"Mother, I'm sorry, I—"
"Before you lie," said Mother softly, "the witch called me and screamed at me for sending you. I hung up on her, which is what I usually end up doing, and then I unplugged the phone from the wall."
"I'm sorry," said Alessandra.
"You didn't think I had a reason for keeping her out of your life?"
For some reason, that pulled the trigger on something inside Alessandra and instead of trying to retreat, she erupted. "It doesn't matter whether you had a reason," she said. "You could have ten million reasons, but you didn't tell any of them to me! You expected me to obey you blindly. But you don't obey your mother blindly."
"Your mother isn't a monster," said Mother.
"There are many kinds of monsters," said Alessandra. "You're the kind that flits around like a butterfly but never lands near me long enough to even know who I am."
"Everything I do is for you!"
"Nothing is for me. Everything is for the child you imagine you had, the one that doesn't exist, the perfect, happy child that was bound to result from your being the exact opposite of your mother in every way. Well, I'm not that child. And in your mother's house, the electricity is on!"
"Then go live there!"
"She won't let me!"
"You would hate it. Never able to touch anything. Always having to do things her way."
"Like going off on a colony ship?"
"I signed up for the colony ship for you."
"Which is like buying me a supersized bra. Why don't you look at who I am before you decide what I need?"
"I'll tell you what you are. You're a girl who's too young and inexperienced to know what a woman needs. I'm ten kilometers ahead of you on that road, I know what's coming, I'm trying to get you what you'll need to make that road easy and smooth, and you know what? In spite of you, I've done it. You've fought me every step of the way, but I've done a great job with you. You don't even know how good a job I've done because you don't know what you could have been."
"What could I have been, Mother? You?"
"You were never going to be me," said Mother.
"What are you saying? That I would have been her?"
"We'll never know what you would have been, will we? Because you already are what I made you."
"Wrong. I look like whatever I have to look like in order to stay alive in your home. Down inside, what I really am is a complete stranger to you. A stranger that you intend to drag off into space without even asking me if I wanted to go. They used to have a word for people you treated like that. They called them slaves."
Alessandra wanted more than ever before in her life to run to her bedroom and slam the door. But she didn't have a bedroom. She slept on the sofa in the same room with the kitchen and the kitchen table.
"I understand," said Mother. "I'll go into my bedroom and you can slam the door on me."
The fact that Mother really did know what she was thinking was the most infuriating thing of all. But Alessandra did not scream and did not scratch at her mother and did not fall on the floor and throw a tantrum and did not even dive onto the sofa and bury her face in the pillow. Instead she sat down at the table directly across from her mother and said, "What's for dinner?"
"So. Just like that, the discussion is over?"
"Discuss while we cook. I'm hungry."
"There's nothing to eat, because I haven't turned in our final acceptance because I haven't decided yet whether we should sleep or stay awake through the voyage, and so we haven't got the signing bonus, and so there's no money to buy food."
"So what are we going to do about dinner?"
Mother just looked away from her.
"I know," said Alessandra excitedly. "Let's go over to Grandma's!"
Mother turned back and glared at her.
"Mother," said Alessandra, "how can we run out of money when we're living on the dole? Other people on the dole manage to buy enough food and pay their electric bills."
"What do you think?" said Mother. "Look around you. What have I spent all the government's money on? Where's all the extravagance? Look in my closet, count the outfits I own."
Alessandra thought for a moment. "I never thought about that. Do you owe money to the mafia? Did Father, before he died?"
"No," said Mother contemptuously. "You now have all the information you need to understand completely, and yet you still haven't figured it out, smart and grown up as you are."
Alessandra couldn't imagine what Mother was talking about. Alessandra didn't have any new information. She also didn't have anything to eat.
She got up and started opening cupboards. She found a box of dry radiatori and a jar of black pepper. She took a pan to the sink and put in some water and set it on the stove and turned on the gas.
"There's no sauce for the pasta," said Mother.
"There's pepper. There's oil."
"You can't eat radiatori with just pepper and oil. It's like putting fistfuls of wet flour in your mouth."
"That's not my problem," said Alessandra. "At this point, it's pasta or shoe leather, so you'd better start guarding your closet."
Mother tried to turn things light again. "Of course, just like a daughter, you'd eat my shoes."
"Just be glad if I stop before I get to your leg."
Mother pretended she was still joking when she airily said, "Children eat their parents alive, that's what they do."
"Then why is that hideous creature still living in that flat in Polignano a Mare?"
"I broke my teeth on her skin!" It was Mother's last attempt at humor.
"You tell me what terrible things daughters do, but you're a daughter, too. Did you do them?"
"I married the first man who showed me any hint of what kindness and pleasure could be. I married stupidly."
"I have half the genes of the man you married," said Alessandra. "Is that why I'm too stupid to decide what planet I want to live on?"
"It's obvious that you want to live on any planet where I am not."
"You're the one who came up with the colony idea, not me! But now I think you've named your own reason. Yes! You want to colonize another planet because your mother isn't there!"
Mother slumped in her seat. "Yes, that is part of it. I won't pretend that I wasn't thinking of that as one of the best things about going."
"So you admit you weren't doing it all for me."
"I do not admit such a lie. It's all for you."
"Getting away from your mother, that is for you," said Alessandra.
"It is for you."
"How can it be for me? Until today I didn't even know what my grandmother looked like. I had never seen her face. I didn't even know her name."
"And do you know how much that cost me?" asked Mother.
"What do you mean?"
Mother looked away. "The water is boiling."
"No, that's my temper you're hearing. Tell me what you meant. What did it cost you to keep me from knowing my own grandmother?"