“You are such a fool,” said my mother, almost ninety then and in pain from a new compression fracture of the vertabra. We were sitting in her doctor’s office in New York.

I had been away and she had fallen once again. In her old age she had fallen a lot. Twice, she fell down an entire staircase and broke nothing. She then had strong bones, full of calcium unlike mine. But now, on Coumadin and many other drugs, bones cracked and she bruised and broke.

Living on the beach meant I was away from her and those others—my two brothers, my two stepsons and their families, my talented daughter, Lily, then a book editor, bike rider, and pugilist—who actually had begun to miss us. To my mother, I had become the unforgivable thing, a voice on the phone.

My lady mother, from a great distance, still disapproved of my beach life. Denied her title only by accident of birth, she, a dowager empress, was regal in her attitudes as I, after years of studying the quirks and intimate habits of the Bourbon royals, knew. Just like Louis XIV, the Regent, Louis XV, Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, Charles X, she had contempt for money and all it took (time/work) to get it, she loved possessing beautiful things and having well dressed people surround and bow to her. Her tongue was sharp and her standards were high. She was always elegant.

A simple life, away from good clothes and precious things, away from the small protocols of her court, displeased her, the anti-Thoreau.

Even bruised from her fall, barely able to breathe from her uncontrolled pain, she wanted to get her hair and nails done.

My mother never shampooed her own hair, or cooked, or asked what something cost and tried to get it cheaper or carried leftover food from a restaurant. Like the royals, she was impatient, even impatient to die. We spent a lot of time talking about her death in the deliberately dimmed apartment where her will to die fights her will to live. There was no eternity, waves washing in and out on the shore, there was only now, the immediate time she wanted things done.

Born on the date of Waterloo, she has always reminded me a lot of my Napoleon. She went into the hospital on her birthday to have me on the next day—June 19^th, a date of famous executions—the date Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico was shot by a firing squad in 1867, the Rosenbergs were strapped into the electric chair in Sing Sing in 1953 and the mobster Sam Giancana was gunned down in 1975.

More and more she requires care, and I have very little care to give. Every time I landed in the city, I would go to see her every day and it is was as though, in her presence, I would catch her vast impatience.

The beach, the calm, the savasanna would all disappear. My voice rises. The plane lands and I become instantly exhausted. Far from being the jester, or the little princess at my mother’s court—I become the unwanted royal doctor, the unwelcome advisor bringing bad news. I have begun to think of myself, never gentle enough, as a bad daughter.

When I was very little, maybe even before my brothers were born, my mother used to sing me a ditty: “A mother loves a girl she can call her own/ At the end of a perfect day/ A mother loves a girl, a girl loves a mother/ At the end of a perfect day-ay-ay.” Is it any wonder…

I have absorbed her thoughts, her hypercritical eye, her reactions. First I was in my mother, now my mother is in me.

The older I get, when I report for duty, a fully formed human being with ideas of my own, I find myself dissed and downed, no longer free, I am once again owned.

As Connie Francis sang, and I truly believe, everybody is somebody’s fool.

“If you had to choose one place to live, which would it be?” my mother would ask, not for the first time, and I’d go to her window and look out on a city full of pollutants, assorted flus and threats, filled with all the complications of friends and family. I was five blocks from where I was born, two blocks from where I grew up, one block from the 74^th Street house where I spent my early years, across the street from Lily’s nursery school. I was six blocks from where I had lived most of my marriage.

“Guess who is playing my friend Susan Berman in the Durst movie?” I said to distract her. “Lily Rabe, Jill Clayburgh’s daughter.”

“Really!”

One morning back in April, Jill emailed me to tell me her daughter was to play the character based on Susan and that my name had come up in her research.

When we were girls, Jill and I were best friends and played together every afternoon in plays that I wrote. Or maybe we both wrote them, I don’t quite remember. She was Shooting Star, the Queen of the Universe, and I was her lowly handmaiden, Silver Star, and she bossed me around mercilessly. The plot never varied: one of us died and the other flung herself around in paroxysms of grief. Years later, I went out to California to interview Jill when she was playing Carole Lombard in the movie Gable and Lombard. And now her daughter was cast as my murdered friend.

Indeed this was Samsara, the cyclical nature of human existence, a subject I had been discussing with Kimie.

“Oh God, Jill how it goes round and round,” I had answered her and told her I was now a beach bum, something, she said, that would make her lose her mind after a while.

Susan was finally getting her life into a movie, only everything was very wrong with this movie and she could not speak to say so. My mother disapproved of the movie and refused even to finish a copy of the purloined script.

“I’m glad you kept away from all that,” she said.

It is all a circle, I said to my mother: you and me, Jill and me, her Lily and mine.

I know you don’t like Florida, but I learned there that the turtle returns to lay her eggs on the beach where she was born. In New York, after having roamed far, somehow I have found myself living exactly around corner from the house where I was born. I have gone from East 78^th to East 79^th Street. Things come back around at you, mother, just like the endless waves.