Along with the notebooks and yearbooks and photo albums above my childhood desk is a newer blue scrapbook that I wouldn’t have noticed if I weren’t stuck in bed. Yesterday I made a foray to my desk to pull it off the shelf. The clippings are chronological, from the first local newspaper articles to the later magazines, with highlighted TV Guide listings to document the television news segments. Each clipping has been cut out with immaculate care, centered on its page, and dated in Mother’s precise handwriting. When Mother came in and saw the scrapbook open, she asked if I’d made one of my own. On the contrary, I told her. I’d done everything I could to keep Jane and me apart from all that. Well, this one wasn’t complete, since it was only Cleveland and the national publications, but it was mine if I wanted it. She’d made it for me.

The world shrinks so much when you’re sick! To a person whose life consists of sleep, meals, medicine, and blood tests, your letter may as well describe a distant planet. It’s funny, but my first thought was to tell you to move—as if living farther away from all those missile silos would make any difference should the Soviets decide to blow us all to bits. As for how the police treated you, I can name one little boy who must have been thrilled when his mother was released so quickly. I can’t imagine that the students who were jailed overnight begrudged you for it. Just because you’re no longer a Poetical putting on weekly protest performances in Buena Vista Park doesn’t mean you’re “playing” at activism any more than you’re “playing” at being a poet or a mother, though it’s true that life divides us into smaller and smaller pieces as we go, until each piece seems too small to do anything as worthwhile with it as we’d like.

105. Self-portrait without hair, Cleveland, 1970

Even the meticulous blacks, grays, and whites of Lillian’s print don’t show how, after a month at home, her skin is still that weird orangey chemo color, but the picture is jarring enough as is. A bald woman in a high-necked nightgown sits at a wooden desk chair in a suburban bedroom meant for a teenager, the outline of her skull too visible beneath a face that stares at the camera without expectation, a face resigned to waiting. Lillian had come back a week into the school year and Grandma was the one taking care of her, so I saw my mother only when I wanted to, which wasn’t often. After all, I reminded myself whenever I started feeling guilty or neglectful, there was so much studying to do.