Life In Miniature

by Linda Schlossberg

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

From a powerful new voice in fiction comes a compelling debut about the delicate bond between daughters and mothers, and about leaving everything you know in order to find the place where you belong. Adie has always known she was different. There's her size, for one thing. Born three months premature, Adie is the smallest of her peers. Then there's Adie's mother, who at first glance seems like so many other 1980s moms--clipping coupons and attending Feel the Burn aerobics classes. But beneath the surface is something erratic and unpredictable, something that makes her drag Adie and her older sister, Miriam, from one rental apartment to the next--until Miriam runs away. Adie is left behind with her mother, who is convinced their lives are in real danger and takes Adie on a crazy run across northern California. Now Adie faces a stark choice: submit to this increasingly surreal adventure, or grow up in ways she never imagined. . . "Life in Miniature is a stunning double portrait, subtly capturing a daughter's misconceptions of her mother's delusions--while simultaneously revealing the consequences for both--in a compulsively readable and deeply insightful first novel." --Jonathon Keats, author of The Book of the Unknown ". . .a book of intelligence and grace that will make you laugh and cry." --Terry Gamble, author of Good Family Linda Schlossberg received her PhD in English literature from Harvard University, where she is the Assistant Director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. Her fiction has been recognized by the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, the National League of American PEN Women, and Writers at Work. She has also received research and writing grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as several awards for excellence in teaching. Linda lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Release date: December 1, 2010

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 337

Sample

As long as I can remember, people have been telling me how lucky I am to be alive. I was born three months premature. By all rights I should be missing an arm, blind, dead. When I was little I used to be afraid that I was actually incomplete, not fully developed, that one day I’d wake up and find that I was missing something important, an organ or limb I’d never learned to mourn.

I still feel a little unfinished.

My birth made the local papers, even a small article in the Los Angeles Times. The articles were full of words like miracle and triumph. My mother cut them all out and posted them, along with recipes and makeup tips, on the bulletin board above her sewing table.

My birth was also accompanied by a lot of prayers. My mother, who was Jewish and had never been a particularly religious woman, began praying the second she went into labor. Because she didn’t have an image in her head of God (her faith forbidding it) she summoned up the only picture she could think of: Jesus, with soulful eyes and hippie-length hair. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, she prayed, let my child be healthy, safe, beautiful. In the delivery room she saw him, hovering over her, holding, of all things, a pacifier and humming “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business if I
Do.” It was then, she says, that she knew everything would be all right.

The doctors were less sure, not being particularly religious themselves. And they were not very gentle with my mother. People were always imagining that my mother was stronger than she was, and were sometimes too blunt with her, telling her, for instance, that she looked funny in a certain dress or had been too pushy at the grocery store. It was no different at California General. The ob-gyn in charge told my mother there was only a chance I’d survive, and a very small one at that. He said it, she always told me, like he needed the reassurance more than she did. She patted his hand and told him not to worry. It was December 31, 1969, the very last day of the sixties, and people were worried about all kinds of things.

In some versions of the story my mother says that the doctors were hostile and mean, trying to get her to give up hope entirely. She yelled at them from her hospital bed, throwing rolls of gauze tape and pulling the bell for the nurse. In this scenario, she has to be forcibly restrained, even when the labor pains become so intense that any other woman would have been out cold. I am not sure which of these versions I like better. It would be just like my mother to keep pulling that bell, to get her money’s worth.

After I was born I was put in one of those special rooms with all the other preemies, where everything’s extra clean and neat. My mother was discharged almost immediately, but she came to visit the hospital every day, dragging my sister with her. Together they’d stand and stare at the rows and rows of tiny babies, like they were at the supermarket trying to pick out a box of cereal. According to the newspaper accounts, I did not cry much, though my mother disputes this. Certainly I knew when my own baby cried, she says.

My sister Miriam was already four years old and enjoyed the attention; all the papers were taking pictures of her and my mother, with captions that said things like “Miracle Baby Has Healthy Full Grown Sister,” as if she’d won first place in a
spelling bee or discovered the cure for cancer. All the same, the reporters were far more interested in my development, monitoring the status of my breathing, my heartbeat, and my weight, which at birth hovered just under a pound. This was my first experience with sibling rivalry.

One pound. Most everything weighs more than that. Pick up a tennis shoe or an old book that’s just lying around. That’s me you’re holding in your hand.

