Excerpts from Mapping Eden . . .

We had a photograph on our piano, in the sunroom in the front of our apartment on the North Side of Chicago.  The sunroom had little black and white mosaic tiles on the floor, like in the bathroom, and windows all around. 

The piano took up the entire sunroom. . . . They said my mother used to play.  

I didn't like to look at that photograph. . . . 

People talked in front of me but not to me. They whispered behind their palms. They halted their words mid-sentence.

Best not to speak about it, pretend it wasn't happening.

I would never tell. I never said a word. Of course, not a word was said to me.

Geography, my father liked to explain, is a Greek word that means writing the world. A map will anchor you, ground you, guide you when you are lost. A map will supply the name of the town you are passing through and the stream running alongside the road.

My father knew the configuration of the earth not only as we understand it today but as the ancients believed it to be.

My father wasn’t supposed to be sitting in the kitchen, in the suit he wore to work, at three o’clock when I came home from school.

My father never was home in the afternoon, neither were any of the other fathers I knew. Ginger’s wasn’t, he came home after we were done with our games and I had gone home. Molly’s father didn’t go to an office, he went to a plant, the kind where they make things, and he came home earlier but not till dinnertime.

When Dora came she took my mother's clothes out of the closet and packed them in a carton from Kroger's that said Clorox in big letters on the side.

I wasn’t supposed to say “my mother” that way and didn’t say it and never would say it again. Leila told us to call Dora that and so we did, though it stuck in my throat and I had to have something crossed, like my fingers behind my back, at least I meant them to be.

By the next summer when I went down the back stairs out the side gate onto Thorndale and around to Magnolia, past the stoop where the mothers sat, I could barely picture her at all. Memories flickered, seeped out of my consciousness. How did I know they were real? . . .

They did not speak of my mother—my father or Leila or the other mothers or Robbie. Robbie just looked daggers at Dora. Robbie slammed his door and didn’t come out. Or he went outside and played ball for hours, even by himself, even with no one to play with, instead of doing his homework. I was afraid to slam the door, and I didn’t know how to play ball.

My mother left, not with another man, and not all at once, but little by little, pieces of her falling away.  She didn't pack suitcases, she didn't make arrangements, she didn't bring back a present.

She slid out of reach, over that place where the earth curves, where our ancestors believed it ended.  They needed to be careful. 

Now we know better: The horizon is continuous, the earth is round.