"The damned Holy Family woke me up last night with another knock-down-drag-out," I tell my daughter when I call her today. "What a pack of hypocrites." "Ma. You shouldn't talk like that about people." "Why shouldn't I? You know they're holy only when they think someone's watching them." Three times a week and twice on Sundays, my neighbors in the apartment upstairs make a spectacle out of going to the storefront church around the corner, parading like ducks down the street, flapping righteousness like feathers I'm allergic to. The children tote bibles almost as big as they are. The mother puts on a pious face, but she isn't fooling anyone. Her husband wears a three-piece pinstripe and tight lips. "God bless you," they say to everyone. "Jesus loves you." "Yesterday, I saw them praying for a bum in the gutter," I continue, "waving their hands in the air and babbling gibberish at him. Like that's going to do any good." "It's not gibberish, Ma," my daughter informs me, "it's tongues. It's how angels talk," like she knows all about God and angels, and I don't. "You should try their church," she's telling me now. "It might help you." "Well, it isn't helping them. That wasn't any holy language I was hearing from the Mr. and Mrs. at one A.M. It was 'Goddamn you bastard' and 'Go to hell you bitch' and 'shove it up your ass' from the both of them. And all the banging and crashing, the kids screaming 'Daddy Daddy stop stop' -- you've never heard the likes of it." "Oh, yes," my daughter replies as faint as the rustle of old newspapers blowing down a street. "Yes, I have." Click goes the phone, and all I'm left with for company is Bob Barker and his Beauties on "The Price Is Right." A groggy, froggy voice answers my daughter's phone on Saturday morning. "Huh. Yeah. 'Lo?" It's the paramour de jour, of course. She changes her boyfriends as frequently as she does her lipstick color. I told her a few months ago that she ought to have a revolving door installed to her apartment. She slammed the receiver down so hard it made my head hurt and wouldn't talk to me for two weeks. "Hey. Anybody there?" the current bed-warmer rumbles at me. I hang up without saying anything and stare out the window. The Baby Bimbos across the street are up early today, strewn like trash all over the front stoop. Everything about them is a flag, a billboard, an invitation. Men driving by in cars catch their scent and slow down to sniff. Boys on bikes go around the block again and again, hoping for a handout. Girls like that can't help but give it away. The youngest, a precocious six, shimmies up and down the stone steps, letting the wind whip up her grimy little skirt so her underpants flash like a beacon. I bet she's got "Trouble" written on them instead of the day of the week. The middle girl paints her toenails, electric blue on gray soot foot, and waves her legs in the air to dry the polish. The eldest can't be more than thirteen. People used to talk about young girls "blossoming," but this kid is ready to erupt, like a sex volcano, bubbling up and out of her skimpy little halter-top and peek-a-boo short-shorts. Her mouth is always slightly open, as if to let steam escape. She'll soon be splitting her seams with a melon belly and have no idea who's responsible for it, of course. Why do young women want to spread their legs to the four winds like an airplane runway? You better believe I kept a tight rein on that daughter of mine. But no good deed goes unpunished. She only comes around now when she needs money -- and what's happened to her husband, God knows. "The relationship didn't turn out," she says, as casually as if her marriage were a cake that fell while baking. "I need to be my own person," she tells me, just a breath before announcing she's a little short this month and needs me to pay a bill for her. If I balk, out shoots that lower lip of hers, like a boil ripe for lancing. "But Ma," she whines. "We're family." Remember family? They ate your meatloaf or tuna casserole every night. On holidays, they were always there, by your side in church, around your table for turkey. The older women jiggled the younger women's babies on their knees and juggled households so there was peace and quiet. The men were hell to live with, but that's just how men are. Drunk, sober, glad, mad -- they knew what their responsibilities were. They worked their forty-plus-overtime every week and handed over the paycheck on Fridays. They made sure the kids got home by curfew and all hell would break loose if those teenagers were five minutes late. They raised their sons to be real men, and walked their daughters down the aisle. You knew they'd be at your deathbed, if you didn't outlive them, and that in secret, they'd weep bitter tears. That was your satisfaction. When I remind my daughter of these things, her silence is red and prickly, like heat rash. Finally, she groans, "Oh, come on, Ma. Don't you remember?" and recites a list of things I swear to God never happened. Beatings. Bruises. Black eyes. Supper swept off the table in a fit of rage. The Christmas tree smashed, the bits of shattered ornaments like a million little mirrors reflecting rage. The bad thing that happened to the puppy. Puppy? What