All through elementary school I am the shortest child in the class, by a good five or six inches. Even though the doctors tell my mother not to worry, she becomes obsessed with measuring me–pulling out tape measures when I least expect it, pushing me onto the bathroom scale two or three times a week. I am always seated in the front for school pictures, as if being small is a privilege. Adults are surprised that I can read street signs, usually better than my mother, who refuses to wear her glasses. I feel the world growing larger around me.

My height gives me a special perspective. I know, for instance, when something has rolled under the table, and I tend to notice if shoes are untied. I can squeeze into spaces other children can’t–under the fence at the back of the schoolyard, through the tiny window in our basement. I feel a special affinity with small animals, especially cats. I drink lots of milk, which pleases my mother, who is sure it will make my bones grow.

To compete with me, my sister Miriam tries to make herself as tall as possible. She saves her allowance for weeks on end to buy cheap plastic shoes with heels from the neighborhood discount store, shoes she’ll have to hide under her bed, since my mother calls them slut shoes. Miriam is always breathing deeply, throwing her shoulders back, trying to stand as straight, she tells me, as a tree. She even teases her hair so that it stands a little higher off her head, like a soft crown. Teachers always note that her posture is excellent.

The four-year difference between us is just enough to make Miriam my idol. She treats me like a baby, even though I still
catch her looking at my toys when she thinks I’m not watching. (“Someday these will be worth a lot of money,” she says, when I find her playing with my model horses.) Miriam is the pioneer, she’s allowed to do things first, but she has to fight my mother for them, trying out the smiles and coy looks she’ll use later on boys. I watch her closely, picking up tips for future battles.

Four years is also the amount of time Miriam had with my father. He left when my mother was pregnant with me, even before she began to show. Miriam has photographs of him, holding her above his head, at the beach. She keeps them hidden between the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica, changing the location weekly–from A to Q to P–so that I have to pull out the big heavy volumes and search through them all when I want to find the photos. I refuse to fight with her over them, for fear that our mother will take them away entirely. These are the only pictures I have ever seen of him.

My mother is vague about the details of my father’s life: he was a plumber, then an electrician. I’m happy when the kitchen sink gets clogged or the TV blows out thinking, Maybe he’ll come back and fix them. When strange men in overalls come to make repairs, I hover around, getting them drinks or changing the radio station. I watch them work, studying their gestures, their hair color, looking for clues, a resemblance. For a while I think it’s normal to know so little about a parent, that having my mother around is a special exception.

So my mother is what some people call a single mother, like Bonnie Franklin on One Day at a Time. But we’re not poor like the families you see on TV. My mother has money, saved in the bank, from her parents, who died long before I was born. I don’t know how much exactly. My mother always just says, “Thank God I have some money tucked away,” when she reads an article about social security or inflation.

For school I have to write an essay about my family. It’s hard when you have so few people to write about. So I start with: “Some families are large, but not mine. It’s a small group of people who live in this house: my mother, my sister Miriam, our dog Maxwell, and me.” I show the essay to my mother and
point out that they all begin with M. That is quite a coincidence. But my mother just frowns. “Your name is Adie,” she says. “That doesn’t begin with an M.”

My mother works as an office administrator at a law firm. If I call her when she’s at work she answers the phone with, “Dawson, Kessler, Kessler, and Briggs,” instead of hello. It’s as if she has her own secret language made up of names instead of regular words. When I ask her why Kessler gets to go twice she explains that there are two of them, brothers. I wonder which Kessler comes first, or if they both think they’re first.

No one says anything, but I can tell that my mother is different from other mothers. Not at first glance. On the surface, she looks just like the other moms: dark hair tied back from her face, not much makeup but always a gash of dark red lipstick, embarrassingly earnest matching polyester pants sets. If you saw her walking down the grocery aisle, coupons cut in neat squares from the Sunday circulars, or delicately pumping gas at the corner station, you’d never even think anything was wrong.

Still, I’m aware that something’s not right. I can sense the ground shifting quietly, right under my feet. I’m not sure how to describe it. All I know is that it reminds me of the earthquake filmstrips we watch in science class. The plates of the earth are moving, slowly. You never know when they’re going to bump up against each other and cause something crazy to happen.

