By the time I met Marjorie, the occupants of the Maple Street house had dwindled in number from five to two and then, quite unexpectedly, to one. In The Woman at the Washington Zoo, Marjorie explains, "My father eventually got tired of living in a marriage divided by that passage past the back stairs," by which she means the area that lay between the kitchen and the living room. A couple of weeks after an unobserved Mother's Day in 1986, Marjorie traveled to Maple Street to discuss her parents' imminent breakup. When telling this story years later, Marjorie would never fail to relate that this was the weekend of Hands Across America, a much-ballyhooed national fund-and-consciousness-raising event on behalf of the homeless. You paid $10 to hold hands with other concerned souls in an attempt to create an unbroken human chain traversing the continental United States. Marjorie's father had judged the stunt a fitting rebuke to the Reagan administration and eagerly purchased three tickets. Marjorie's most vivid memory of that weekend would therefore be facing the ancient pile of Nassau Hall, one parent in each hand, forging what she imagined to be a chain of heartbreak and disillusion that stretched from lower Manhattan to Long Beach, California.

Four years later, when I asked Marjorie to marry me, she hesitated. Here's how she tells the story in the book:

You, he said. You think of getting married like you start out with a certain amount of capital, and that's all you're ever going to get, and you start to spend it the day you get married. By which he meant emotional capital, of course, and he was right: My parents had divorced after thirty-five years together. I must not get married, I thought, until I found myself in a relationship so manifestly rich that thirty-five, forty years, a lifetime could not spend it. It was a new idea to me that marriage could be a source of capital, instead of the thief of my hard-won store.

We married. We had two children. We had to decide what to do about Mother's Day.

The Williams family fatwa, Marjorie had begun to realize, had less to do with the holiday itself than with the particular temperature of her parents' marriage. It wasn't even true that Mother's Day was invented by the greeting-card industry. (Its creator was one Anna Jarvis, a childless turn-of-the-century schoolteacher.) Marjorie found her mother, in particular, a cipher, and speculated that she'd spent years tolerating from a distance her father's infidelities, which in retrospect seemed all too obvious. From Zoo, again:

I think what I watched, over all those years, was my mother's decision to look away: to ignore and overrule her most immediate passions, the bitter stew of jealousy she has to have tasted all the time; has to have, I insist to myself even now, since I can know this only by the work of my intellect, never by what I witnessed in her outward behavior....I think she rose above and rose above until she had reached a place where she was quite cut off — from him and also from almost everyone else, including her daughters.

These words, written after the death of Marjorie's mother and her father, and published only after Marjorie herself died at forty-seven of liver cancer, have been disputed by some of Beverly Williams' dearest friends. Whether their sunnier view is correct, I cannot say; inevitably, I saw Beverly largely through the eyes of her daughter. But regardless of how accurately Marjorie may have captured her mother, this chapter in Zoo constitutes the truest self-portrait that I can find in Marjorie's writings. At the essay's end, Marjorie relates a dream in which "my mother made gorgeous individual pizzas for me and my sisters, and I spent the dream wrestling with the age-old temptation to keep one of my sisters' pizzas for myself...." Marjorie had an outsized hunger to understand, to be rewarded, to be seen. She was greedy for love. It can't have been easy being her mother, particularly for a mother who'd been raised in a formal WASP culture that took strong exception to any demonstrative behavior.

Here's how we resolved the dilemma about Mother's Day. We continued to honor the fatwa on Maple Street, but we quietly abandoned it in our own home in Washington, DC. The children and I brought Marjorie breakfast in bed and buried her in gifts. We even bought greeting cards. The rigors of motherhood blended with Marjorie's own innate appetite to sweep away any final misgivings she had about the banality of such tributes. She drank in every detail, down to the burnt toast and our two children's hastily scissored-and-Scotch-taped crafts.

÷ ÷ ÷

In the essay, Marjorie presents her own fear of bugs as a trope for her larger anxieties about the disorder children bring into a parent's life, which she describes with characteristic frankness:

I tell myself that all parents wring their hands over the chaos of family life, but I think perhaps I fight it harder than most. I resent it, in ways that I am often ashamed of: the external chaos of living with small children and all their stuff, yes; but especially the internal chaos, the way my mind seems colonized or overrun or even, in my darkest hours, infested by motherhood. The loss of control is exquisitely incomplete, just partial enough to lure me into a constant struggle to get on top of things. I can remind myself that the will to impose order isn't only about housecleaning; that my fear of losing these modest battles is in some way a surrogate for the larger, unthinkable losses to which parenthood opens one. And still I fool myself: If I could just get this done, I am tempted to think, or this, or this, or this....But always there is some little bug. Some fly in the ointment. Something slipping through a crack.

The only relief, she concludes, lies in surrender.

[T]o my surprise, I love our insect hours. Part of it is the familiar way that time slows and expands when you make yourself truly stop and be where your child is, doing what he is doing, trying neither to manage nor to escape it. As Willie searches, his self-consciousness falls away. I can surreptitiously inventory his newly skinny body, the arms and legs that are suddenly shockingly long....I can cover the sweet spot at the back of his neck, just below his hairline, until he shoots a swift glance upward at me: "Oh Mommy, you missed it. You were supposed to look at the spider." He says this with sympathy, for my opportunity lost.

[T]his gift, this sweet present, contains another from the past: the dimmest memory, lost until now, of a day when my own mother held up a caterpillar, inviting me to touch the velvety length of it, and an era when my sisters and I flitted in our white nightgowns through the bluing air, catching lightning bugs to take up to our bedroom in old mayonnaise jars.

On Mother's Day I'll be thinking about my own mother, of course, who is still very much alive. I'll be thinking about Marjorie. And I'll also be thinking of Marjorie's mother — forgive me, Beverly — and the imperfect but palpable love passed from one generation, to another, to a third. In my mind's eye I'll see ghostly hands that clasp one another and join hands with the living in an unending human chain.