sniff, and then eat, the poison.

At the funeral I sat in the front row next to my father, fiddling with the frayed end of my black plastic belt. He prodded me when it was time to stand and sing. “Sleep, my love and peace attend thee, All through the night.” Everyone around me was blubbering