Every month or so we have an earthquake drill at school. The bell rings shrilly, three times in a row, then a pause, then another three times; on and on, the loudest bell you’ve ever heard. We all have to rush under our desks, and everyone shrieks and screams like they’re really scared. Usually there’s gum stuck under the desk, and it gets tangled in my hair. The only way to get it out is with peanut butter, which is worth it even if it makes your hair smell like a sandwich.

The teacher stands under the doorway, though I’ve never understood how a doorway is supposed to protect you from anything. “Make sure you always have someplace to run for cover during an earthquake,” she tells us.

I’m not scared. All the earthquakes I’ve ever seen have only lasted a few seconds and don’t really do anything. It’s like being in the fun house at the fair. When it’s over the pictures are hanging a little crooked and maybe something small has fallen, like a vase. Still, you never know.

In Mrs. Hauser’s backyard there’s a Japanese-style garden with a tiny waterfall and a river. You can tell just by looking that the waterfall and the river are fake. Some of the rocks are plastic, and there’s a rubber pump behind a bench, small and pulsing like a little heart, that keeps the water flowing. But the fish are real, and that makes the whole thing worth it, since they are really what my mother would call the star attraction. The only fish I’ve ever had are the tiny goldfish you win at the school fair and carry home in a sealed plastic bag, like a snack.

Mrs. Hauser won’t let us throw pennies into the water, even to make a wish; the copper will poison the fish. Anyway, my sister says, it would just be a waste of money. It’s not like they can spend it on anything.

“They have everything they need right there,” she says, pointing to the waterfall and the rocks. You’d think the fish would start at one end of the river and then turn around and swim back, the way we do in a pool. But instead they mostly hover in one place, keeping still, except for their little mouths making a quick o o o at the surface of the water. It looks as if they are trying to speak, especially when they stare at you from the side of their head with that weird glassy fish eye, also an o. But Miriam says they’re just hungry.

The fish food is all different colors–green, blue, red, yellow–jumbled together like confetti in a clear glass jar. I’m allowed to feed the fish, which sounds fun but is scary in a kind of sneaky way, because if you give them too much food they’ll keep eating until they die. And it’s hard to tell the difference between a dead fish and a living one. A dead fish drifts around just like a fish that’s alive, but then you look more closely and realize something’s wrong. One of the bigger fish has already died since I got here, and I lie in bed at night, picturing its little bloated floating body, wondering if I’m the one who killed it.

My mother is in the hospital. When I got home from school last Friday, Mrs. Hauser was waiting outside on the front stoop, fanning herself with a copy of my mother’s Glamour magazine. She stood with her arms folded tightly across her huge chest, humming quietly to herself, while I packed up my toothbrush and some pajamas and the rainbow-striped sweater my mother gave me a few months ago for my eleventh birthday. “Just for a few days,” Mrs. Hauser said. I felt funny having her watch me like that, as if I was stealing things from my own house.

The next day Miriam and I went to Kendall’s stationery store and bought my mother a fancy card with raised gold writing and a picture of seagulls flying into the sunset. Dear Mom, We are having a lot of fun at Mrs. Hauser’s. Heidi the cat just had kittens. More than anything, I want a kitten; Mrs. Hauser has already said it’s fine with her; we can even have two of them. I’ve picked them out: a boy and a girl, the smallest in the litter, both of them mottled in soft patches of white and black. Mrs. Hauser tells me they’re called tuxedo kittens, and I imagine how perfect they’d look stretched out on the shiny black-and-white checkerboard floor of our kitchen. But Miriam says no, our mother already has enough on her mind as it is.

“Maybe a kitten would make her feel better,” I try to argue. “Or two kittens.”

But Miriam just tells me to go away; she’s trying to sketch and needs to concentrate, and I’m bothering her. She’s using her special artist pencils, the ones that come in a pretty little metal box that I’m not allowed to touch. Even the lid is beautiful, smooth and polished, with a picture of all the pencils, sharpened and lined up in a row, just as they are in the box. She’s working on a picture of one of Mrs. Hauser’s parrots, the big gray one with the white crown, but he won’t keep still–he keeps bobbing his head up and down and swearing in German. Fahr zur Hölle, which, Mrs. Hauser tells me, means “go to hell.” At night, Mrs. Hauser covers his cage with an old towel so he knows it’s time to stop swearing and go to bed; otherwise, she says, he would never sleep and go crazy–sort of like the goldfish who will just keep eating until they die.

