I wish it were truly possible to have a major scene at my house, a time when you truly hit the mother lode—excuse the pun—but it just doesn’t happen. I heard myself saying: “For a gift, I’d like to have a party with you and Irene.” But I didn’t say this. “Okay. But these last months in Milan, things have changed for me, and I’m happy about it.”

“That’s wonderful, the best thing a mother could hear. But really, you mustn’t concern yourself with how others are getting along. We’re all adults and have made our own choices.”

And then I went ahead and said—cryptically, respecting her wish to be vague—“Sometimes a person makes a choice, other times he doesn’t—it’s just turned out that way.” I purposely used “he,” to be extra vague.

“I sometimes think,” she said, twisting my meaning, “that certain choices are made because they’re in style.”

The way she said “style” brought me back to myself, standing on a sidewalk in Milan, among people that only a few months before I didn’t know. My mother’s voice came from Rome—my city.

“In style?” I said. This was the same woman who’d sat, so dignified and pleasant, on a red orchestra seat in the second performance hall in the Auditorium.

“Certain life choices are also meant to wound,” she added, of course referring to Irene. But it feels forced for me to explain that exchange: it would betray her nature: religious, allusive, serpentine. Like an oracle, you could take that comment as referring to the two of them, my parents, instead of their daughter. “Certain life choices are also meant to wound.” What a heroic admission that would be. Or maybe it was intended as a universal truth to contemplate. As I write now, I can visualize both my sister’s thin hair under her wig and my mother’s hair, so dull. I jot down: “incomprehensible incomprehension.”

I don’t remember what else we said on the phone, but I remember my mother’s small voice, strange, not my mother: for the rest of the call I kept thinking this wasn’t my mother.