When I was young, my mother made Italian wedding soups and gnocchi and polenta with slabs of butter folded into the center. She fixed the porch steps and repainted the house and repotted the plants and sang in the evenings. She built a fire pit in the backyard, and killed spiders, and rescued sparrows, being careful not to touch their wings. (I have, at times, been jealous of birds.) When I had the hiccups, she made me drink a glass of water with a knife in it, blade angled toward my eye. Hurry, she said, clapping her hands. She was always changing her mind, moving the furniture.

She worked at an advertising firm, but if you asked her what she did, she would tell you that she was an artist. At home, in the two-carless garage she used as a studio, she built enormous figures of women out of clay, their bodies obese and towering, earth-and-water flesh pooling and mounding over rebar bones, their faces sagging and distended, the opposite of her own. She called them the Mournful Fatties.

On warm Saturday nights, she would invite all of her friends over, a wild array of people from buttoned-up businessmen to frizzy schoolteachers to pink-haired, nose-ringed comedians, and someone would have a full band in their back pocket (bass, guitar, drums, trumpet), and they would dance around the fire pit, stage belt-sander races across the yard, and play hide-and-seek among the Fatties, or dress them up in old clothes my mother kept in a trunk for this purpose, as sea captains or fairy princesses or accountants, all while drinking bottles and bottles of wine so red it was almost black, their voices reaching me in my bedroom like bells.

The dancing was my mother’s favorite part. She would dance as long as she could get anyone to dance with her, and she could always get someone to dance with her. Men or women, though mostly men. She would pull their bodies close, wrap her legs and arms around them, grind her hips into theirs as they ran their hands along her thighs. She loved to be dipped, swung, and twirled. She loved to be touched, anywhere, by anyone.

During these evenings, my father would usually stay in the house. I could hear him turning the pages of his book, or not turning the pages. There were hours and hours of not turning the pages.

After her last guest had left, shoes worn through for his wife to wonder at in the morning, my mother would come in and kiss my father on the forehead. “Come to bed,” she would say.

“I’ll be up soon,” he would say. And she would set her wine glass down gently beside him and go upstairs alone, and he would turn the page.