The week my mother died, I read an article in the paper about somebody who got despondent when her mother died. A friend -- the article said friend -- gave her a hit of crack. To raise her spirits, it said, and presto! Addict. I was scared to talk to my friends the whole week after I read that. Even at the wake.

Not really a wake, just kind of an evening at my apartment. The reason I had an evening is this. At the health club, my best friend Alicia said, "You and your mother, were you close? Were you close-close?" I said we were close but not close-close. Not calling-every-day close, but like I didn't sign up to teach Breath and Belly Sunday mornings, because that was when Mom always called. I'd lie on the floor and do crunches with the headset on my stomach, because Mom was from the days when you had to yell on the phone. One time my neighbor asked what was that program I listened to Sundays with the nice old lady. I swear to God I said, "That's no lady--"

"--that's my mom!" Alicia filled in. We were dying laughing and all of a sudden I burst into tears, and the whole women's dressing room was putting their arms around me. Alicia said I needed to have something. Here, in New York.

It was mostly instructors like me from the club. A couple of students dropped in to look at Mom's picture, next to some flowers on the counter between the stove and futon, and say something nice. The Director came for a whole hour. Lifelong types that had started clubs of their own or did acting or dancing came, and a few that had a real job or taught at the club and filled in with a part-time like mine. I do computer help lines, which is called RTFM for "Read The F****ing Manual" because if people did that there wouldn't be help lines.

A woman showed up from the job, in fact. She was a girl that lived in Jersey someplace and wore tweed skirts, I swear to you. She had a cooked dish with her, a big macaroni and cheese thing. She was so nice to bring it, I introduced her to our best-looking actor. Tommy O'Hara was the kid that lived in the club at the time, a classic Irish face on a body that showed he went to every single workout every day and Tai Chi in the park at sunrise. He read Mom's name under the picture and said something about Irish mothers that didn't quite fit, because Mom only talked to her Jewish inlaws, but was nice. I cut up the macaroni thing in little chunks on a paper plate and put the rest in the freezer to throw out afterward, because my crowd is strictly carbonated water and soy. Tommy and the girl started talking about their grandparents. God, make me feel old.

Alicia and the instructors sat the Director on my futon with the teapot and cup Alicia had brought. Everybody else took their paper plates and draped themselves against walls or on cushions or the folding chairs I'd borrowed from my neighbor, all trying to pretend they weren't staring while the Director looked down at the space between his folded hands where the most active manifestation of chi resides. The Director never looks at people younger than him, which isn't really so strange for a Chinese person like himself, but for a while there was a big superstition about his Ancestor Gaze. Some people were hoping to see me get looked at, on account of my mother, and drop dead or go nuts. But he didn't do anything like that, just sat there so quiet and gentle I hoped they were ashamed of themselves. Besides, gazing at Mom through me would have done him zero good. She was never the type to sit around and reminisce about the good old days of tuberculosis and polio.

The Director talked about how he felt when his mother died. It didn't sound like anything happened to her, exactly; she just got older and older and then one day she lay down in her bed and told them to get her a coffin. She patted the grandkids, said goodbye to her sons and daughters and their wives and things, and then she died and they buried her. With Mom it was kind of the same except she got pneumonia and coughed up blood. But it came down to the same thing, a bed in the hospital and us standing around it, and then they told us she'd be dead soon, and then she was. He said he'd had visions of her coming back afterward, and I said that happened to me too, in dreams.

All of a sudden, him sitting next to me, I thought, "Who is this cheesy-looking character?"

Not hearing voices, but the words were there. "He doesn't pay his help a tenth of what he ought to. He must sock away thousands a week. I'll bet there's a beautiful house in Connecticut or someplace that he goes to when he's not here playing mystic. I'll bet it's in Darien." Even though I knew he lived with his wife in a tiny little room at the club, right across the hall from Tommy's which used to be their son's. And everyone sitting around us hanging on his every word, even Alicia, looked to me all of a sudden like sad little kids.

