“Mother, I don’t have a phone,” Sylvia answers, vexation countermanded by relief. The schoolchildren’s shouts rise and fall at random, raucous and piercing. “It’s almost impossible to call within this district, let alone to the States. But I wrote to you right away, all the details. You’ll see. You should have my letter any day.” Six hundred times! Six hundred times she’s written to her mother since she left for Smith at seventeen, flooding the envelopes with reassurance, gratitude, filial praise, innumerable dazzling inventories of accomplishments for Aurelia’s delectation, the convenient distance of letters keeping their intrusive bond remote, but advantageously—for both of them—intact.

“Well, I was frightened,” Aurelia hedges. “There was such a whirlpool of events and decisions to be made, and I hadn’t heard…”

“Mummy, thank you for being so worried,” Sylvia soothes, momentarily unguarded, attracted into the open by the tantalizing lure of maternal sympathy. “But really, we’ll be fine. The flat is lovely; the children are happy. I’m relieved to be back in London.”

“And living in the home of Yeats—how proud you must be!” Aurelia gushes. “I’m sure it will give you years of inspiration, remembering all the wonderful poems and plays that he wrote there.”

“Oh, he didn’t actually write anything here, Mother,” Sylvia says, chagrined by her sudden scramble for approval as she listens to Aurelia’s expectant breath on the line. “He lived here as a child. But it was the first thing he mentioned in his autobiography—his first real memory was of my house, looking out the window—”

“I can picture you and your brother the same way, looking out Daddy’s study windows in the Winthrop house, watching the ocean,” Aurelia says, sucking Sylvia back like the sea to her early childhood: the high, briny horizon, the gulls’ cries and sleepy massage of afternoon sun shafting through glass. Winter days with her maternal grandmother in Point Shirley, on the other side of the sandspit from the Plath home: the kitchen steamy and warm, scented with chowder and gingerbread; the Atlantic heaving against the breakwater, snow at the tide line icy and salted. “But when Daddy died…” Aurelia continues, her voice fading off, the background roar of the connection rushing to swallow her unspoken feelings. “It was much more practical for us to leave. I sold the house as well as Grampy and Grammy’s, and we combined our households. I had you children, and that’s all that mattered.”

No matter how bitter the flavor of the distance Sylvia has protected herself with, her mother’s voice and breath can lure her back into their shared need, dragging Sylvia in to digest every aspect of her individuality. Tentacles of emotion wind through the phone line, drawing them tight.

“Oh, but I love Primrose Hill. It’s not like that at all for me,” Sylvia responds, kicking free.