At Christmas we drive from Minneapolis to Buffalo. My mother, who is not a fan of Minneapolis, takes turns with my father at the wheel, while I stretch out in the back. Her canaries, Lucky and Himmel, stay behind with one of the neighbors. 
        "This is your father's town," my mother says, looking out the window, toward white lawns and skeletal trees. She studies a travel magazine, staring at glossy pictures of California: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Monterey. "These places are my speed," she says, holding the shiny page up for me to see. She leans back from the front seat to run a fluttery hand through my rust-colored hair. "Someday, Miss Birdy, I'll bring you there." 

*  *  *

        I am twelve years old. When my mother isn't around I hold mirrors up to Lucky and Himmel, trying to make them angry, hoping they'll attempt to peck at their own eyes. I try to teach them to speak, even though they aren't meant to, don't have the necessary muscles, tendons, cords. My desire is to teach them the words certain pretty girls are called at school: Moron, Bitch, Slut; I whisper the words over and over to them, my mouth against their cage, and by the end I have lines on my lips from the bars, and the words mean nothing. Still, there's another part of me that wishes I was one of the birds, so that my mother would poke her fingers in and stroke my tiny feathers, occasionally open the metal door and reach in a hand for me to climb on to.

*  *  *

        Inside my grandmother's kitchen where everything-the refrigerator, stove, counter-is minuscule and avocado or aqua, my grandmother drinks cup after cup of Sanka and does crossword puzzles. She has hair so thin you can see her scalp like the spaces between rows of corn. The remaining strands are dyed black, and set once a week at the beauty shop in town.
        Rose was born in Poland. She escaped in the late '30s, to come to Buffalo, to meet a Norwegian florist a decade older than she. He said it must have been fate: she had the name of his favorite flower. She named my mother Esther, a name my father thinks glamorous but my mother resents, calling it an "old lady name," to everyone except my grandmother. Rose's accent clips the ends of some words, rounds and smoothes others. She doesn't talk at all about her life before. It's my mother who tells me about the way Rose came here, smuggled in a boat like treasure.
        My grandmother likes flowers and Niagara Falls and now even Christmas. She opens cans of ginger ale and staggers them around the kitchen counter because flat ginger ale settles a stomach, and she believes in being prepared. 

*  *  *

        When I was six or seven I ran over the concrete floors of my grandparents' greenhouse: a long glass room with tables overflowing with leafy scarlet poinsettias. I ran through the aisles pretending I was pushing through fire. At the end of the tables a heavy wooden door led outside, and sometimes my mother would be there, a cigarette in her hand, because she wasn't allowed to smoke in the house. She'd stand just inside the doorway, with only her hand and the cigarette stretched outside into the cold. I'd run to her, leaping, Momma! And she'd hug me and laugh, surprised. I'd spring up and shimmy loosely around in her arms, like a fish on the floor of a boat, and she'd always catch me, hold me, and let me go, the cigarette thrown outside and forgotten.
        Once I decided to spy. I heard the trickle of the hose, which was always on, and the soft murmurings of my mother's voice. She'd pulled the greenhouse telephone over to the heavy door so she could smoke and talk at the same time. She was cooing into the phone, like you'd do to a baby, and then shaking her head slowly back and forth, saying, "no, no, no." 
        For a second I was confused. Had I done something? I hid behind one of the silver tables, but in my head I was saying see me, see me, see me. And then she stood, and I shrunk even smaller behind the table as she set down the phone, threw the cigarette outside, and stared through the glass at the house, where icicles hung like fangs. 