Awful things came to my head all week. Not things I was thinking, just words. Words would be there, solid as the Director's house in Darien. Just there. And worse, like Tuesday for instance, the day the first box of linen arrived in the mail from my sister, the Executrix of the Will. Napkins and antimacassars, like I might want a trousseau. I used one for a neckerchief warming up in the club before a.m. class. It's dank and drafty coming up the stairs in the twilight to the big room in the front with no particular decorations, except the blue curtain to the dressing rooms, which has a lotus flower on it but also a ragged bottom edge. So I had on an Irish-lace former antimacassar, and was relaxing into those last couple millimeters of the split-sit before my rear touched the mat, when I heard, "Wonderful, Miss Athletic. After thirty-four years and a college degree you've got no family and no career and no prospects of either, but you've accomplished exactly one thing in your life, which is to stretch your extensors so completely out of shape you'll be walking like a chicken before you turn fifty." It was me, out loud, talking.

Luckily Tommy O'Hara stumbled through the lotus curtain still unshaved without hearing it, and only yawned when I ripped off the neckerchief. We turned a few cartwheels, and then he arched back, holding his ankles, and gave that unmistakable groan. I could feel the hot lump where the intercostal popped. He stretched out on the mat and I rubbed it a little; anybody would have done the same.

But as soon as the palm of my hand touched his skin, I was almost knocked over by a wave of feeling, as if there came right then surging through my palm the most intimate knowledge of this man, things his mother and his girlfriends and his confessor didn't know, and I loved him like he was dearer to me than myself. I switched to thumb pressure. He was young enough to be my own son. Well, a nephew. My baby brother, the boy Mom wished she had had. The nice Irish fellow some people wished she had married. I got him some ice.

My head stayed clear while I taught my class in the forms, as we call them because "exercises" is hard for Chinese to pronounce. There were a couple of people I'd just gotten through the beginner phase, where everything's tight and the fat gets in the way, to the phase where muscles they hadn't known about start to move. I hung around the dressing room with them, and Alicia came in. Watching her stretch her leotard over the most beautiful string-taut separated cords you've ever seen in your life, I suddenly had thoughts about her I can't even tell you. Pictures. Of starvation and people having heart attacks and old nuns gone crazy from living too long in a cell.

Now, nobody in Mom's family went crazy being a nun. Her father got put into Belleview for what the family referred to as senility, but you and I would call the delirium tremens. There was no excess church in that crowd. Mom's idea of consolation was asking, "What do we learn from this?" But there were the pictures. Alicia. Crazy people. And the place in Darien, warm orange brick with peaked eaves and black shutters and white azaleas, and the autumn leaves drifting on the yellow grass. One of those semicircular drives you don't have to pull out of backward.

The quickest way to settle this once and for all would be for me to look at the books. The Director always forgets to lock the door to his office, maybe hoping someone will clean it which nobody does because of all the butts and papers and teacups that never get washed and old pictures of relatives in cardboard stand-up frames, and the account books stuck in the back of a drawer I had to crawl under the desk to pry open. How can you tell what numbers are saying? I gave up and shut the book and turned around and saw Tommy.

His room across the hall had a little mirror in the corner above a sink, and he was there, with an icepack in one hand and a razor in the other, shaving. I saw his reflection pick up the soap and glance in the mirror and stop to look, as if he missed a spot shaving. Then instead of getting the spot or going on, he went through the whole business, picking up and glancing and stopping, again and again and again, like he was hypnotized. Like Narcissus that fell in the water and drowned trying to kiss his reflection, I thought. I wanted to cry, he looked so beautiful and so helpless against himself.

Finally he noticed me looking and washed. "Acting practice," he said, with a smile that could make you want time to stop.

I don't act on crushes, and I keep my browsing to friends of friends. Gigolos, even nice ones like Tommy who says he treats his dates like he'd want his own aunties treated, who needs? I exercised. I put in extra shifts at work to make up for the weeks I lost taking care of Mom in Chicago. We get no sick days or bereavement time. What difference; you don't get an extra day tacked onto the end of your life because of a day you lay prostrate with diseases or grief. In fact, the reverse.

The thing to which I do object is, they can listen in on any call, and there is no little audible click. Luisa my supervisor says the hardest thing is getting over your belief in the audible click. And do you know Luisa's got cousins in County Sligo, Puerto Rican as she is? Inlaws, right near Mom's Last Irish Aunt and the house where all the people died of tuberculosis, one by one.

