One day—rare moment of rebellion!—my father takes a pair of pruning shears and has at the ivy that shades the front of the house, the thick and tangled vines my mother loves. It’s full of birds’ nests and spiders, glad of some respite from the Tucson sun, but he doesn’t care; there is no limit to his pruning. When he’s done the exposed fired-red adobes look naked and raw, hardly a vine scrambling up the wall, and on the gravel beside my father’s feet is a huge pile of leaves, glossy in their cream-edged dark greens. When my mother sees it she starts to cry, a silent and recriminatory weeping that goes on for hours. My father busies himself in the carport and the tool shed, oiling the clippers, working with a certain combination of trepidation and pride. He’s struck back, in some way, but the victory is so small, so tangential to the real, unspeakable war between them, that it can’t seem like much.

After a bout of drinking she’s rigid and remorseful, mouth tight, her head down. She says nothing at first, then eventually lets out some self-recrimination which doesn’t attempt to hide its undercurrent of hostility: “You couldn’t forgive me for what I’ve done.” Silence. The iron moves, the dish is wiped. “I’m the one who’s sinned.” The more she drinks, the more she’s invested in a kind of spiritual economy, a moral accounting—as if what struggles in her isn’t the desire for vodka (for obliteration? for freedom?) but forces of good and evil, which wrestle out their drama on the darkened stage of our house—our kitchen, our couch, our dry garden. But the struggle seems unwinnable; she has always just failed.

It is in such a mood that she goes to visit my sister in a Tennessee State Prison, where Sally, brilliant survivor, is getting by. I don’t hear much from my mother about the experience—taking a plane to Nashville, a bus to some little town, going through security, being led down some painted concrete corridor to the visiting room where her daughter’s on the other side of a partition of glass. Or is it more casual than that, the two of them sitting down at a cafeteria table together while a guard in the corner watches them and the other lucky women with visitors? I’ll never know. My mother’s assumed a sort of martyred look; in memory I cast Loretta Young in her role now, nunlike, self-consciously good, eyes downcast in sorrow, then turned up to heaven. That moral rigidity again; you’re either pure or fallen.