The Dark Room

In 1980, when I was nine years old, my mother had a hysterectomy. I seem to have been anesthetized during the week of her hospitalization: I don't remember missing her, I don't remember feeling that she had been taken from me. Her homecoming from the hospital must have sparked a flurry of activity—my sister Anne tucking piUows behind Mom's back and running to fetch the TV remote, my father heading downstairs to smoke in the basement so that Mom wouldn't split her belly open, coughing—but I can't recall the day she came home. I remember the days afterward, when Anne and my brother, Danny, went to school, my father to work, leaving me alone with Mom.