puppy? I don't remember us ever owning a puppy. My daughter tells me crazy things, awful things. Like being so frightened she hid in the closet behind the winter clothes where no one could find her. Sticking things in her ears so she wouldn't hear the fights. Watching her father punch me and throw me out of the apartment in the middle of the night. "Ma. You stood in the hall. In your nightgown. Crying. I begged Dad to let you back in, but he told me to shut up or I'd be sorry," she says. "You're crazy!" I shout. I have to shout. It's like talking to a foreigner who refuses to learn the language. "Your father -- God rest his soul -- never did anything like that!" "The next day you acted like nothing had happened, but no one in the building would speak to us after that. They thought we were trash." "We certainly aren't trash! We're a much better class of people than the neighbors. They were stand-offish because they were jealous." "Jealous?" my daughter screams. "Of what? Of a woman with a battered face in a bargain basement nightdress, knocking on everybody's door at three A.M., going 'Help me, help me'?" That girl's mind is a sewer and her mouth is even worse, full of the worst lies. I swear she must have been dragged from some slut's womb and mislabeled as mine while I tossed in the twilight sleep of those drugs the doctors doped you up with during childbirth. When you came to, you didn't exactly remember anything, but it wasn't entirely forgotten either. It was just hazy and haunting, on the edge of your memory, like something you're working hard not to recall. And my real daughter, the dear little girl meant from the beginning of time to be mine, is long gone and lost to me, a member of some other family, all grown up now and somewhere so far away that I'll never find her, no matter how much I hope and pray. "Ma," my daughter snaps. "I told you not to phone me at work unless it's an emergency. Is this an emergency?" "Yes, it most certainly is. You need to find me a place to live outside the city. It's not safe here anymore. The neighborhood's changed." "Changed?" she hoots. "From what to what? It's exactly the same as when I was growing up." She sighs. "You know very well we should have moved when I was nine and Uncle Jerry offered to sell us his split-level in the suburbs cheap. But Dad said he'd be damned if he'd commute an hour to work and play Mr. Fix-It every weekend and let your stinking family cut off his balls by getting him to accept their charity." "Your father couldn't move out of the city. He was allergic to grass and trees. You remember." She doesn't, of course, any more than she cares about all the trouble I've had here since her father died. "You know how many times I had to call the cops about that psycho downstairs before they finally put him away for good." "Jesus, Ma! That man had been a P.O.W. in Vietnam," my daughter says. "His wife explained to you that he sometimes acted funny, but he was harmless. He just needed his meds adjusted." "Acting funny? Is that what it's called when a man creeps around the halls in a camouflage suit with a big knife in his belt, menacing little old ladies?" "You know very well he never threatened you, much less attacked you. He ran away when he saw you. He was scared." "It's obvious you don't care what happens to your mother." "Come on, Ma. Even the cops told you the only person he was likely to hurt one day was himself." "How can you be so sure? People are just fine up until the moment they're not fine any more, and then, well, you better watch out," I inform her. "Yeah," she says in that little lemon juice voice that sets my teeth on edge. "Tell me about it." The woman whose apartment is across the airshaft from mine is upset. I don't know her name, but she used to have a little blue parakeet. I'd see the bird perching on her fuzzy red hair while she cleaned house or flittering from her book to the lampshade when she read. Then one day, her husband didn't shut the window all the way and it flew off. Now, all I hear is "Chipper! Chipper! Chipper!" as she hangs out the window, calling into the dank gray gloom of the airshaft. "Then she starts this loud sobbing," I inform my daughter when I call her this morning. "It's driving me crazy." "Her name is Caroline Feeney," my daughter says. "She's lived in the building for years. You ought to make friends with her. It would do you good to have someone to talk to." I ignore the last comment. My daughter is always suggesting things that are "good for me." "Well, I don't know what she's boo-hooing about. It's just a dumb bird. She can get another one. I mean, it's not like her man is gone." "People are replaceable, too." I hear the click of her Bic as she lights a cigarette and exhales smoke so emphatically into the receiver that I practically choke. Then she says, "Bye, Ma," and today's pleasant little chat with my only child is over. When my daughter stops by, I remind her that Sunday is the anniversary of her father's death and she needs to go with me to the cemetery. Put flowers on his grave. Say a prayer for him. She looks at me like I've told her to put her hands into a vat of boiling water. "What's the matter with you?" I say. "After