ABSTRACT
She died on Shakespeare's birthday in 1982, aged either 83 or 85. I'm not sure which, because she concealed her age from me and everyone else, especially her second husband, who was ten years her junior and my father. "Don't pin a number on yourself," she would say to her husband-hunting friends in those long gossipy conversations about bargains and fashions that I overheard while connecting the dots or pretending to read Mary Poppins. I never called her mom or mommy, always mother, the more formal term, to keep her at bay linguistically when I hadn't a chance of keeping her out of my room, my bureau drawers, my wastebasket and least of all my mind, which she still inhabits.
