My Body is a Cage and Other Stories

neighbor after she caught him trying to burn a white cross on her lawn. And Betty, who is just a
few years younger than my mom and dealt hard drugsas well as her body. And my mom. They
spent their hours outside smoking cigarettes and discussingtheir past, their plans for their future,
and of course, talking shit. I don’t think she toldthem what really happened to her husband.
From what she’s said, the women who killed or attemptedto kill their husbands had a tough
reputation in the place, so maybe she kept up thefacade for protection. Maybe she enjoyed being
seen like that, but I feel guilty for thinking that.She sobbed so hard holding me the night it
happened.
I had a panic attack in the hotel last night. I haven’thad one since I was in high school.
My mom came out of the bathroom, her hair wrappedup in a towel, to find me on the floor. It
was hard to breathe and her voice sounded far away,but she pulled me into her arms and
squeezed tight. We breathed together. She calmed medown. She asked me what happened, and I
said I don’t know. One minute I was fine, the nextI heard her singing in the shower and I was
overcome. She never sang in the shower before prison.I imagined her learning how to from
other women, these solitary songbirds in the bleakcold of prison bathrooms. The songbird that is
my mother was only in the cage because I put her thereyears ago. Anyone stuffed in a cage has
to be resentful of the one who put them there, butI couldn’t ask her if she resented me because I
was afraid of the answer. And then the song she wassinging, it was that Nancy Sinatra song that
you played at Syd’s. And I realized I had no ideawhere you were or what you were doing or if
there was another naive, rain-drenched blonde youwere serving cokes to. If maybe you had
asked her to dance and she had said yes. But I couldn’trelay this back to my mother, so I kept
repeating, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.