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No one had told my mother that the pills could be fatal (although someone, obviously, had told my father), and as a result she hasn't trusted doctors since. So it was a few months after she started losing her memory before she relented and made an appointment with Dr. Snyder on Park Avenue. It's nothing, Dr. Snyder assured her. You're not young anymore, and this is what we expect to see at your age, a little memory loss. Everyone takes it hard.

She tried not to take it hard. Two months later she came home from work to 105 East Twelfth Street and her house key wouldn't work. She tried another key. Stuck. It wasn't until she tried every key on her ring, twice, that she remembered she hadn't lived on Twelfth Street since 1977. She went back up to Dr. Snyder on Park Avenue. Now, Dr. Snyder said, we'll run some tests. It's normal, it's natural, it's just a smidgen more than we expect to see at this age, it's progressing a little more rapidly than we would like and so we'll run some tests, we'll run some very expensive tests and we'll see.

Evelyn, my mother, mentioned the visits to Dr. Snyder offhandedly during one of our monthly phone calls, as regular as the full moon. I didn't know what to say so I asked, lamely, why she didn't tell me earlier.

"I didn't want you to worry," she said. "They said maybe it's my circulation, so I'm taking some pills. Herbs. That should help. It's probably nothing, I just-well, I thought I should tell you. I thought you should know what's going on. It's probably nothing."

It was definitely not nothing . If it was nothing she wouldn't have told me about it. I asked if there was anything I could do.

"Actually," she said, "there is something I'd like you do." The slight Brooklyn accent my mother had when I was a girl has, without my father's WASPy Connecticut influence, thickened a little every year since he died. Now she speaks from her throat with drawn-out vowels and hard t s and you would never know, listening to her, that she moved to Manhattan in 1961. She said: "We're having the holiday party at work in a few weeks and I'd like you to come. Just in case-well, you know. In case I need some help."

No, this is not nothing .

Dr. Snyder said, we'll see. Now my mother tries to get a dead person on the phone once a week and has twice more tried to go home to Twelfth Street and we haven't seen anything. Thousands of dollars worth of blood tests and neurological exams and we actually see less; one month ago we saw a world of possibilities: we saw vitamin deficiencies; Alzheimer's; psychiatric disorders; alcohol abuse; drug abuse; blood-sugar conditions; brain tumors; head injury; encephalitis. Now almost every diagnosis Dr. Snyder and his team can think of has been eliminated, and we see nothing at all.

Chapter Two

"Zip me up," I ask.

Crystal makes a face, annoyed to be held back from her Newports for even a minute, but she obliges.

"What's with the getup?" she asks.

"My mother's throwing a party." Zipped, I sit at my desk with a makeup kit and a compact. "I'm supposed to be there at eight thirty."

"She's better?"

"No, worse. That's why I'm going. It's a work party. She's worried she might have another episode." I like the word episode . It turns my mother's illness into a vague malady from a Jacqueline Susann novel, and I don't have to think about the specifics. Crystal props herself up on the credenza under the window and lights up.

"What does she do again?" Crystal asks. "She works at a magazine?"

"Editor."

"The doctors know anything?"

"They don't know."

"They never know. So listen to this: Tony's in jail."

Tony is Crystal's on-again, off-again boyfriend of seven years. They used to sell crack together in Brooklyn in the eighties. They were just friends, back then.

"What for?"

"Transporting stolen property. It's bullshit. Someone owed him a little something, they gave him a gold ring. Gave it to him." She shrugs. This is everyday for her; it's raining, broke a nail, boyfriend in jail.

"When's he getting out?"

She shrugs again. "When his goddammned lawyer gets to work already."

"Give me a cigarette."

She tosses the pack at me and I light up, blowing smoke toward the window. I thought I had given up smoking three years ago. Now, somehow, they've sneaked back in, and a few times a week I'm shocked to see that I've got a cigarette in my hand and I'm puffing away. And I'm loving it.

* * *

My mother, Evelyn Forrest, is the editor and publisher of GV , short for the Greenwich Village Review . Every year they throw a bang-up holiday party at Sid Cohen's house on Perry Street. Sid is a contributing editor to GV and a close friend of my mother's; when I was a teenager I suspected they were having an affair. In the living room in the house on Perry Street, Evelyn is sitting by the fireplace with Allison Highsmith, my mother's lawyer and best friend, and two women I don't know. One is an awkward girl who I guess is a GV intern, the other is a woman in a fuschia silk shantung suit who's deeply involved with her portable phone. Evelyn and Allison are dressed like twins; black skirts, black sweaters, dark hose, gray hair cut into a layered bob.

I kiss Evelyn and Allison and they introduce me to the intern, Lisa. We shake hands. She's so wide-eyed and excited to be here I think she might faint. Evelyn tells me that the woman in pink, who's still on the phone, is Kerri May. I knew she looked familiar, with her bobbed black hair and thoroughbred legs crossed high on the thigh. Kerri May is the editor-in-chief of the fattest, glossiest women's magazine on the newsstands.

After the introductions are made Evelyn starts where she left off, telling the intern the story of the founding of GV , "Michael-Mary's father-was wasting his time at Columbia," my mother tells her. "He got his Ph.D. in 'sixty-three and he liked teaching all right, but that wasn't his main thing. His main thing was his writing, and reading new writers, and teaching took time away from that. No one was writing like him back then. His first big book was Hamsun .

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Saturn's Return to New York by SARA GRAN Copyright © 2001 by Sara Gran
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.