My mother was handsome too. Not even Paula would extend the theory of opposites so far as to expect otherwise. But her dark hair and dark eyes and loamy olive skin made a stark contrast against my father’s blue-and-blondness. Unlike him, she had been born far away, to a woman who had made the voyage to America quite pregnant, dragging a child in each hand (my mother was one of these children) while her husband played cards belowdecks. And she was tall, my mother. Six feet at least, with an ovoid face and stretched limbs, but it was her long, thick hair that seemed to take up all the space in the room. (She never braided her own hair, or in fact tried to control it in any way.) The only thing that took up as much space as her hair was her voice. I could hear her from anywhere in the house. I sometimes felt that I could hear her from anywhere on our street, anywhere in our city, anywhere in the world.

Speaking of opposites: I almost never heard my father raise his voice. Instead, he responded to any quarrel or difficulty by softening his consonants, gentling his sentences, as if strife had only to be coddled, held close and licked clean. When my mother and I argued, my father would look at her and say, “Be soft.” And then he would look at me and say, “Be soft.” It’s no coincidence that it was he who was able to disappear.

I look nothing like my mother, alas. I look like my father’s mother, the wife of a dairy farmer, with fat low breasts and wide hips and a heart for a face. In college, a boy trying to unzip my jeans would gesture at the reclining nude fixed unevenly to his wall, Blu Tack bleeding at the corners, and intone in my ear: You look like a Modigliani. I would look up and see a painting of my mother. I would laugh into the boy’s sour mouth. He would turn out to be the kind of boy for whom this ruined the mood. Well, bullet dodged, I suppose.

(An angel, a Modigliani, a model, a slut. Men are always comparing naked women to other things, as if our exposed flesh is too bright to be experienced without simile. As if bare breasts won’t blind you if they’re cans, cantaloupes.)