Lesson

Whenever my mother, who taught small children forty years, asked a question, she already knew the answer. "Would you like to" meant you would. "Shall we" was another, and "Don't you think." As in "Don't you think it's time you cut your hair." So when, in the bare room, in the strict bed, she said, "You want to see?" her hands were busy at her neckline, untying the robe, not looking down at it, stitches bristling where the breast had been, but straight at me. I did what I always did: not weep --she never wept-- and made my face a kindly whitewashed wall, so she could write, again, whatever she wanted there.