Rena goes to Greece and sends me postcards of the Acropolis with a big arrow she has drawn behind a pillar. She writes this is where she kissed a boy. Then there is another arrow and she writes this is where Bonnie kissed a man. She phonetically writes out a Greek curse for me and I use it on my sisters and when I walk by the diner whose glass door I smashed. I use it on John to see if he knows it but he’s not listening, he’s busy cleaning the hot dog cart, dipping his apron corner into the hot hot dog water and then running the apron over the metal, over the handles, over the umbrella frill that’s dirty with grime, over the pole and the spokes on the wheels and the handle he pushes every morning when he comes to the park and every evening when he goes home.

I grow the other tit. It too starts like a cyst, hard, and it moves like a quarter back and forth under my skin. My mother makes fun of my tits. She grabs at them and pinches them when I undress. “Bee-boop” she says when she pinches one and then the other. I hit her hands and slap them hard and push her away. I start to dress where she can’t see me, leaning over the radiator to hide myself when it’s cold, or changing in the shower stall when it’s not so cold. When I’m bored she tells me the French have a saying, she says I should go take my titties and dance. “That’s your saying?” I say.

“That’s it,” she says.

“Tell me more,” I say.

“I can’t remember,” she says.

“Yes, you can,” I say.

“I was in love with my cousin. I would swim with my cousin in the ocean, naked of course, at night without moonlight. We would race to a buoy and then back. We swam so close side by side that sometimes we would touch. But it was dark, merde, who knew what we were touching. Something soft and fleshy, a body part we could hardly name. He was tall. My nose came right here,” and she touches me right at the arch of my ribcage. “I could fit my nose in there. He said either his ribs were made from my nose or my nose was made from his ribs because they seemed to fit so perfectly. Merde, he was a poet. He said we fit together like the world before the world was continents before the world broke up and drifted apart.”

“What about Dad, what do you remember?” I say.

She starts to cough. She coughs all the time. A cough that lasts through my dreams at night. She gags sometimes, she coughs so much. Her neck puffs up, her eyes bulge and tear. She takes a drink of her drink to keep her from coughing, but she still coughs. She cannot answer my question.

*   *   *

The landlord won’t fix the windows. Gusts of winter wind blow through the broken glass fallen out from rotted wooden frames. Snow comes in at an angle, collecting on the floor. The cats step in it and lick their paws. My brother staples plastic to the inside of the windows. Lights from cars and street lamps are just blurs. The snow collects on the skylight. We wake up and we can’t see the sky. It’s quiet, as quiet as if we had slept in a cave.

“I hope the roof holds,” my mother says.

We are cold at night. We sleep with sweaters on and hats. The cats claw at our faces, they want to get under the covers too. We let them in and keep our heads under the covers, breathing in what the cats breathe out.

There’s a fire outside in the empty lot, but who would know except for the heat. It’s a fire seen through plastic, the flames a blur of orange. We are told to evacuate. We take the cats in pillowcases and sit on the curb in the snow. The firemen ax down our downstairs door even though we keep telling them we have a key. My brother tries to buy a coat off one of the firemen, but the fireman won’t sell. We say we would be better off inside, at least we wouldn’t be cold, our building’s brick warmed by the raging fire in the empty lot.

“What’s this? What’s this?” our mother says.

“Your hair,” we say. It’s coming out in clumps held between her fingers.

“My hair?” she says. “It never did this before,” she says. “What’s going on inside of me?” She bangs her fists on her head. “Your father did this to me,” she says. “All those years,” she says.

The firemen say it’s safe to go back in. To fight the fire out back they’ve gone through our place. The floor’s one huge puddle from their leaky hoses. They’ve pulled off all the plastic hanging, and now the wind is coming through again. The puddle freezes like a pond in our house and we take turns sliding across it wearing our coats and our gloves and our hats and the dog is with us on the ice, sliding too, barking, biting at our coattails and sleeves, trying to pull us away to the safety of shore.

We are smoked through. Our clothes in drawers, our mattresses, our furniture, it all smells like the fire did out back. We run the washing machine for days, one load after the other while the poor machine shakes and dances across the kitchen floor. What trees were out back are now just charred and when a wind comes along, cinder bits and ash fly into our window like black snow.

“A black Christmas,” our mother says, holding out her hand to catch it. It is Christmas. We have a tree with no branches at the top, only a spindly long point, and a few fuller branches at the bottom. The cats eat the tinsel and we can hear them throwing up all night. Ma Mère comes over with a basket of fruit. She won’t sit on our car seat couch unless we spread a towel there first. My mother pours her wine. “Joyeux Noël,” we all say and then there is nothing to say and we walk away and leave my mother talking French to her until dinner. After dinner Ma Mère needs help to the bathroom. We take her in there and get her pants down and sit her on the toilet. She falls over and we pick her up again. There are tears running down her closed eyes.

“Quest-ce que tu fais?” our mother asks her.

“My girdle,” she says in French to my mother and my mother tells us to help her unfasten Ma Mère’s girdle. Once her girdle is off she slides forward, her head falling back and banging on the tank of the toilet seat, the gray sparse hair between her legs visible now, as her pubic bone is pushed out toward us. My mother props her up again.

“Pee-pee already!” my mother says to Ma Mère, but Ma Mère starts to laugh and says she cannot. “Oh, damn you, peepee!” my mother says again.

“Come on, pee-pee!” my sisters and I say. We are all laughing now, and kneeling on the floor of the bathroom, trying to hold Ma Mère up.

“Pee-pee!” my mother tries to say again, but she is laughing so hard she cannot say the word. Ma Mère starts to cry, great sobs that make her thin shoulders go up and down. Her nose runs and we wipe it for her.

“It’s okay, ma cherie,” my mother says to her and hugs Ma Mère and Ma Mère cries louder and grabs onto my mother and tries to stand but she cannot and so she is just sort of hanging off my mother, her pants down by her ankles and then she starts to pee. She pees all over my mother’s legs and my mother’s feet. “Oh, merde!” our mother says.

“No, c’est du pee-pee,” Ma Mère says.

Our mother says, “C’est vrai, ce n’est pas de merde, c’est du pee-pee. Oh, damn you all,” our mother says.