Two.
"My mother is holding her hand out palm up.
Her hand is empty.
I am 18.
And she's trying to convince me to go to Europe.
But in it, I see coins, pennies.
We are standing in the living room with the blue carpet
and the cream-colored drapes.
Behind me, the baby grand piano.
Behind her, the gilded mirror.
My mother is smaller than I am.
Her hair is in a French twist.
She is wearing a smart pantsuit.
In the kitchen, my father is splashing Coke over whiskey
and ice cubes in a tall glass.
My mother is telling me that once when
she was younger than me, maybe 14,
her mother tried to give her pennies.
They were all she had, and my mother had refused them.
She had knocked them out of her mother's hands,
and they had spun across the wooden floor clinked
into the furnace grate.
This is the lesson of the story, how
sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to be a thankless child?
But I have a stony heart.
I'm 18.
I have a boyfriend named Walker who
doesn't want me to leave him.
And even though I want to leave him,
the thought of hearing him go on and on about it makes me tired.
I will give anything--
I will give into almost anything for a little silence.
This is how I am, a very old, a very tired 18.
There are marks on my arms, but my mother
has never mentioned them.
There is a distance between us.
'You have built a wall around yourself,' she says this
sometimes, 'and I can't get in.'
But I am thinking you don't want in.
You don't want to hear the truth.
You just want me to be someone else.
I am standing before her, a skinny 18-year-old, long hair,
black T-shirt, shaggy bell bottoms.
It is 1972.
I have marks on my arms and a stony heart.
What, she is thinking.
What do you want from me?
She holds out her empty hand, she
believes in gestures, not words.
She believes in the liftoff of the jet, in crossing the ocean,
and being incommunicado, in clearing your mind."