all he did for you, you won't even visit his grave. It's unnatural for a child to have no feeling for a parent. Your father was a good man." "Ma. Please. Don't start." I don't like the expression on her pinched little face or her tone of voice. "You wouldn't know a good man if you met one. Look at that worthless scumbag you married -- having affairs with women he met at the office or on the bus or in a bar, then coming home and sleeping with you! Your father never cheated on me once in all the years we were married." "Are you so sure?" Her chin juts out, her eyes are chips of ice. "He could have been doing things right under your nose and you would have overlooked it. Or made excuses for it." She stares down at me from the haughty heights of her $259.99 platform shoes (I should know -- she bought them so she could look like Jennifer Lopez, and then gave me the credit card bill to pay.) "Considering what your marriage was like, you have no business talking about mine," she continues with a sigh, exuding contempt and breath mint at me. "My husband didn't sneak around. We had an open marriage. We both had other partners." "What's happened to you? Your father and I raised you to be a decent girl. Every male wasn't sticking his thing in you when you lived under our roof. I kept my eye on you, little missy. We didn't let you run wild." "Didn't let me run wild?" She throws back her head and laughs. I can see her teeth like little white tombstones in the yawning wet pinkness of her mouth. "I fucked boys all the time." "That's impossible. We never let you go to boys' houses or ride in cars with them." "There are dozens of places for kids to fuck, Mother. The back seat of the city bus. The restroom in a coffee shop. Section 200 of the public library." "Section what?" "The religious books section. Nobody's ever in that aisle. Except fucking kids." She takes a deep breath and then spews out a stream of vile words like vomit. "If you kept your eye on me, then you must have seen me fucking boys in the doorway of the vacant store across the street when you looked out the living room window. I even fucked boys in the hall, right outside this apartment. We didn't even try to be quiet -- all the neighbors saw and heard us. And you must have, too." "You're lying! It never happened!" I desperately try to remember her at fifteen, sixteen. Had she acted suspiciously? Had she stunk of sex? I don't know. All I recall is she got straight A's and gave her father and me no trouble. "You're just saying these things to hurt me. You were a good girl." "I was a whore. Once, the man down the hall stood in the doorway of his apartment and watched me fuck a boy. When I was done, he said he'd pay me twenty bucks to suck his dick. And I did." "Where in God's name did you learn to do something so disgusting?" She shoves her face right up in mine. "From dear old Daddy. Starting when I was eight years old." "What? My God, you're evil! Telling lies about the dead who can't defend themselves!" I raise my hand to smack her, but she seizes my wrist and gives it a mean little twist. When I try to free myself, she grabs my other hand and squeezes it tightly, making my wedding band with the little diamond chips cut into the fingers on either side of it. "You can't tell me you didn't know what he was doing in my bedroom late at night. There's no way you didn't hear me crying and begging Dad not to make me do it. The walls are paper-thin." "You're sick in the head!" I scream at her, and I keep on screaming because I don't want to listen to anything more she's saying and I don't know how else to shut up her lies. "If you really cared about me," she concludes, "you'd have left that son of a bitch." "Why would I have done that? I loved him!" "Why do I even bother?" She grabs her purse and jacket. "You're hopeless. Totally hopeless." "Now you're going to storm out in a huff because you can't stand the truth. You don't know anything about real love. You don't know anything about commitment. You can't keep a job or a husband or -- " She opens the front door and shoots a glance back at me. "By the way, I'm in therapy now," she announces, as hard and cold as a slab of marble. "And my therapist says I don't have to see you any more if you're going to act like this." As she turns to go, her long brown hair falls with the finality of a brick wall between us. I don't care. I'm sick of her wearing the stench of strange men like a foul perfume. Sick of imagining the patchwork of anonymous handprints all over her body like an ugly quilt. Sick of seeing her little Swiss cheese soul so full of holes. This morning, the Blessed Mother of the Holy Family got run over in front of our building. I had a ringside seat -- police cars, fire engines, ambulances, screaming people. She was coming back from the supermarket when she walked right out in front of a delivery truck. There were heads of lettuce rolling down the street and splattered tomatoes everywhere -- what a mess. The traffic is still blocked up, the air in my apartment is blue from the exhaust fumes and I can hardly breathe. Well, at least my soap operas are on this afternoon. The messed-up lives of those poor people are so sad that it makes me cry.