*  *  *

        It's the morning of Christmas Eve. Frank handles the greenhouse and the telephone orders while Rose takes me to Niagara Falls for a photograph. We have one from every year, taken in exactly the same spot: the squat concrete wall on the American side. The background is a sheet of falling water. Since it's always my grandmother who takes the photograph, the only thing that changes in it is me.
        Earlier this morning Frank and Rose had gone on and on about who I look like more, my mother or my father.
        "Oh please, Frank," my grandmother said, "She's her mother's daughter. The eyes."
        "She's got his cheeks, Rose. Besides, the hair, the freckles…."
        While they went over this, I attempted one of my grandmother's crossword puzzles, and my mother walked around the kitchen opening and closing cupboards.
        I have my father's red hair. This, my mother swears, is not why they named me Ruby. "Please," she says whenever someone asks, her hand up like a boy scout, "Give me more credit than that." Besides, I actually had dark, curly hair like my mother's until I was two years old, even according to photographs. Then it became red, fine, and straight, similar to my father's, but not really; it's different somehow, sometimes separating itself into thin wheaty stalks, like some old eccentric aunt's.
        There is a special place at Niagara Falls where you can stand between two vertical rushing bodies of water; the noise is practically deafening. On the way to the Falls this year my grandmother tells me about a woman from Quebec who was there with her baby recently -- apparently the sound and the sight of it mesmerized her so completely that she forgot who she was, and the preciousness of what she was holding, and she let go, and didn't even scream until she saw the blanketed bundle funneling away.
        "But don't worry, honey," my grandmother says as she parks the car, "we won't go near there."
        She goes around to the back of the car to get her camera, walking slowly in her white nursey-looking shoes and thick beige stockings. As she leans down into the trunk, I stand next to her, balancing my weight on the balls of my feet. I have recently started trying to make my calf muscles more defined by rising slowly on my tip-toes whenever I can. At the edge of the parking lot sits a small brick diner with a banner over the doorway advertising a breakfast special: two eggs, toast and bacon, with a free bloody mary. And then, here's my mother coming out, with a man I don't know, a man who is not my father. Together their bodies seem loose and rambling, as if they are just learning to use them. They pause in the doorway, and my mother straightens the man's plaid jacket, buttons the bottom button he hadn't done. My grandmother watches them too. We're both wondering where my father is. I consider waving, imagine myself walking over, holding out my hand to introduce myself to this man with blonde hair, a brown mustache. But really, I'm not that concerned with him; I'm watching the glass door at my mother's back, waiting for my father to come out.  
        When my mother pushes the man against the wall, for half of a second I feel relief. She's trying to get something out of his eye. Of course. Then she presses her mouth against his. 
        "Get in the car," Rose says, and I do.
        She drives out the way you're supposed to come in, so we don't have to pass them. On the way home we don't say a word about what we've seen. There will come a time when I've almost convinced myself that what I saw was something or someone else. It's an ability I will acquire from my mother and grandmother, and later I will be able through this reconstruction of the past to believe almost anything I want about the present.  
        Rose and I go directly into the greenhouse. You'd think the smell would be beautiful: springy or musky or sweet, but it isn't. It just smells like dirt. My grandmother turns on the flowers' favorite music: Mozart piano sonatas, and grabs my hand. 
        "Here, honey, you can help me," she says. She hasn't looked at me since we saw my mother and that man. My grandmother gestures toward the long red rows of poinsettias. "These all need to be watered."
        My father is inside cooking; he does this every year while my mother watches TV or goes for a drive.
        "Who was that person with my mom?" I ask.
        "That was nobody." She holds out a plastic watering can and motions toward my side of the table. "You do that side, please," she says.  
        Later she'll sing to the poinsettias -- boisterous songs I don't understand because they're in Polish -- and then she'll draw the long, specially-made black shades over the windows, because the plants require twelve hours of complete darkness a day.
        "Nobody like he didn't exist?  Because I definitely saw someone there."
        "I mean that it will work itself out."
        "How? How could it work itself out?"
        She sighs, and I know she won't say anything else.
        The poinsettia blossoms are collars around yellow faces. I could pop their heads off like dandelions.
        "I'm going for a walk," I say.
        The snow is so high -- up to my waist in places. All of the sidewalks have been shoveled, and I pass through the thick aisle invisibly. There is no one else outside. This neighborhood is easy to maneuver, the blocks a simple grid I understand. I like the way the snow sounds under my feet, the way I can make it say anything I want. Moron, bitch, slut.    
        My mother already left us once, when I was eight, but it didn't last long -- not even a whole summer. When she came back, driving up in a wide, slightly rusted car, she had just one suitcase and Lucky and Himmel in a cage in the back seat. She wouldn't tell us what happened to the rest of her things, where she got the birds, or even where she'd been. It was a month before my father let her stop sleeping in the spare bedroom. Later, she'd refer to that time in the spare bedroom as her "probationary period." She started taking me on drives with her then, always, as if she didn't trust herself alone in a car. Sometimes she'd have me light her cigarettes for her, and I'd let a little bit of the smoke slip into my lungs before passing it to her. Once while we were driving, she said, "You know, not all people are as good as your father, honey."
        "I know," I said, my eyes on the looping telephone wires along the highway, where clusters of dangerous-looking black birds sleepily perched. 
        "Good," she said. "I'm glad you already know that. It's important."
        She was a different mother then, for a while. A different person. I'd catch her looking out the window at nothing while standing at Lucky and Himmel's cage, the wire door open, balanced on her fingers, as if she was daring them to leave. Or she'd stare down into the empty sink. I'd place myself next to her, and press my body against her legs, as close as I could get. 