The room I’m staying in at Mrs. Hauser’s place isn’t a real bedroom at all. It’s a small attic room with a slanted ceiling; Mrs. Hauser says I am the only person she knows who can stand up in it. There are a few wooden steamer trunks filled with tablecloths and shoes and photographs, but mostly there are round boxes of hats, from when Mr. Hauser owned a store with labels that say, HAUSER’S FINE HATS & NOVELTIES, EST. 1946. Miriam and I have tried them on; they have a deep, damp smell–the kind of smell that makes you think of dead things. Still, I like my little room with the slanted, cobwebbed ceiling, and the tiny lead-glass window with its own lace curtain. The steps, which are kind of like a ladder, are too steep and narrow for Mrs. Hauser to climb. When she kisses me good night her breath, musty and dank, smells as if it’s been locked up in a box, just like the hats.

Mr. Hauser spends most of his time pacing the garden, his body hunched over and angry. Sometimes I’ll be playing by myself and I’ll hear a little coughing noise, just a tiny sound from the corner, and when I look up I realize he’s been there for a while, watching me. It’s very strange, thinking you’re alone, and then noticing someone there–sort of like when you look up from a book and realize an hour has gone by. My mother has told me to be nice to Mr. Hauser; he’s a Holocaust survivor and has been through a lot, things we can’t even imagine. He and Mrs. Hauser fight all the time, and when they yell at each other in German it sounds as if they’re clearing their throats and getting ready to spit, even if all they are fighting over is what to watch on TV. Miriam just makes her mouth into an empty smile and pretends nothing’s happening, but I go outside and sit by the fake river, wishing I could join the fish in the water, where everything is quiet and dark and still.

My mother is sick, but it’s not the kind of sickness you get from going out in the cold without a sweater or not washing your hands. “Your mother is very delicate,” Mrs. Hauser says, and the word makes me think of the tiny glass animal figurines lined up on the wooden shelves in her dining room, dozens of them, horses and cats and birds. I dropped one once–a tiny rabbit curled up in a ball–and it shattered instantly, its smooth little rabbit face disappearing into a thousand shards of glass. But my mother is nothing like that at all. She can lift heavy things and never gets sick–really sick, I mean–the way other people do. The doctors always say that she is in perfect health; she is fond of pointing out that she’s never had a cavity and has had only one serious injury, a broken leg from a ski trip when she was sixteen.

“It’s not that kind of hospital,” Miriam says, when I ask her to explain. “It’s different.”

“Different how?”

“It’s for people who need a rest,” my sister says, but she looks a little unsure of herself, as if she’s memorized the words out of a book.

When I speak to my mother on the phone she sounds the same as always, maybe a little more tired. “It’s good for me to be here,” she says. “I needed a break.” She is finally getting a chance to catch up with all her soap operas; can you believe what’s happening with Luke and Laura?

After a few days Mrs. Hauser drives us to the hospital so we can see my mother during visiting hours, which are in the afternoon. (“They serve dinner here at five thirty,” my mother tells me on the phone. “Have you ever heard of anything so uncivilized?”) I am not sure why, but I feel nervous about seeing her–as if she’s a stranger I’ve never met. My sister doesn’t say anything to me, just stares out the open window at the afternoon traffic going by. It’s cold out, and I poke at her to roll up the window, but she pretends not to notice.

When we go inside I see that the hospital is very white and clean and looks just like a normal building. The lobby has green plaid couches with matching chairs and a few tall plants lined up in a neat, solid row against the wall–the same, really, as anywhere else. It even has the very same poster that’s in the entry-way of the Jewish Community Center–a dolphin, surfacing from the water, and the words KEEP DREAMING–where I wait for my mother to pick me up after my Saturday swimming lessons.

“Do you think there’s a pool?” I whisper to Miriam.

She shakes her head. “I doubt it,” she says, her voice a notch lower than usual. She eyes one of the ashtrays, which is filled with cigarette butts.

Mrs. Hauser gives a small grunt and sinks her heavy body into a chair. “You girls go up and I’ll wait for you here.” I can tell she wishes she were at home, playing solitaire with her old set of Bicycle playing cards, the television tuned loudly to The Phil Donahue Show, which my mother won’t let us watch. (“All those freaks he has on,” she says. “Pedophiles and addicts. It’s unhealthy just listening to them talk.”)

“We should have brought her something,” I say. I’m pretty sure that’s what people do when they visit patients in hospitals: they bring chocolates in a little box or flowers. Maybe even a stuffed animal, or balloons, the ones that say GET WELL SOON in shiny silver letters. But Mrs. Hauser shakes her head and tells me not to worry. “Your mother just wants to see you.”

