38 Midway through writing this draft, I called my mother, my back against brick wall, choking on imagined plastic and real tears. I think I scared her—calling her up at 10:39 in the evening, when I knew she’d probably gone to sleep. She was in bed, but I caught her before she had drifted off. We talked about it again, the hospital. But we grew out of it, talked about school, about what the kids had done lately, how she was feeling. I spent an hour before I remembered the book I was supposed to be reading for class. She ended the way she always does: “Don’t lose your scholarship! Love you.” She. My mother. I keep forgetting “she” isn’t enough specification. People tell me I look exactly like her and it makes her beam. Her eyelids fold over in a way I’ve told her mimics a sad hound dog’s. When she’s upset, they make me mad—how dare I make her eyes look that sad? How dare she make me feel that? I don’t even think she knows she does it. I have my dad’s blue hue, but her hound-dog folds. Maybe I spend so much time dwelling on the “She” in my head that I forget to look at my mother now. Her hair is greying; she gave up plucking the white hairs out a while ago. I have one white hair that I refuse to pluck. It curls around the other hairs. My mother is entirely practical, but she knows to factor my tears into the budget as a regular expenditure, filed under “comfort.” We get in fights more than we used to, but she still knows how to interpret my emotions to my dad most of the time. She wanted to be a doctor—all of the facts I know about anatomy came from her.
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