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"He's nothing," Grammie Marlowe snaps. "He's never given you so much as a pair of shoes, and he killed your mother same as if he did it with a knife." Lying belly-down on the Oriental rug near their talk, I try to visualize Mamie's world and can't. All I know is that it contains nothing definite, only shapes and sounds and sometimes no sounds. Mamie told me this with her eyes when she thought I wasn't looking. Strangely I wasn't. For Mamie there's neither cure nor hope. She's a kind of Alice shut up with swelling sizes from which there's no waking. She's been in the rabbit hole for more than twenty years now and all told she'll spend forty there. Two years from now Grammie Marlowe will pass away in her sleep, but Mamie will croak with her chin 
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pressed against her feet. Instead of a burial, they'll stuff her into a teapot. After Grammie Marlowe's death my mother makes my father clear away the forest of lilacs, so that all four sides of the house gleam like brushed teeth. With the State's permission we bring Mamie home for a weekend. Quiet, almost lucid, she wears her madhouse smile like an amulet. On her own volition she moves to the piano and sits before it, almost as if she had never left it. My mother bites a cigarette while my father nervously prods my shoulder as a warning to keep quiet. Our eyes reach toward the back of Mamie's shaved neck, which resembles a celery stalk. She breaks wind. With a hot glance my mother burns the smile off my face. My father, sinking deep into an upholstered chair, peels a newspaper. Mamie has  |
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