At the club I didn't talk much either, except musclechat: how's the grisilius and adductors? Better, how's your glute? I swear when Tommy confided that since his mom died he'd had trouble in the sack, I thought he was telling me about a sacroilial pull.

Tommy said after his mom died he used to dress up in her clothes and impersonate her. He did her someplace for a comedy gig. People told him he ought to cross-dress and try men. "Is that when you started having trouble?" I asked him.

"I'm too big. I looked like a cop."

"Not the dressing, I mean. Sex."

He looked at me sort of blank. "It all goes together, doesn't it?"

The Director shouted one time pointing around the class, "What is the form? Is it what you do? Is it what he does? Is it what she does? The form is not that."

Tommy said the role is like the form; the role is something that happens on stage and isn't the script and isn't the actor. The actor has to keep an emptiness inside. He told me that, looking at me over a couple bottles of carbonated water after Tai Chi in the park, between the bare trees and the frosted stubble grass up by 90th. There was something magnetic about that winteriness and him in it, empty.

Men are like streetcars, like rocks on the beach, like fish in the sea. I resisted. I took all the boxes to the laundry and washed and ironed the linen and put it back. I got avuncular. When Tommy auditioned for a play about boys at an Irish boarding school, I went to watch, and I made such a pass at an actor from County Kent that he wept to explain he was gay. Poor guy brought me a consolation prize, a copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I threw out because I'd already read it. I don't keep books. They get dusty. I don't bring home papers, either, and I usually throw out the mail.

A person can hate RTFM work when callers are ticked off at whoever sold them the ware or giving lectures on how it should work. Look, I told somebody, the application has to serve a lot of people with a lot of different jobs they go about in different ways. You want a piece of software that works purely for you, go write it. "Yes, mommy," he said, and hung up. Jerk. He deserved it, but you can believe I was listening for that nonexistent audible click. Luisa said I was being rude from stress and gave away my weekends, to the same girl from Jersey who came to my apartment with the macaroni no one would eat. I had to pick up a temp job, doing the same thing in another building fifteen streets away.

Money is such an inadequate symbol for all the realities. At the club, the subject of cash never even comes up. We drop our checks in the box like clockwork and say thank you to whoever's being treasurer that month, and the treasurer says thank you to us. Nobody even thinks about where all this money is going or the difference between expenses and what I happen to know the place nets.

Alicia came over three days after I walked out of the club. "Why didn't you say anything?" she clucked, sitting on the boxes of linen from my sister the Executrix. "We didn't even know you quit until the Director assigned somebody to take over your class."

I had a pretty good idea who got assigned to my class, and I'd seen that individual teaching. Stretch and scold, stretch and scold. And my beginners in the phase where muscles they never knew about start to move. Next would come soreness beyond all they'd felt in their lives. I wanted somebody to be with them--

"Or else they might quit, like you?" said Alicia. She also said I had a dybbuk, which I couldn't find in the dictionary after I got mad and kicked her out.

With nothing exercise on the horizon but jogs from work at my part-time job to work at my temp and lunchbreaks running in the park, I was poised on the lip of decay. And Tai Chi in Central Park dawn, which now in the wintertime left an hour to run through forms with Tommy before work. I did notice him practice acting a lot: stop in the middle of an ordinary thing, like turning his head or reaching down to zip his jacket, and do it over and over, trying to do it exactly as he'd done it when he really wanted to. One day he told me the guy from County Kent had slept over, but he had trouble again. He said he hadn't known what he was expected to do. Expected. Alicia said he dove into his roles so completely that he broke up with his girlfriends if they didn't suit the character he had to play.

Leaving home in the dark every morning to go to the Park, I didnıt have to look at the boxes from my sister stacked all around my apartment. Nights were bad enough; I had dreams of my mother sitting on boxes draped in a tablecloth, calling up Macy's to order a chair.

When a chair showed up addressed to me at my apartment, I called my sister the Executrix herself in Chicago and told her message machine a couple of things. "What are you talking about?" she picked up the phone to ask me -- she lets it play till she decides if she cares. "Saint Vinny got all the furniture from Mom."

