When we were little, my sister Patty and I liked to pretend that ferocious tigers lurked in the space between our twin beds, just waiting to rip us to shreds. They stalked us at night with their razor-sharp fangs, growling and snorting and licking their chops. Dip a toe or a finger down too low and . . . SNAP! . . . they’d chomp it off clean to the bone. We’d bounce from one bed to the next, shrieking as we flew through the air.

Pipe down, you two, or I’ll come in there and beat you to a bloody pulp! my mother would yell from her bedroom down the hall.

The invisible tigers scared us. Our mother did not.

Watch this, I’d whisper to Patty as I leaned over the side of my bed and slowly wiggled my fingers down into the pit. She’d poke her curly little head over the side of her bed and stare into the big black hole, nervously wheezing as she waited for one of the tigers to take the bait. I’d squeeze my eyes shut, imagining the hungry beasts skulking toward us, the smell of their musky fur filling my nostrils, and feel the thumping of my heart in the middle of my throat.

I said, “Pipe down!” my mother would call out, weaker this time.

We knew that she didn’t have the energy to beat us, much less into any bloody pulp.

My mother, Jean Kissinger, an erstwhile debutante with a genius IQ, now spent her days rubbing ointment on babies’ blistered bottoms, wiping snot off our faces, plastering our cowlicks with her spit, and dripping warm medicine into our oozing, infected ear canals. She stuffed our lunch bags with peanut-butter-and-potato-chip sandwiches as she helped us conjugate Latin verbs, folded laundry while she quizzed us on our multiplication tables, and typed our term papers between bouncing a baby on her lap and ironing our uniform blouses. Her own mother was dead and she had no sisters, so it fell to my mother to raise her eight children more or less by herself while my father was out of town most of the week on business.