There is a little scalpel that sits on my desk, for making very straight cuts in paper. It is part of the work that I do, making the straightest cuts that I possibly can. People find it surprising that you can make a straighter line with a scalpel than with scissors, with one blade than with two. Usually more of a thing makes that thing do its job better. Or when you can get on both sides of a thing, as with scissors, then you yourself can do your job to it better. But I have found the single blade and the steady hand to be the best and simplest instruments at my disposal.

When my mother comes over to clean the apartment from time to time she always eyes that scalpel suspiciously. She looks at it, then at me, and says, “Don’t get fancy!” by which she means: Don’t kill myself, either on purpose or by accident. No indication has been given that this might happen, but my mother knows that indication means nothing. For the child to die before the parent is a crime against Nature, my mother likes to say, though when my mother ever started caring so much about Nature, I don’t know. When she sees the scalpel, she does not see the potential for care and precision, but a latent carelessness or violence, or a dangerous proximity of the two. That isn’t even the truth, really. Here is the truth: The truth is that my mother would not clean my apartment if I paid her.

My mother is a very sensitive woman, and in the position, both difficult and enviable, of being a beautiful woman growing old. You can tell she was beautiful both because she is still at least really good looking, handsome even, and because she conducts herself like a beautiful woman does, acting a little crazy or stupid or mean because her looks have made her lazy and there is no reason to do the work of goodness if it isn’t required of you. Sometimes when I see my mother flirting with an innocent member of the service industry, I want to stop her, maybe cover her with a sheet. I never do though, because really: She can get us into movies for free. Still! If I were a certain kind of man that my mother likes I would say admiringly, “What a woman,” and by this I would mean that she still has it, it is still there, whatever it was. Just to keep the same shape, after awhile, constitutes accomplishment.

But she is susceptible to everything, and liable to crack under the weight of things that a bigger, better woman would kill through laughter.

My mother’s sensitivities have presented certain problems, as sensitivities do. Certainly they present the problem of obscuring each other, that is: sometimes there are so many things that might have upset my mother that we don’t know what the problem is. For instance, when she was young my mother had her wisdom teeth removed. Her oral surgeon did not suture the wounds in her jaw, for reasons mysterious to everyone but him. Instead, he told her to bite down on gauze until the bleeding stopped. “When you run out of gauze,” he said, “Use tea bags. They feel just the same.” My mother did what he said, and after 15 minutes of tea bags, she vomited and then fainted. But here was the thing: My mother had both a horror of her own blood, and a total intolerance for caffeine. So she never did know if it was the sight of blood or the tea bags that did her in.

My mother, though, is not a useless woman, nor a helpless one. She has a power all her own. And she is ruthless, but in a way most people call dedicated. If she had had a child just slightly different from myself she would have taken vicious, tremendous care of it. She would have scrubbed skin raw, enforced strict television watching hours and homework times, demanded torrents of extracurricular activities and thank-you cards for all gifts given on all occasions. That child would have been a force, a power; polished like a gem and burning with ability. My mother could have unleashed something on this world. If she had been able to, she could have really made something.

When I was a kid my family used to go over to my cousins’ house for dinner once a week, and in the summertime we would eat in the garage where my aunt thought it was cooler, though it never seemed to be. We ate with the garage door open part way, because if you ate in the garage you had to leave the door open or else you would die from gas fumes, my aunt believed. This was my father’s sister, my mother’s sister did not believe things like that, and anyway she was dead before the time I am thinking of. My mother was a smoker then (although this is now something we share a hatred for) and my aunt made her sit out in the driveway to smoke, partly because my mother had never managed to win the affection of any of my father’s five (five!) sisters, and partly because my aunt believed that my mother’s cigarettes would ignite the greasy oil and gasoline spots on the garage floor. My aunt, you see, had many beliefs. When she wanted a cigarette, my mother would sigh, always, and take her folding chair out to the dark of the driveway where she would sit with her good, left side facing the garage. This was largely for the benefit of my father’s sister; to show her what she might be with a little effort. My mother did not like my aunts all that much either, for what it’s worth. But it isn’t worth much, and here’s why: it is not even really the point of the story.

The point of the story is: Sitting in the driveway, with her lower half all lit up by garage light, and her upper half in the dark, was a woman, my mother. She presented her profile carefully, even though none of us could see it, denied as it was the light that the rest of us sat under. All we could see was the ember at the end of her cigarette hovering like an insect near her throat and face. And when she was almost finished smoking she would saunter down to the end of the driveway and carefully take the last drag before tossing the butt (unfailingly, unerringly) into my aunt’s rose bushes. The light of the ember made a line; a pure, clean cut into the darkness. Impossible, then, to love a better woman; and impossible to love even the worst one more.