Now that I’m older, I suspect my mother used marriage as a way to reinvent herself. As if she could slough off the past and emerge whole and unmarked, ready to slip into the circumstances of someone else’s life. Her own circumstances, the ones she was born into, were poverty, eight younger siblings, a brick and aluminum bungalow, a backhoe parked out in the yard. Thick, golden-brown hair that fell to the middle of her back. Eyes the color of an azure butterfly. A tall, graceful frame. The broad-faced bone structure she inherited from her grandmother. An accent that wherever she went would betray her origins, a variation on the Ozark hillbilly and Deep South. When she left the small town where she’d grown up, she found a dialect coach and “neutralized” the accent. Evidence perhaps that she had ideas about the kind of person she wanted to appear to be. Also that she understood how to cork the past, contain it inside her.

ANDREW CUOMO SAYS on March 9 that Corcraft, a New York State–run company, will begin producing hand sanitizer. “It has a very nice floral bouquet,” he says. “I detect lilac. Hydrangea. Tulips.” Corcraft is operated by the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), which runs New York’s state prisons. I do not hear Andrew Cuomo say this. I do not hear him say that around 2,100 people incarcerated by the state work for Corcraft. Or that they make, on average, 65 cents an hour, can earn as little as 16 cents an hour. Or that they themselves are unable to use hand sanitizer because in prison it is considered contraband. “We are problem solvers,” Cuomo says. We, as in, the “state of New York, Empire State, progressive capital of the nation.”