I went back down to the custodian, and he had the papers still taped to the box. Macy's. Charged to my card. Tommy and the guy from Kent helped me carry it upstairs.

Alicia sat on the boxes and clucked at me again. "Look, your mother obviously got up and ordered it from one of those twenty-four hour lines in your sleep. I told you, a dybbuk." She said to try acupuncture. Her new boyfriend, a middle aged Chinese-American acupuncturist who did accounting by day, said to write off the chair as a business expense. Like Tommy and his friend sitting in an overupholstered green throne decked with fleur-de-lis talking about James Joyce and Thomas Aquinas made my apartment a professional Broadway stage.

Alicia brought my dictionary out of the cupboard under the sink. "Here, d-y-b-b-u-k." It was there, of course; Iıd been looking under d-i. Yiddish for ghosts that take possession of somebody living, usually relatives.

The actor from Kent said he had a cousin who got exorcised. "Maybe the idea of a chair got transmitted through your electrical currents, you know. That run from nerve to nerve. They carry the chi."

"And the current went into my phone and called Macy's?" One thing I've learned working help lines is to start with the most reasonable explanation.

"Which is...?" Alicia put in.

My reply was to go and quit my temporary second job. Taking it had been obviously the idea of this dybbuk, my mother, to keep me from missing the club.

By the time I got back from doing that, it was already dark. I stood for a long time in the foyer of my apartment house, feeling the cold wind that blows in through the vent from the sidewalk. Without the second job doing phone service, I could look for an exercise-related gig. I spend more time in the park working out, or jog in that fresh cold wind. Meanwhile my apartment was full of empty chair.

We had piled the boxes in the chair and draped it with a linen tablecloth to hide the ugly green. When I opened the door, the murky blue light from the fluorescent in the hallway showed the tablecloth flapping like a ghost. I must have left a window open when I went uptown to quit. A gust of air slammed the door while I ran in, past the chair, to where the curtains were flying away from the wall. The ghost rose out of the chair at me, moaning. Boxes knocked me to the floor.

I must have stepped on the tablecloth and upset the arrangement. The custodian wouldn't be back until morning. There wasn't room for the chair and the boxes in the hall. Give them to my neighbor for all the times I've borrowed his furniture -- maybe three times in the past six years? No, it was going to be me and that junk for the evening, and hours before I could sleep. Hours of working out to get tired, with the chair watching the whole routine. If only I'd gotten hooked on karate instead of the forms, by now I'd be good enough to smash it to bits.

Luckily, while getting up, I glanced at my hands to see if this was one of those dreams where you know you're dreaming. The Director says if you can look at your hands you control the dream. Of course, you can look at your hands any time if youıre awake. So call me philosopher butterfly. I looked at my watch. Half an hour to go before the last evening class at the club. I went downstairs and started to run.

I'd made this jog a couple times a day for years, sometimes limping, sometimes mad, sometimes so close to flying I had to be careful not to cross against the light. This time I just ran, really ran with the breath in the feet and head floating, like back in the days when the class would sit cross-legged for an hour with the guys from Tibet and then pop up and start running and jumping and sometimes pass out, back before the Director threw out his son and got Tommy, before I quit thinking I had to get married have kids.

Anyway, something happened during that run. Maybe the dybbuk got mad. Maybe too-certainty, the Director would say. If there's anywhere I'd fall into certainty about what was to come, it would be on my run to the club. Maybe I fell into mind-death, the poison of meditation that begins when you say to yourself "I am meditating well." Or maybe it was the something-else, the flicker of light they call transcendence.

Amtrak runs to Darien from Penn Station, and I had plastic.

I could see the house in detail in my mind, down to the orange brick and the yew trees along the front walk and the porch light casting shadows of the big azalea. At this time of year the azalea wasn't flowering like in my picture. Everything else was exactly the same.

"So he's got a house; so shoot me," said Alicia when I told her, not believing a word of it anyway. She thinks all this part was a dream. But I know I saw the house, and it was just like I pictured. A lion's-head knocker on the front door. As I raised it, I thought of what one of the aunts used to say about Mom, "Poor thing, she's been knocking on the wrong doors all her life."

The door opened. Tommy.