I am not so sure about that. I had wanted to come visit the hospital right away, the moment I found out she was sick, but Mrs. Hauser said that my mother was not allowed visitors for a couple of days, that she needed a little quiet time by herself, to collect her thoughts. I am not sure exactly what Mrs. Hauser means by that, but I picture my mother stooping over with a dustpan to sweep up her thoughts, which are scattered about on the ground like a spilled bag of popcorn.

Now Miriam and I take the elevator upstairs to the sixth floor, to room 614–the date of my mother’s birth, June 14. Did they do that on purpose, or is it a coincidence? Either way, it’s spooky, and I feel a little shiver of excitement run through me. Miriam looks at me, then clears her throat and knocks quickly, three swift violent raps in a row, as if we’re in a hurry and have many people to visit at the hospital today.

My mother opens the door slowly, cautiously. Even though I knew she hadn’t really hurt herself the way people usually do, hadn’t fallen off a bike or tripped on a stair, I still pictured her looking like the patients on General Hospital–lying in bed with her leg in a plastic cast, or a tube, filled with blood or something else, snaking into her arm. But she seems the same as always, and her room has nothing special or different about it, nothing that says I am sick. No tubes or medical charts, though there is a little table with a tray and the leftovers from a meal: half a sandwich and some orange slices, lying upright in a little row.

My mother catches me looking at the tray. “You girls had lunch today, right?”

“Yes.” This is a lie: the only thing I’ve had to eat today was a few bites of the runny Cream of Wheat Mrs. Hauser makes for us every morning. But I can’t imagine swallowing anything right now. My stomach, my whole body, feels as if it’s somewhere else, as though I’m seeing everything through a window. I wonder if my mother feels this way too.

“Adie, you know how important it is to get enough nutrients.” I am the shortest girl in fifth grade, and even though my mother tells me over and over again that it’s what’s inside that counts and beauty is only skin deep I can tell it worries her. The doctors have assured her that there are no special foods that make you tall, but she still believes that one day we’ll find the right combination of vitamins that will help me grow. She measures me with her eyes. “Has Mrs. Hauser been feeding you enough?”

I don’t say anything, just look around the room. The bed is in the far corner, under a window–a single bed, covered with a dark green comforter. How strange, I think, to lie in a bed where so many other people have slept, people you don’t even know. The carpet is one of those brownish-beige colors you never see anywhere except in a carpet–and usually only someplace like a school, where they expect people to spill things or throw up. A wooden dresser stands opposite the bed, and I picture my mother’s clothes tucked safely inside, folded carefully (refolded if not done perfectly the first time) just as she folds them at home. I can see the handle of her pretty yellow and white embroidered suitcase, the one she got when she went away to college, peeking out from under the bed.

Miriam sits down without a word and pages through a copy of Better Homes and Gardens. “Make yourself comfortable,” my mother says. I think she is trying to make a joke. From the window you can see a cement courtyard shaded by palm trees, their leaves green and stretchy and prehistoric looking. Everything is very quiet, the kind of quietness that makes you want to say something–anything–to make it go away. My mother seems glad to see us, but also a little embarrassed, and her eyes are clouded and heavy with sleep.

For some reason the room reminds me of the motel we stayed in when we went to Disneyland last summer. We’d planned to go for three nights; my mother thought it might be nice for us to get away as a family. Miriam was grumpy the whole time, she thought Disneyland was for babies, and would rather have stayed home and watched One Life to Live and hung out with the boys at the JCC. I was excited about the Mad Hatter’s teacups and Space Mountain, but I thought the Disney characters walking around the park were creepy, and I tried to get away every time they came near us. Why was everyone shaking hands with them and pretending they didn’t know there were real people inside? There was something frightening about the way they couldn’t speak, but just made awkward, shifting movements with their big hands–like the retarded kids I sometimes saw getting on the special bus in the morning. And it was very hot outside, everything seemed coated with a glistening wetness, and I could feel the sweat collecting behind my knees, under my arms, my belly. And then my mother swore she heard the guys next door to us talking in the elevator about smoking pot, and she didn’t want us (and especially, God forbid, Miriam, a teenager–Miriam rolled her eyes at that point), to be anywhere near them; they could be pushers. The walls of the motel were very thin; I listened closely, but I couldn’t hear anything except the television next door, turned to a Spanish soap opera. My mother was nervous all through our fried chicken dinner and the bright exploding fireworks–so much better than any fireworks I’d ever seen on the real Fourth of July–and finally, around nine, she threw our things in the yellow and white embroidered suitcase and told us to get in the car, we were going to drive home tonight, but don’t worry, we’d come back another time. It was very hot that night, and our car didn’t have air-conditioning. I tried to sleep in the back, but all I could think about were those perfect teacups whirling around in a circle of bright colors….

