Free Babylon Sisters by Pearl Cleage

when she left, the silence was almost overwhelming.
    For some reason, I started listening to a lot of opera, Puccini especially, since he’s the one my mother liked and these were her records I was playing, especially
Madame Butterfly
and
La Boh'eme.
All those doomed sopranos and impossibly passionate tenors helped me fill up the house with other voices that didn’t remind me that my baby was now off on her own in the world, growing up and having adventures while I was just rattling around in a big, empty house. For the first time in a long time, I was lonely. Sure, I had my friends and my work, but there I was, still relatively young, still reasonably attractive, all dressed up with no place to go. I had had only two lovers, if you can even call them that, since Phoebe’s father left for Africa. They were nice enough guys, and I wasn’t looking for mad love as much as a friend I could sometimes sleep with. I thought it would be easy, but once you get out of school, it’s much harder to meet single men.
    The ones I did meet never seemed to have it all together in one place. The ones I liked to talk to were already married or didn’t appeal to me sexually. The ones who appealed to me sexually usually had no interest in the things I cared about. Only twice did I think I had found somebody interesting, but neither one worked out. In both cases, the sex was terrible. One guy was so inept that teaching him would have required more effort than I was prepared to put in, and the other one had seen one too many porno movies and firmly believed that the best position in which to have sex was doggie style, no matter how many times I assured him this was a male fantasy, not a female preference.
    After those disasters, I tried a couple of vibrators, but they made me feel pathetic,
Sex and the City
notwithstanding, and I didn’t want to explain what they were to Phoebe, since I knew she would find them sooner or later. She’s gone through my drawers and closets since she was a kid, just like I used to search through my mother’s things looking for clues to who she really was. Trying to crack that mysterious code. So I got rid of the machinery and made sure to masturbate au naturel at least a couple of times a month to keep everything in working order, but that was pretty much it.
    That was still pretty much it. I don’t think about sex much when Phoebe’s home. I think my maternal instinct keeps my libido at bay, but lately when she leaves, I can’t help it. Amelia says thirty-five to forty-five is a period of intense sexual energy for women because we are facing the end of our childbearing years, and the urge to express all we are and know sexually is
overwhelming
—her word, not mine.
    Well, I’m thirty-eight, and it wasn’t that bad yet, but the devil does find work for idle hands, so I put on my mom’s scratchy old album of Leontyne Price singing
Madame Butterfly
and went to get the mail. I was delighted to find a letter from Phoebe sitting on top of the stack. E-mail had encroached on our letter writing, but we still managed to sneak in a real letter, on real stationery, with real stamps, every now and then, and it was always a treat.
    I dropped the rest of the mail on the coffee table and carried Phoebe’s letter over to the couch so I could curl up and savor it. I tucked up my bare feet, unfolded the pages that smelled vaguely of my daughter’s scent, and read these words.
    Dear Mom,
    I know you won’t like what I have to say, but you know I would never do something like this if it weren’t really important to me. I have a right to know
my father.
    She underlined
my father
in red like I might miss it.
    You have made a decision not to tell me what I want to know, and I respect that, but now I’m asking you to respect the decision I have made.
    I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. What was this girl talking about?
    I have taken your college diaries back to school with me. I’ve only taken the ones that would