How It Begins -- - Kitchens: 1959 -- - Conception -- - The Cold War: My Parents as Newlyweds -- - My Mother Gives Birth -- - Correcting Memory -- - The Knocking Tree -- - Recalling the Leg -- - Nights in Tijuana -- - Learning to Say No at the Immaculate Conception High School -- - First Time -- - What We Didn't Talk about at Fifteen -- - My Mother Refuses to Wear Glasses -- - My Grandfather Returns after Many Years -- - How I Fear God -- - Coming Home at Seventeen -- - My Mother's National Geographics -- - The Annunciation: Our Mothers at Church -- - After Giving Birth, I Recall the Madonna and Child -- - First Pregnancy -- - Satisfying the God of Statistics -- - Preschool -- - Seventy Degrees in December -- - Checkup after the Operation to Evacuate the Dead Fetus -- - You Found Me in the Dry Tub, Fevered, Whispering of God -- - After the Miscarriage -- - Mother as Judas -- - The Pill -- - Language Lab, Paris, 1989 -- - After Eleven Days of Rain -- - The Cow Remembers Urus -- - Pharaoh's Dream -- - My Daughter's Sight -- - My Daughter, like Eve, Realizes Nakedness -- - Cesarean -- - What the Poets Could Have Been -- - Blurbs -- - Dear Mr. Houdini -- - The Assumption: Mary's Heart in the Guinness Book of World Records -- - What I Told the Jehovah's Witness -- - Discussing Sorrow with Jesus -- - My Cousin Attempts Suicide in Gander Hill Prison -- - Jesus in the Mail -- - On My Husband's Thirty-Third Birthday -- - Living Where They Raised Me -- - The Beginning -- - The Dead Must Disappear or Join a Story -- - My Mother among Bears -- - My Mother Prays to Dream of Her Dead Father -- - My Mother in the Garden