I knew my mother came from a country like Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit-hole, where heads used to be chopped off and those who managed to keep theirs watched like we watch cartoons on TV. But still, this was the United States. Even if people in Japan have rooms smaller than this, in this country we call it a “closet”. I could see my mother in her recliner, her feet up at a forty-five degree angle, chatting with Ursula as she sipped a salt-rimmed martini and dipped her hand in a bowl of pistachios. How peaceful she must find the evening without a child butting in to ask a question. Maybe she’d decide to keep me here until I was old enough to support myself. I’d be blind by then, mute, wrinkled; a vegetable … I cried louder than I normally would have, hoping someone out there might come to my rescue or at least feel bad.

The doorbell rang.

“Who’s dere?!” my mother never failed to consult the peeping hole before asking.

“Harry. Who the devil do you think?! The Ambassador of Vilna??”

“A’ dis time of de night?” My mother’s aggressiveness was already thinning.

The screen door screeched. I sighed. Some men knew how to handle my mother. Their bark had to be louder than her bite. My mother encouraged Ursula, Ursula insulted Harry, Harry laughed at Ursula’s silliness before repeating “Goodnight” and “Thanks a million” to my mother. I knew she would soon be on her way. I lay tragically on my stomach with droopy, eagle-spread arms, like Ulysses cast upon the shore without drink for ten days.

When I awoke, my back was stiff. My hair dripped over my neck like seaweed off an uplifted anchor. Potatoes were pushing into my chest and my foot was stuck under a bottom shelf, next to a soldier line of unopened family-sized dill pickles. There must have been a liquidation sale.

“Can I come out now?” I would walk straight up to my mother and ask in a simple, direct manner; yet I procrastinated. She would be capable of doubling the sentence if she considered it an impudence.

I tiptoed down the corridor. To one side, was an ancestral portrait in oil. A man on horseback wore a handlebar moustache that only a Hell’s Angel would be caught dead wearing today. It ran into the low ceiling, where the cavalier’s throat was nearly sliced by the fan’s blades. I assumed it had once belonged to my father.

On the opposite wall were my mother’s two attempts at art. “Sun, Sky, and Tree” looked more like “Bacon and Egg” because the sky was white and dominated by the yellow globe; and the tree, a trunk without branches, was brick red. “Self-portrait of the artist” was but a circle painted on a square and what were supposed to be earrings looked like golden fringed military shoulder-pieces, after all, there was no neck. One upside down triangle represented both her eyebrows. An orange slice represented her mouth, facing down. Signed Olga Yulof, her maiden name. Cecilia and I called it, “Mótina is watching you.” It prevented evil spirits from getting anywhere near the house.