“Adie? Are you okay?” My mother puts her hand on my face. I want some fresh air, but the window has a little bar in front of the latch so it can’t be opened. So it’s not a real window: it’s just a way of seeing what’s outside.

“I’m fine.”

My mother’s hand is cool and calming. “Maybe you should get something to drink. There’s a machine down the hall.” She opens her white leather purse, which looks strange here, old-fashioned, out of place, and counts out some quarters. “Anyway, I need a few moments alone with Miriam.” Miriam finally looks up from her magazine, her eyes tight and focused.

I hover by the door, not wanting to leave. “Do you want the door open or closed?”

“Closed, pleased.” My mother smiles weakly. “Go get your drink, hon.”

The door shuts behind me with a soft click. I crouch outside for a moment, trying to hear what my mother is saying to Miriam, but her voice is muffled, a dull echo of her real voice. Everything here seems to have an extra layer of silence around it, like a blanket. On the door there’s a tiny bulletin board with a chart and a typed schedule of meals and medications, and I can see that someone has put down my mother’s first name as Melinda–it’s her real name, but she hates it, and always tells people to call her Mindy instead. I am mad at the hospital for not even knowing this very basic thing about my mother: how can they make her better if they can’t even get her name right?

The sharp smell of burnt coffee drifts down the hall. I look around, wondering if there are other kids here visiting their parents–worried, for a moment, that I might see someone from school, then feeling ashamed of the thought. The walls are lined with pictures of trees and mountains, all in the same black plastic frame. Something about them seems strange, flat, and when I look closely I realize that there is no glass in the frame, just the picture itself.

I find myself in front of a wooden door with a handwritten sign that says: LOUNGE: NO SMOKING, PLEASE, propped open with the same kind of metal folding chair we use for school assemblies. Inside, a few women sit around a table, a giant bowl of pretzels between them. At first I think they are having a conversation or playing a board game, but then I notice that they are not really talking, just staring into space. They are all gazing in their own private direction. A couple of them look like they’re scanning the air for something in particular to arrive, but the others just seem to be resting their eyes quietly in that nowhere place between looking and daydreaming. Overhead, the fluorescent lights buzz gently. Every single light is on, even though the day is sunny and bright.

I buy a Tab from the drink machine and press the cool shiny pink can against my cheeks. A dull pain travels my chest. I wonder if my mother is really happy to see us, or if she’s just pretending, just being polite. Sometimes at home she’ll lie on the couch with an ice pack on her head and say that she needs a little time to herself, can we please be quiet. When that happens, Miriam tries to get my mother’s attention by turning up the stereo, or walking through the house with heavy, booted steps, but I make myself as invisible as possible, knowing that after a nap my mother will be herself again, sweeping through the house in her terrycloth bathrobe, checking on the plants. Sometimes I curl up on the floor outside the living room and listen to her fast-asleep breathing, hoping my own breath won’t wake her.

When I get back to the room my mother is perched on the edge of the bed, filing her nails with one of those extra tiny emery boards. I am not sure what to do so I look through the stack of old Reader’s Digests piled on the dresser. Half of them are missing the cover, and they all look shrunken and wrinkled the way my books get when I’ve been reading them in the bathtub. “This is all they have to read here,” my mother says. “It’s pathetic.” Miriam stares out the window, not saying anything.

“I could get you some books from the library.” If my mother’s going to stay in this room with the old blankets and a fake window that doesn’t really open, she should at least have something good to read. Some mysteries maybe–those are her favorites. “I could go first thing tomorrow.”

“You have school, sweetie.” My mother unwraps a stick of gum and hands it to me. “Anyway, I’ll only be here for another day or so.”

“How much longer ‘til you’re better?”

My mother smooths out the gum wrapper and folds it over and over until it is a tiny silver square. “How much longer,” she says, her voice a d. . .