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Just to the left of the entrance of the Met, where civilization begins, where the Greek and Roman Wing begins—there it was: the dwellingplace of the jugs, the buxom jugs, just begging to surrender their shapes to a substance.

Curvant. Carinated. Bulging. The jar girls, containments themselves contained, immured squatting behind fake glass.

I used to stop, stoop at the vitrines, and pay my respects—breathing to fog their clarity, then wiping with a cuff.

I should say that my virgin encounter with these figures was in the company of Moms, who’d drive the family up 440 N across all of Staten Island for culture, for chemo (the former for me, the latter for Dad, whom we’d drop at Sloan Kettering).

But that Friday this past spring, I didn’t see any maternal proxies. Coming close to these figures, all I could see was myself. At each thermoplastic bubble, each lucite breach, I hovered near and preened. I was shocked, shattered, doubly. My chin quadrupled in reflection. My mouth was a squeezed citron. Stubble bristled at every suggestion. What had been highbrow was now balding.

Returning from that first chemo visit, Moms went and bought some clay, a wheel, some tools. Impractical platters, flaccid flasks: she’d been inspired to pot, moved to mold, vessels for her depression, while I had been, inadvertently, sexualized.

Moms had intended to inculcate only a fetish for art, not for what art must start as: body, the body defined by waist.

Dad, weakened, shriveled—a mummy’s mummy—had six months left to live.

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That day, signing day, I took my tour, conducted my ordinary circuit by gallery: first the women, then the men. Rounding the rotundities, before proceeding to those other busts, those heads.

Staved heads—of the known and unknown, kings of anonymity with beards of shredded feta, or ziti with gray sauce—separated for display by the implements that might’ve decapitated them. If it’s venerable enough, weaponry can look like art, just like commonplace inscriptions can sound like poetry—Ozymandias, anyone? “this seal is the seal of King Proteus”?

The armor of a certain case has always reminded me of cocoons, chrysalides, shed snakeskin—all the breastplates and armguards and sheaths for the leg just rougher shells from an earlier stage of human development. The armor featured in an adjacent case, with its precisely positioned nipples and navels, sculpted pecs and abs, would’ve been even stranger without them. The men without bodies were still better off than the men just lacking penises, or testes. Regardless, statuary completed only by its incompletion, or destruction, resounded with me, while the swords hewed through my noons, severing neuroses.

But then I returned, I always returned, to my women, closing the show, a slow, agonizingly slow circumflexion.

Fertility goddesses, that’s what the archaeologists who’d dug them up had said, that’s what Moms had said, and I’d believed her—these women were the idols of women and women were the idols of men and yet we kept smashing them (I understood only later), smashing with rose bouquets, samplers of marzipan and marrons glacés, getaway tickets, massage vouchers, necklaces, bracelets, and words.

It strikes me that Moms herself might’ve believed that these odd lithic figurines were for fecundity, because everything else had failed her—the inability to conceive (and the inconceivability of) were fates she’d share with Rach, or else the problem was mine.

And Moms might even have been so distraught by Dad’s decline as to have placed genuine faith in the power of that petrified gallery—guiding me through rooms now changed, antiquity redecorated since 1984—because suddenly I wasn’t enough, she wanted another: a boy, though what she needed was a girl in her image.

If so, then that studio she had erected at home—her installation of a kiln in Dad’s neglected garage—must be regarded as a shrine, a temple to opportunity lost.

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Now, when it comes to art, and I mean every discipline: lit, sculpture, painting, music, and theater (but only Rach liked dance, because she danced)—when it comes to any medium, I’m divided. Not between styles, between perfections. Mark my museum map with only the oldest and newest. Roll me in scrolls, volumina of vellum and parchment, papyri. But then also pile up all the new books appearing, seasonally stack the codex barrage—how else to live, without contemporaries to hate? Forget their books—I mean how to live without their bios, their autobios to peruse and hold against my own?

Beginnings to romanticize and endings to dread—I’ll take anything but the middles, all that received or established practice crap. Because the middle was where I grew up—bounded by house and garage filled with clay—a cramped colorless room filled with clayey boyhood, which my mother was bent on modeling not for greatness, but for portability and durability and versatile use. Moms’s hands that were her English, the puffy wrists behind the pads digging in, poking holes in me so I might perceive life only as she perceived it—threatening, but beautiful if I’d be careful. This was her way because from earliest age she’d been foreign to even herself, as the youngest and the only girl after six brothers, dumbsy, clumsy, inconcinnous, a dreamer, whose family fell in the snow around her, around Kraków, and who’d lived like “an extinct girl dinosaur”—meaning arousing of a hideous pity—until my father married her home.

She’d had difficulties having sex, and so difficulties getting pregnant. Her baby was late, was me. She’d told me about the drugs. Pergonal, Clomid. The barren superstitions. Don’t sit on snow or ice or rock, do bathe in water infused with moss from the walls of the shul on Szeroka Street. Dad had mentioned, only once, as he was dying, that Moms’s war had been “tough,” “hard knocks,” which was how he’d recount each tax quarter. A solo CPA after being laidoff as an auditor with Price Waterhouse, he’d never applied his actuarial MS but kept it in a depositbox at the bank. Moms is a public school speech-language pathologist/audiologist, retired. Anyway, Dad’s instructions: “Help your mother out,” “Kaddish if she insists.”

Moms: what she lost in family, she gained in body.

She was dense with her dead—with Dad’s passing becoming ever more solid, ever more embonboobed, rubicund. Zaftig, not obese.

Steatopygous—which doesn’t have to be italicized, it’s already my language—all italics do is make what must be native, not. Anyway, it’s not from the Latin, but Greek. Steatopygous meaning possessed of fat buttocks, and implying fat all around, the thighs, hips, waist, a gluteal gut, even adipose knees, unfortunate but vital. That’s what Moms’s lady statuettes are technically called—steatopygi, or steatopygia. Thrombosed bulges, throbbing clots—my mother’s hindquarter was always a veiny maze, a varicose labyrinth, though not just hers: weighty were the bases of all the women in my family, my mother’s family. My grandmother, my greatgrandmother, every aunt and cousin—Holocaust fodder. Heavy Jewesses, thickly rooted Jewesses, each swinging a single pendulous braid. From Poland, the Russian Pale, that settled and mortaring mixture. Upper Paleolithic, Lower Neolithic, lower and swollen. Marbled in calcite, schist, steatite, striated with stretchmarks of red rivers, the Vistula, the Bug. They were made out of stone and many of them even had hearts of stone—not Moms, though, despite how tough Rach found her. Yes, yes, Rach—she was the hard one, the skinny, the taut, all rib and limb, a spindly wife more like a plinth, like a pediment.