When I was almost nine years old I heard her talking, but her voice was so low I couldn’t understand the words. It bothered me she would do that, talk loud enough to be noticed but not loud enough for me to understand. Like maybe we’d all go out for Chinese food, then we’d come home, open the door, and behind the squeak of my sneakers on the rubber mat in the hall, I’d hear a woman talking, a monologue that stopped suddenly. The first time it happened I thought someone broke in to use the phone while we were away, like Goldilocks, you know? Or I thought maybe someone who lived in the apartment before us, maybe a woman who slept in my bedroom before me, still lived here with us now, invisible. But then I decided the voice was my mother, who died before I got old enough to think about it, when all I could do was feel it, tightening up behind my ribs.

I told a different story about how my mother died every time we moved, starting fresh in every new school, every new neighborhood. We moved around a lot when I was growing up, so I had plenty of opportunity. In Milwaukee, for instance, I went for the massive heart attack. I’d say, Oh yes, she was so young, no one expected it. One day she just grabbed her chest and fell backwards. My father never really got over it, I’d say.

Everywhere we went, we drove in cars or rode in trains, and though we always seemed to be traveling in straight lines toward a clearly ruled horizon, I did know the earth is round. When it wasn’t summer I saw the posters over the blackboards every day, and heard teachers with long wooden pointers in their hands explain that the planets were making circles around the hot core of our sun, the blazing center of all that space dust. But when I lay back in the summer grass and looked up into the moving clouds, then I thought the earth was something else, a fairly flat place with trees sticking up into the sky. I would think those trees ought to lean over, or bend a little at least, if the earth was really round. Leaning and bending had to happen; I had figured that out.

So in Milwaukee we stayed with Aunt Bella and Uncle Georgie, whose children were older than my brother and me and didn’t live there anymore; we slept in their rooms. I took my cousin Natasha’s high school dance dresses out of the closet and tried them on, standing on the bed so I could see in the mirror above the dresser. In that neighborhood we went to Townsend School. One day I walked home across an empty lot covered with deep snow and my left boot got caught. I struggled until I was sweaty and overheated in my wool leggings and winter coat, but I couldn’t pull it out, so I left it there and walked the rest of the way home with one boot and one sock. My stepmother didn’t believe that this had happened, but she didn’t say what she thought I did with the boot, or why I did it.

She told me I was not a baby and much too old for the little yellow rubber duck I asked for at the dime store, but she turned it over to see if was as cheap as it ought to be, and when it was, she bought it for me. She didn’t test it though, and when I took it into the tub with me it fell over sideways as if it’d had a stroke, bobbing with one folded wing above water, its little orange beak a sliver on the surface. Then she tried it in the sink, tried it in a bowl of water, but the little duck would not stay upright. She sighed loudly and carried it out of the bathroom, a small symbolic failure.