The Monday after my Harlem weekend, I’d been expecting to walk myself to Mrs. Ardolini’s like usual that afternoon. Instead as I stepped outside the school entrance, a woman who looked a lot like my mother started crying my name. Before I knew it, I was swept into the arms of a familiar-smelling coat, but rather than hug back, I froze. I froze because I hadn’t been expecting my mother, and because I was being hugged by someone who was crying, which was something my mother never did. Maybe I would have thawed if Lillian had kept at it, and this could have become a bonding moment for us; but she didn’t, and it wasn’t. Instead, Lillian touched a frozen girl and quickly pulled away. By the time I’d figured out that this familiar-smelling, unfamiliar-acting person was the same person I’d been pining for all weekend, it was too late. The whole thing went something like this:

—Mommy?

—I’m so sorry.

—Mommy, is it really you?

—I didn’t mean to scare you.

—Mommy, what happened?

—Let’s go home.

So we did. Lillian looked smaller, like in the four days we’d been apart, I had grown or she had shrunk. There was something else I couldn’t place until we’d passed the candy store where all the scary kids hung out: my mother was looking down. Normally she was looking for her next shot, but today she was staring at her shoes. She wasn’t even holding her camera. And that scared the hell out of me.

JOURNAL ENTRY, SEPTEMBER 1963: It’s almost unbearably lovely to prepare your breakfast. To pull a brush through your hair, button the buttons in back of your dress, and tie the bow. But my hands shake, and sometimes I break a milk glass or pull too hard at a tangle or take too long with your clothes. When I sit down to eat, my fork trembles on its way to my mouth, and I stop feeling hungry.

You don’t know what to make of me. I’m not the same mother who brought you to school last Thursday. I must believe that this new mother is temporary, because if she isn’t, then my time in the Women’s House of Detention hasn’t ended.

72. Soda jerk, Brooklyn, 1963