PHANTOM LIMB

(Ages Thirteen to Fourteen)

“This, this, this . . .” Mom was tossing things into an ever-growing recycling pile. “Out it goes.”

I’d been at Godark just over a year, and after much discussion, Andreas had agreed to sell his waterfront condo and move in with us. The three of us had looked at a few houses, thinking to move, but seeing other places only caused us to realize how unique and cozy the coach house was, and we decided it was more than large enough for the three of us. However, Andreas was going to need some closet space, and this had prompted a purging frenzy.

“Mom, you can’t just—achoo!” I sneezed from the dust she’d stirred up, pulling all of her opera paraphernalia out from the back of her closet. There were programs, playbills, cast photos, review clippings, musical scores, tiny opera house–shaped chocolates from who knows when. “You can’t just throw all that out—not the Carmen program, not—come on, I remember most of these shows. Wait!”

Mom paused to open a score and run her index finger along the notes, then she swore in some exotic language and threw it on the pile.

“When they cut off your leg, do you keep it to take it out and look at?”

“Eww. What?”

“Precisely.”

“A leg would smell, Mom.”

“Well, this smells too, and I don’t want Andreas to find our house smelly. It goes.”

“It’s not a leg, Mom. This is your life. Our life. Your legacy. It’s important.”

At this she tilted her head toward the ceiling and growled.

“Oh my God,” I said. “Fine.”

“And we do not speak of it to him. Ever.”

We’d been over this and were not in agreement, not that it mattered since 90 percent of the time in the case of a disagreement, I would lose. My being thirteen had not changed that fact.

The craziest thing was that Mom, even after almost two years with him, had still not told Andreas about her life in opera. Yes, he knew she’d been a singer and that she “didn’t like to sing anymore.” She’d told enough of the truth—that she’d drifted around Europe in her early years, hoping to make a living as a singer, that she’d taken bizarre jobs all over the place and sung wherever she could, but I could tell he had the impression she meant she was singing in bars, or even on street corners, and that maybe she hadn’t been very good.

“All this time I thought you were just waiting for the right moment to tell him,” I said.

“There is nothing to tell. That person,” she said, pointing to a stunning photo of herself, “is not me. Not now. And it is me he is with. Me of right now. I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to relive it, I don’t want him feeling sorry for me, and I don’t want him wishing I were still that woman. He loves me now.”

“So you’re never going to tell him.”

“No. And neither are you.”

“But . . .”

“No!” she roared. “No, no, no! I would rather break up with him. Is that what you want?”

“Fine.” I sighed and got back to the depressing task at hand. Margot-Sophia was in a mood, and even the old photographs, which we didn’t have digital copies of, went in the pile. There would be no dissuading her. And so I helped: holding the garbage bag open, sorting recyclables from nonrecyclables, making runs outside to the bins.

My heart hurt with every bit that was tossed. It was my life too—the best part of it. Even things that had happened before I was born were part of who I was, and how we got to this place in time, with or without possibly odiferous metaphorical limbs.

Not all of it made it outside—some of it, as much of it as I could manage, made its way to the very back of my closet, from which I could produce it later on, if and when she regretted tonight’s actions.