*  *  *

        Back at my grandparents' house, my father scoops the eyes from potatoes with a small knife. He wears my grandmother's white apron across his chest and waist. There is no sign of my mother. 
        "What's up with my little lady?" he asks as I walk into the room.
        "Nothing," I say, going over to the warm stove. I won't tell him what I saw -- not this second anyway -- but I wonder how much he already knows. 
        He puts me in charge of the lettuce for a salad. Rose and Frank come in from the greenhouse and open a bottle of white wine. They are pretending that what's happening here is normal. But normally we'd be eating by now, and then sitting around the small tree in the living room handing presents to each other. Normally my father would be making silly toasts, while my mother smiled, rolled her eyes, and then leaned over and kissed him.
        The food waits on the table in fragile platters and bowls that must have years ago started out white, but now in some spots are almost clear.My mother's absence is loud and unspoken, echoing off the crowded walls of this tiny house.  My father and Frank eventually drift into the living room to watch loud football highlight shows, while Rose and I make as many batches of butter cookies as is humanly possible. One by one we all sneak away from our positions to take surreptitious snatches from the turkey, quick spoonfuls of mashed potatoes, forkfuls of salad. Still no one says a word about my mother, and the television stays numbly on. Once, my father glances toward my grandmother, a questioning look on his face, and I half-expect her to smile and shrug her shoulders goofily, the way she sometimes does, but she doesn't; she just looks at him and slowly shakes her head. My grandfather looks at his watch and then toward the window. Red and green lights blink outside around the window frame, flashing on and off, sending sharp slivers of color into the room and across the carpet. Some years there are groups of carolers, but tonight the streets are empty, except for a man walking a large grey dog on a leash. The dog wears red slippers, tied in bows around his fragile-looking ankles. He makes me think of Lucky and Himmel, my mother's helpless wards, with limbs as easy to break as twigs. 

*  *  *

        Late. I am in the room my mother slept in, until she went away to college. The flannel sheets feel soft but smell bleachy and sharp. They couldn't be the same sheets, but still I picture her under them, feeling trapped by their weight, the way I sometimes do. From across the hall I hear a door open, then close, then open and close again. A few seconds later the door to my room opens.
        "Hi, honey," my mother says in a loud whisper. "How are you?" Her breathing is hoarse, which means she's smoked a lot.
        I say nothing.
        She moves clumsily in the dark toward the twin-sized bed across the room from mine.
        "Honey?"
        "What?"
        "How are you?" she asks, crawling into the bed.
        "Great." I say. "I'm fantastic. I don't think I've ever had a better Christmas Eve, like, ever."
        She sighs and pulls the sheet up over her head. 

*  *  *

        Her bed is empty when I wake up in the morning. Downstairs the living room is silent except for the sound of turning newspaper pages and the plow outside pushing snow from the street into neat, rejected piles. Rose and Frank read the paper on opposite couches, their faces shielded. Technically, it's Christmas. The presents, which we usually open on Christmas Eve, sit unopened under the tree. 
        In the kitchen, my mother and father stop talking when I walk in. She has a cup of coffee in front of her at the table. The coffee infuriates me. She has no right to normal comforts right now. My mother's mouth has paused in the shape of the letter O, and I wonder what she might have been about to say: Oh, I'm so sorry, Oh, if she told you anything it was a lie, Oh, take me back and I'll never do it again. Or maybe she was just yawning, bored out of her mind. My father sits on the counter near the back door, his hands tucked under his thighs.
        My mother stretches her arms out to me. 
        "What?" I say with practiced iciness, but my Benedict Arnold feet take me to her anyway. And then I'm perched on her lap, which is awkward because I'm as tall as she is.
        She massages my shoulders. 
        "You're full of knots," she says.
        I want to say, of course I am, what did you expect? I also want to tell her that I hate her, to call her the awful names I hear at school even. But I don't. I lean into her, and allow her to rub my shoulders.
        "Ruby," my father says.
        "Sorry," I say, and quickly stand.
        The door pushes open and my grandmother comes in.
        "It's time to open the presents," she says.
        "Not now mom," my mother says, "Please?" She looks toward my dad for some kind of help.
        As if he'd help you, I think.
        "Why should Ruby have to suffer?" my father says, jumping off the counter. 

