Somehow there was a cat and the cat had kittens in a soft tangle of bedding on the floor of my mother's bedroom. As little as it was, it was too much for us, for our small apartment. But we were young at the time and knew nothing of our poverty. "You can each have one," my mother lied. I named mine Tina, after Tina Louise on Gilligan's Island, and my sister named hers Buttons. Things were good for days or weeks. Maybe weeks.

There was a depression in the wall by the back door, square and purposeful like an old fireplace or the remains of a dumbwaiter. Inside this depression was where she put the cats, penning them in with a thin sheet of particleboard she painted gray to match our walls. I came home after school one day and heard the kittens mewing inside, a pattering of soft question marks. I heard the mother cat clawing at the board.

My mother staggered out of our living room where a black felt tapestry of zodiac signs hung over a legless couch, a cigarette flitting between her lips. She fumbled with her bathrobe that was loose about her waist, and in a flash I saw a breast, dark-tipped, perfectly conical between the folds of pink material. She looked at me curled on the linoleum, at the thatch of papers that grew from the corners of my lunchbox. Her eyes were stern, glassy. "Well," she said, "I'm only twenty-one."

I know my mother thinks we hold this against her after all these years. In fairness, how could she not? No doubt my sister can reassemble the facts better than I, but as for me parts of this memory remain elusive or unlikely, as spurious now as tax relief or acid rain. But parts, too — the lesser movements of this symphony — have been for better and worse etched in my mind: that once there was a cat who had kittens in a soft tangle of bedding on the floor of my mother's bedroom, and once I saw my mother's breast, feral, refulgent in its beauty, and beneath it the first surfacing of an unspeakably cruel heart.