“My eyes are blue,” I said.

At the beach with Karen. Seed pods, corn cobs, smashed clams, horseshoe crabs, starfish, cartilage, bird tracks, “sea snacks.”

A passing thought: “Can a woman hurt you as much as a man?”

“Worse,” I tell her. “They understand you better, so they can hurt you worse.”

“That’s what I thought,” she says.

“Nothing pulls weeds faster than frustration.” I walked the rows of vegetables in the garden, and without having planned it, kneeled to pull up weeds, the right way, by the roots. It is a satisfying task—a tangible improvement, an instant fix. I fell into a kind of trance moving along the rows, improving the lives of beets.

In the drawer of my mother’s night table, under the emptied bottles of pills, were two pages torn from a women’s magazine. One page was a kind of consumer’s guide, a chart of deadly combinations, which pill taken with another would make you sick, or worse. Depending on your point of view, it was cautionary or how-to. The other page was what I quoted a moment ago, a list of suggestions for chasing off a gloomy mood. “Spend time in your garden. Nothing pulls weeds faster than frustration.”

But wait—maybe I am confusing this page with the page I found in her night table drawer the time she tried to quit smoking. And she did quit smoking, and what a time that was. I was in the seventh grade. I would ask her for permission to do something, and before I could get the question out she would have snapped back the answer—No! Years later, I heard a joke that brought this back. I say to you, “Ask me what is the secret of comedy.” You get as far as, “What is the secret—” and I cut you off with, “Timing.”

Yes, I went through her night table drawers, her dresser and closets, too. What simple taste she had. Everything she wore was unadorned. A cable in a cardigan came to seem festive. Plain black pumps. Unfrilled slips. Not drab-classic. She wore a lot of white.

You told me you had dressed the same since you were back in college, the khaki pants and Oxford-cloth shirts. Never Bohemian, certainly no beret. Cast against type. One is tempted to say you don’t look like an artist, but that is like the man who introduced me to his friend and told him I was talented, and his friend said back, “She doesn’t look talented.”

Did you ever paint a portrait of a woman you didn’t like? There is a portrait I saw—the one that hangs in the Tate—where I thought you must hate the woman. Hatred is a passionate involvement. It’s worse not to care for a person at all. Or is this a notion I hold onto to flatter myself?

My mother picked out all my clothes. We never went shopping together. Often what she bought was too small for me, too tight, as though she thought of me as being smaller, or wished that I was.