Looking out at an unexpected visitor, puzzled, with a gleam of moonlight on his cheek, any man would seem beautiful. Only a few would remain so beautiful in complete darkness stepping back into a resounding hall.

I don't blame him for not resisting. For myself, I was hardly even there. I couldn't speak; when I opened my mouth only silence came out. What happened between us is programmed into the humblest little animal. The lips, the palms of the hands under clothing, the fingers roping through hair. Insides of forearms against backs, leg on leg, arches of soles against calves. A woman clambering all over him as if every inch of her body wanted to touch him at once is something to which a person like Tommy accedes. He might whisper a couple of times, "Are you sure?" He might remember some talk about a Yiddish word in a dictionary. He might even feel the breath of an impulse from nowhere that wants this much much more than she does, but he'll obey if the voice from the woman answers "Yes!"

Some people think in the act the mind breaks open and dreams and memories pour out. They even think they can tell which is which. The Director says individuation is a dream and what's real is the universe we bud off from to pop out through somebody's legs. His mouth is why Chinese women don't like the club.

What came pouring out was azaleas in flower and deep fatigue. I saw the memory of a wrinkled old man rolling away from me, and felt the memory of an obliterating sense of failure that made me wake myself up to wrestle him until we were satisfied. That's what came to my mind while Tommy and I were knocking elbows and knees against the parquet.

It wasn't Mom's fault. She saw in my head the jokes about the Director's active member bringing in dues. She figured guys naturally leap naked out every window her daughter passes from the Battery up through midtown and Harlem to the Cloisters. Maybe she kept an eye out, there in Chicago, for newscasts about the city knee-deep in naked men. But the vision that came in my head wasn't mine, it was hers.

That leaves a wrinkled old guy in pajamas wakened by people intermingling in his house in pools of moonlight cast on carpetless floor. And the intermingle is no evidence. Who wouldn't mix that way with someone not only beautiful to see but to smell and touch, and become completely satisfied? When that kind of sex is finished it's like the time between incarnations when the cycle of desire lets go.

I wasn't even very startled to look up and meet the Ancestor Gaze.

I heard Get out of the house but it wasn't the Director. It was my mother's voice, with diction she learned at Most Precious Blood Elementary as a girl. And the voice said Everybody will die, one by one. Tuberculosis. That's one of the diseases they thought they had gotten rid of, that's coming back.

I saw the Director not looking at me at all; he was looking straight into Tommy's eyes at Mom. It was Tommy the voice was coming out of. She'd left me.

Then the Director's eyelids dropped again. Tommy was already leading me to the door. He had his clothes in his hands and stepped out before he put them on. In the white moonlight his pale skin really did look like a ghost's.

Darien feels empty and quiet if you just came up from New York, so quiet two people could never meet. The sky comes right down to the ground at night. Walking away from a house on a trail of moonlight over the snow, you could walk to the edge and go into the stars.

I know the voice out of Tommy was Mom, remembering the house near her grandmother's that was infected with tuberculosis. Tommy wouldn't listen, though. On the train back to the city, he brooded about what he'd said. As we pulled in to 125th Street in the early morning he announced, "No matter how much you work out, you're still going to die." Not to waste time in his life, he ran all the way from 34th Street to the club and walked in and quit. Next time I saw him in the park, he told me he'd tried again with the actor from Kent and succeeded. They split up when Tommy went exploring other members of the cast, the dybbuk hurling him into a different man's arms after rehearsal each night. By the time he found whom he wanted, relatives had lit candles in churches all over New Jersey for the salvation of the family name.

So what do we learn from this? Things happen for other reasons than to take notes on, was my usual answer back. I still teach exercise in New York and Tommy's still acting. When he comes to visit he always sits in the green fleur-de-lis chair and we gossip like chits, or play with the daughter of Alicia and the acupuncturist. I look on the club as my time in the cave of incomprehension, and my coming out as a motion in the tide of things that make people drift together and drift apart. Tommy looks on me, if you can believe it, as the one who taught him romance. Before that, he thought sex was just another scene to play, but there in the house in Darien he felt awaken the spirit of desire and pursuit. He's cut a great swath in choosing a husband, and if it's because of a dybbuk, God love her, he says.