I want to skip to the day I can write actual books and bake in New York and help care for Maman when she is tired or ill or aching. By then, a grown man might watch from a distance, maybe sitting on the steps of the Met, as I tie my hair, miraculously smooth, in a knot. He might approach me and ask, “What’s your name?” in English or French or possibly in Russian. We could wander the museum and talk about paintings, artists and books, sculpture and pastry, economies and planets and after-lifes. Later, we could lie side by side on a Central Park lawn and make up our own constellations. He’d
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