Before the Word Mother

My mother had stopped using names for relations.

My brother was the tall one. Her sister was the woman from before. I was first the girl, then the one I had, and finally nothing at all.

At lunch, she sat across from me and pulled my plate toward herself.

She did not ask. She lifted the potatoes one by one with her fingers and placed them on her own plate. Then the carrots.

“Are you hungry?” I said.

She looked offended.

The fish was white and soft, baked with lemon. She pressed the back of her fork into it until it separated into wet flakes. Steam rose between us.

“That was mine,” I said.

She ignored me.

There had been a time when she remembered what belonged to whom. My coat among thirty coats. My handwriting without a name beneath it. The small cup I preferred because the rim turned slightly outward.

Now she wore my sweater and called it hers. Once, she held up an old photograph of herself and asked why I had cut my hair.

I reached for the plate.

She struck my hand with the fork.

Not hard. The tines left four pale marks that disappeared almost immediately.

She bent over the fish.

With two fingers, she searched through it. She lifted each flake, flattened it, and turned it toward the light. When she found a bone, thin as a strand of clear glass, she laid it beside her napkin. She worked from one end of the fillet to the other until a row of bones had gathered there.

When I was little, she had done this without letting me see. By the time my plate reached the table, fish had become something that contained no skeleton. Apples arrived without bruises. Grapes appeared halved. Whatever reached my plate had already passed through her hands and been made ordinary.

She no longer knew my birthday. She could not say where I lived. That morning, when I called her Mom, she had glanced behind herself to see who I meant.

Still, she continued taking the fish apart.

When she found no more bones, she returned the potatoes first, then the carrots. She arranged them around the fish, now reduced to a pale mound.

She pushed my plate back toward me.

“Eat,” she said.

I waited for something else.

My name, perhaps. Or daughter.

She had already turned to the window. Outside, a bird moved along the telephone wire, stopping every few steps.

I ate the fish.

It was cold.

There were no bones.