Chiyo was expected to reply. She had no choice, no excuse. Marvin’s bulletin board became the main topic. Pretty much the only topic, if she didn’t count caregivers’ schedules, bathroom routines, medications taken, food that her mother did or did not eat. The truth was, her mother’s world had shrunk to a pitiable state, and Chiyo had been trying to prevent shrinkage of her own.

Even when her mother was well, she wasn’t an easy person to live with. She pried. Disapproved. Assumed the right to comment on Chiyo’s every act, her every friend. She commented on Chiyo’s appearance.

“You should eat more. You’re too skinny. So much exercise makes you look like that.”

“Like what?”

“The way you look. Skinny, like a giraffe neck.”

At other times: “Have you been eating too much? Your stomach isn’t flat anymore. That can’t be healthy.”

“When the stylist cut your hair this time, he finally got it right.”

What was that supposed to mean? All the other times, he’d got it wrong?

Never a real compliment.

Chiyo was often out because she was booked to teach at regular times in a city-run gym in her area. She taught classes for Parks and Recreation three mornings and three evenings a week: stretch and strength, Pilates, yoga, tai chi. Sometimes she held extra classes on Saturday afternoons. Before and after class, she occasionally scheduled clients who engaged her as a personal trainer. For those meetings, she drove to a YMCA/YWCA gym located in the new shopping mall on the far side of the ravine. She knew that while she was out teaching, her mother was probably at home rifling through her private belongings. She didn’t bother to hide the fact that—until she was too weak to do so—she regularly inspected her daughter’s dresser drawers and closet shelves. Postcards from Leonard were scrutinized, but he knew enough not to send private letters when travelling.

Chiyo had been involved with Leonard for six years. Her mother disapproved from the beginning—in the same way she disapproved of anyone else Chiyo had dated. Her mother wanted her to produce a marriage certificate, grandchildren who would crawl around the kitchen linoleum and who could be shown off to her friends. But her mother’s friends had fallen away in the final year.

When Leonard used to come to the house, her mother—still well enough—made a point of getting to the door first.

“It’s him,” she called back over her shoulder, her small stature blocking the doorway by half. She refused to say his name. At the time, she didn’t know that Chiyo had every intention of marrying Leonard. But the relationship hadn’t turned out that way.

“Your name might mean eternal,” she said to Chiyo one morning, “but you’re running out of time if you’re going to have a child.” She spoke as if her words were etched onto a blade to be twisted as only a mother could. “Child-bearing years do not last an eternity.”

Chiyo had no reply. She did not fight her mother, but her body flinched from the wound. She didn’t shout: Do you think I’m unaware of my own biology? She was forty years old, and if she was ever to have a child, it would have to be now. But she had not been brought up to shout at her mother. She’d been raised to maintain silence. Respect elders. While her mother’s voice yammered on in perpetual staccato, with each beat sharply detached from the next, Chiyo diverted her inner attention to tai chi. Bend bow to shoot tiger, she said to herself, and her body responded as if it had at that moment created the move. Strum lute with both hands. Music calmed her. She thought of the shakuhachi, the haunting echo of rich tones through bamboo. The music of monks.