Inappropriate Behaviour. Irene Mock

neat lawn. A child had died in that house. I don't know when I first learned this. I can never picture our house, though, without seeing the yellow one too. It is as clear in my mind as the tall oak under which my grandfather sat. The stone in his hand. The way he began telling me this story.

      HE SAID, "A little girl was lost in the desert."

      These, I remember, his exact words.

      The girl—she was also nine—was trying to be brave, not crying, though she had been lost for some time.

      Eventually, the girl comes across a statue of a woman in a grove of trees. Weary, she goes to it, lays down to rest. Soon a great emotion comes over her. "Mother! Where's my mother?" the girl cries. Just then one of her tears falls like a pearl on the feet of the statue. The stone woman comes to life, reaches down and holds the girl in her arms.

      "So, Julie," my grandfather said. "What do you think of that?"

      I said I found the story hard to believe. How, I said, could a tear make a statue come alive?

      "It was magic. Or, maybe, not really." He tapped the stone in his hand. "There's nothing, nothing in the world," he said, "like a mother's love for her child."

      "Was she the girl's mother then, the statue?" I wanted to know.

      My grandfather smiled.

      I said I hoped I'd never get lost in a desert without water. I didn't want to die. "Lucky, she didn't."

      "Lucky, yes." He nodded. "Like you."

      THERE ARE THINGS you don't remember. Bits and pieces you can't connect. A party. Red beads. A girl in a desert.

      "I was an unmothered child," my mother has told me. "And so was my mother before me."

      Was this the reason, then, for my grandfather's story?

      Tears to remember.

      Tears to break open a stone.

      One cannot go back to sleep when one is weeping.

      IN THE NIGHT thoughts come to you. You have arrived at motherhood late. You have only one child, a daughter. She still wakes up every few hours and you comfort her, nurse her back to sleep. Sometimes, looking over at your husband's face, you think you see her: she has his eyes, his light brown hair. Often, long after you've put her back in her crib, you feel you're still holding her in your arms.

       Neapolitan

      MY FATHER DRIVES FAST. He calls it the desire for conquest. He likes to pit his skills and the machine against the elements. Stones on the road. A car coming from one side. Wet leaves on a rainy night. "If it normally takes an hour to get somewhere and you do it in half the time," he once told me, "you're annihilating both time and space."

      This was in October 1962, when everyone worried that the Americans would start a nuclear war in response to Soviet missiles in Cuba, but all I could think about was my parents' likely divorce. My father and I were in his ham radio shack, my chair facing a picture of two apes writing the equation E=mc2. Underneath the apes was the caption Engineers ARE People. As my father's teletype machine clattered away with news signalling we were on the brink of war, I thought of those apes. They looked like mad scientists, scribbling furiously while a group of people stood by laughing, hands cupped over their mouths.