My mother stood at the sink, taking odd, bird-like sips from the glass of water. I remembered I had learned that birds cannot swallow and so must tip their heads back to ingest water, and how they will drown in a rainstorm if their beaks are left open and their heads tilted back, although why they would have their beaks open and heads thrown back during a rainstorm is a mystery to me. My mother finally finished drinking her glass of water in this odd manner and then made what seemed to me to be a great show of rinsing out the glass and put it in the dishwasher, which of course was not an easy thing to do as the dishwasher was already full of dishes.

"What happened?" asked Gillian.

"What happened?"

"Yes," said Gillian. "Why are you home? Where is Mr. Angelosanto?"

Both my sister and I enjoyed calling our mother's new husband by his surname, even though we had been told repeatedly to call him Barry.

"I neither know, nor care to know, where that man is," my mother said. "I hope that I never see Mr. Angelosanto again in my life."

"Well, best to discover that now," said Gillian. "Although I suppose it would have been best to discover that before you married him. Or before you agreed to marry to him. Or before you met him."

"Gillian," my mother said, "please."

"It's Gillian," said Gillian.

"What?" my mother asked. "My name is Gillian," said Gillian. "My name has been mispronounced long enough. I have decided that from now on that I will only answer to Gillian. Rainer Maria says naming a child something and then mispronouncing that name is a subtle and insidious form of child abuse."

"Oh, that's not my style," my mother said. "If I were going to abuse you, you'd know it." She looked at me. "And you," she said, "why aren't you at the gallery?"

"John didn't need me today," I said.

"That is not the point," said my mother. "John never needs you. He does not need me. You do not go there because you are needed. You go there because I pay you to go there so you will have a summer job and learn the value of a dollar and know what responsibility is all about."

"I'll go tomorrow," I said.

My mother sat at the table. She took the half-finished crossword puzzle away from Gillian. "Please remove that plate," she said to me. "There is nothing more disgusting than a plate on which a fried-egg sandwich has been eaten." My mother is very particular about what people around her eat. She cannot stand to watch anyone eat a banana, unless they peel the whole thing and break it into attractive bite-sized pieces. I got up, rinsed the plate and put in the dishwasher. I filled the dishwasher with detergent and started the cycle. This act was too transparently ingratiating for anyone to acknowledge, yet it seemed to have a softening effect upon my mother: she sighed and rested her head on her arms, which were crossed before her on the table.

"What happened?" asked Gillian.

My mother did not answer. She was crying. Gillian stood up and moved behind my mother, reached down and embraced her, held her while she sobbed. She looked at me and nodded toward the door. I left them there. I thought that under the circumstances the best thing to do might be to get out of the house so I took our dog, a black standard poodle named Miro, to the dog run in Washington Square. Miro, who doesn't seem to think of himself as a dog, doesn't really enjoy the dog run but he will sit patiently on the bench beside me, observing the simple canine ways of the other dogs with amused condescension.

Right outside of our building is a tree well filled with impatience and English ivy with two plaques attached to the little iron trellis around its base. One reads: IN MEMORY OF HOWARD MORRIS SHULEVITZ, BLOCK PRESIDENT 1986-1993. HE LOVED THIS BLOCK, and the other reads: CURB YOUR DOG.

When I first saw the Shulevitz plaque, about ten years ago when my parents divorced and my mother moved downtown, I misinterpreted it, thinking that the dates supplied were Howard Morris Shulevitz's dates of birth and death, and that he had been a little boy who had died some tragic early death and as a consequence had been given the posthumous honorific title of "Block President." I had very tender feelings about the boy, who had died at approximately the age I was then, and felt in some way I must be his successor, and so I vowed to love the block with Howard's ardency, and I even had fantasies about dying young myself — I thought about throwing myself out our living room window so that I would land on the sidewalk in front of the tree well. I would get my own plaque then, beside Howard's: JAMES DUNFOUR SVECK, SECOND BLOCK PRESIDENT, 1986 - 1994. HE LOVED THIS BLOCK TOO.
    I made the mistake of mentioning this little fantasy to my mother, who informed me that Howard Morris Shulevitz had probably been an old man, a petty tyrant who had nothing better to do than annoy his neighbors with building code violations. I don't remember when exactly the CURB YOUR DOG plaque was appended to the railing, but one can only imagine why it was necessary, and now seeing those two adjacent plaques never fails to depress me, for even if Howard Shulevitz was, as per my mother's imagining, a petty tyrant, did he really deserve to have his name, and memory, evoked beside a CURB YOUR DOG sign?

I find this whole phenomenon of naming things after the deceased disconcerting. I don't like to sit on a bench that is a memorial to someone's life. It seems disrespectful. And when you go to a concert at Avery Fisher Hall all the seats have these tiny plaques on their backs saying things like "In Loving Memory of Arlene Philpot Wagoner." I think if you want to memorialize someone you should either erect a proper memorial, such as the Lincoln Memorial, or leave well enough alone.

It was hot in the dog run and fairly empty. The people who didn't have real jobs who frequented the dog run during the day had left already, and the people who had real jobs hadn't yet arrived. This left a few dog walkers with a motley assortments of dogs, all of whom seemed not in the mood to frolic.