*  *  *

        My grandparents, being florists, believe in having real trees. This one is less than three feet tall, but otherwise looks just like a regular Christmas tree. As always, it's my job to hand out the presents. My parents have given Rose and Frank a gift certificate for a fancy steakhouse in town that they love. My father wrapped the piece of paper in an envelope, a small shoebox, a larger box, and then an even larger box, each in its own layer of wrapping paper. Last year this was funny, this year the joke just makes the minutes around the tree drag on and on forever. 
        "Thank you so much," my grandmother says to my father, when it's finally opened. Then she walks over and kisses him on the cheek, which I've never seen her do before. 
        "Open mine," my mother whispers in my ear.
        In glossy red foil, with an enormous green bow on top, it looks like it's been professionally wrapped. My mother's not usually one for wrapping.
        I tear the paper off slowly, lifting the tape at the corners, in case my grandmother wants to save it. Inside is a shiny black case, and when I open it up, wide oval eyes of blue, green, and peach stare up at me. Narrow black tubes of mascara and eyeliner lie between the two rows.
        "Esther," my father says, "isn't Ruby a little young for that?"
        "No. I'm almost thirteen," I say, clutching the shiny kit to my chest, as if it's about to be ripped away from me.
        "She's old enough," my mother says, "when I was her age--"
        My father cuts her off. "As far as I'm concerned, your experiences aren't exactly a ringing endorsement." 
        "What is that supposed to mean?" my mother asks, but then quickly looks down.
        My father just raises his eyebrows, his eyes hooded and angry.
        "Well," my grandfather says, clearing his throat, "I have to say, this is probably about the worst Christmas we've had. I vote for just forgetting about all of this pomp."
        "Pomp?" Rose says, "what are you talking about?"
        "You know, this stupid hullaballoo," he says, waving his hand toward the tree, the presents, and then for some reason at the window. "Why are we denying what's happening? Esther's pulling one of her usual smoke and mirrors tricks and I'm sick of it."
        "I'd like to know when you started using words like "pomp" and "hullaballoo," my grandmother says. "I've never heard you say those things."
        "Jesus, Mom," my mother says under her breath.
        We all look at her, waiting to hear something else, something like an apology or an explanation, but she's silent, looking out the window.
        I quietly push the rest of the presents behind the couch. 
        "Just forget it Rose. If no one wants to take responsibility, let's at least admit this has been a terrible Christmas and move on," my grandfather says, still looking at my mother.
        "Well, that's it for the presents," I say.
        "Fine," my grandmother says.
        Everyone, else, as far as I can tell, is grateful for my lie.

* * *

        Upstairs I pour three of my grandmother's varieties of bath oil into the tub. I take off my clothes slowly, my eyes on myself in the mirror the whole time. My skin doesn't look like hers -- mine is pinker, rawer looking, with freckles -- but I wonder how much of my mother is inside me. She is a liar. The water is hot, and the bubbles: rainbow-colored like gasoline on concrete, feel slippery on my skin. After the tub is full, I unplug the drain, but leave the water running, for the noise. I want it to be deafening, like at Niagara Falls. I imagine myself standing there, on that precipice I haven't been allowed near, my feet at the very brink, the rubber tips of my sneakers possibly a centimeter over the edge even, and on the solid floor of the bathtub I feel dizzy. I think about the baby there last summer, falling, and the mother, standing above, watching, unable to stop what was happening. And I make a decision, right then, because I am trying to make sense of my own mother, and can't: I will turn away, the part of me that is connected to her will shiver off and go hunting in other directions.

*  *  *

        By the time I dress and go downstairs some other things have been decided. My father and I are leaving, beginning the drive home early the next morning, and my mother is staying for another few days, and then flying back by herself.

*  *  *