"After a fight, men want to have sex, but I don't," my mother said.She glanced at undergraduate me from the driver's seat as if a membranehad been breached and asked, "Do you?"                                                                                      I wanted to change the subject.We were returning from the mall through the stony suburbwhere the model lived, the one who said, "Nothing comes between meand my Calvins," where the fire department floods the commonevery winter for skating, creating warty ice ungroomed by Zambonis,grass snagged in its skin like ingrown hairs. My mother kept lookingat me, her eye a sideways question mark, tricky liquid liner paintedalong the lid, pupil unrelenting.                                                             Everyone in the family exceptmy mother owned their own lockable room. She had to read her Harlequinsout in the open like a gazelle. We stalked through, asking and asking:"Where is the," "Why can't I," "Help me." Nightly, her shirtless husbandarrived with a pump-jar of Jergens, demanding she moisturize his back,scaly from chlorine, but I knew—spy crouching on the stairs,fingertips brushing wallpaper embossed with creamy trees,its surface all bubbles and seams—what he was after.Once, at a modernism conference, a guy chased me around the canapéswhile lecturing me on Marianne Moore's asexuality.I knew my mother didn't like sex, but I never askedwas it generally or just sex with my father. Nothinggets between me and my shame.I don't know what Moore wanted,just that she wrote cryptic poems under her mother's surveillance.Heterosexual marriage: she, too, disliked it. She was nearly sixtywhen her mother died.                                                    Now, I know death's intimacy.How honesty frightens me. My mother is everywhere:cells lodged in my body, invisible flakes of skin on sweaters,a baggie of ashes on the bookshelf.                                                                            Not after a fight.Until adrenaline burns off, I'm hot the wrong way. Clenched.I hope she knew what an orgasm feels like. (During my first,a rainbow tree grew between me and my eyelids, privately.)She said to us, over her book,  "No, I don't wantto hug you goodnight."