My mother: “You told me, you promised!”
They argued, a lot. I was accustomed to it. But it had gotten quiet for the last six months. When my mother had been big with Sweetie, she had been more silent all around, and easy. Now she was more like herself again.
Sweetie was fussing. Sidney took a sugar cube and wrapped it round with cheesecloth, tied it up at one end, and said, just to me, “If you are careful, you can let her try it.”
And I said, “What?”
“She suck on it. It’s a sugar teat,” she said. “It’s what people do in the country. We didn’t have a pacifier when I was a girl.”
Sweetie took to it, her little mouth working hard, and very red.
I heard my mother say, “All right.” Then she went up the stairs.
My father reappeared in the butler’s pantry. “Sidney, can I have a word?”
She went to him slowly, and they spoke softly. Her mouth exaggerated the words. “I can’t stay overnight here. I am sorry about it, Mr. McKenzie. I might could find somebody.”
He followed her back into the kitchen and sat down. Then he said, “Yes, I heard you,” shoving his chin into the v of his hand, squeezing his cheeks. Sweetie had lost the teat and was crying, so I lifted her out of the basket. She weighed no more than a little cat.
My father took a deep breath in a moment and removed his fingers from his face. He said to Sidney, “See if we can find someone else.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. McKenzie,” she said, a second time, stretching out her arms to let me know she could take Sweetie.
“Sure,” he said, his voice hardly audible. “So am I.” He didn’t look at her. He said this to the kitchen table.
One night, not long after Sidney’s refusal, when Sweetie wasn’t even a month old yet, I heard her crying in their bedroom. That was normal—the 4:00 a.m. bottle—but she was very loud. My father, his voice so high and light that I didn’t recognize it at first, was saying, “What is this? Why is she there? Who put her there?”
If my mother answered, I couldn’t hear her.
I heard loud footsteps, and little squeaks. I came out of my bedroom and saw him rolling Sweetie’s bassinette toward me on its wobbly wooden casters, which were no bigger than spools. At my door, he took a sharp turn and pushed her into the nursery, a small room next to mine where we already had the crib set up. I had been told she wouldn’t be ready to sleep in there for a month or more. I followed him in, asking questions.
He refused to answer. He picked her up and went over to the crib. I told him the bed wasn’t made. No sheet. “Okay,” he said, quickly, “Okay, Okay.” He put her back down in the bassinette, then stood over her for a while, staring down as if she had something to tell him and he was waiting to hear it.
I joined him, wondering at our baby. She wasn’t crying. She was silent. Why she was so quiet was the mystery. Her legs pedaled in the air under her thin yellow nightgown. She kicked her booties off. I put them back.
After gazing at her a while, my father shook his head and said to me, “Go back to bed, then. She’s fine. You see the bottle?” He found it among the blankets of the bassinette and stood it on the night table. “You know what to do?” Then, after a few minutes, he put the cover over her, gave her the pacifier, put her on her stomach, and rubbed her tiny back with his thick fingers. When he was certain she was asleep, he left.
Later, from down the hall, I heard my mother’s voice, very high. I still couldn’t tell what she was saying.
But he asked, “What is the matter with you?”
Two days later, without anybody saying anything to me, my Aunt C pulled into our driveway in a light blue Rambler with a tiny oval grille in front. She was from faraway D.C., which we called Big Washington because there was another city in the state we called Little Washington.
After she hugged me, she said, “Where’s the little doll I’ve heard so much about?” Just as I was fixing to get the baby, there was barking in the carport. Although I had been begging since kindergarten, we didn’t have a dog.
“What?” Sidney said, appearing on the porch—she’d heard it too.
“Cleopatra,” Aunt C said, looking at me. “Connor told me I could bring her. No kennel would take her for months on short notice.”
Months.
A yellow dog with a black mouth and eyes drawn round with black crayon, Egyptian style, bounded out of the car. Soon she was dashing around our house, her nails making ticking sounds on Sidney’s polished floors. It was almost the same excitement I felt the great day Sweetie came home.
I brought my sister out in the hoop-handled basket to show Aunt C. I had dressed her in a little jumper with bows in the back and no buttons, and I gathered her one curl into a tiny ribbon. She had very fine hair for a baby her age, I thought. She was twenty-two days old.
Sidney was hesitating in the doorway that led to the butler’s pantry. “S’at dog staying?” she asked.
“She loves everybody,” Aunt C said. “Just rub her throat. I promise.”
She crept over and bent down to do as Aunt C said, with great caution. The dog tried to lick her hand.
“See?” Aunt C said. Sidney seemed calmed, if not won over. I went to get the bags.
Aunt C had visited before, so I already knew about her luggage: a round traveling case with a wrist strap and two big leather bags she called grips. All were decorated with stickers from her travels. Paris, Gibraltar, Kenya. Her husband had worked for the government overseas. She told me I should take them to the sleeping porch, for she wanted “to be near the nursery.”
I realized why she had come.
Soon, she was exploring the drawers of Sweetie’s dresser, sorting booties, folding caps, asking me about a rubber sheet for the crib mattress, which I told her we didn’t have yet. She took out a pencil and asked for paper to make a shopping list. While at this task, we heard my mother coming down the hall, cooing, “Is that C?”
“Yes, dear,” she said.
“And nobody woke me?” she said. She had on a big plaid shirt of my father’s and his pajama pants. It was three in the afternoon.
“How are you feeling, Diana?”
She threw back her shoulders. “What did he tell you?”
Her fingernails had little dirty brown moons. There were things in her blonde hair, feathers, possibly. She had looked like this for weeks now. I was used to it. Just then the dog came up, “Your mutt?” she said, confused. “Connor said you could bring her?”
“Yes.” Aunt C seemed a little wary. “Yes, he said the children would like her.”
My mother nodded, surprised. “What lies did he tell you?” She put her hand at her broad forehead. Her hair fell down in waves from there, to just above her shoulders, a bleached golden blonde with darker roots.
“I don’t think he told me any, just that you were tired. After your labor. All of it. Just how things are,” Aunt C smiled.
“Oh. You take a look at that Odile? She will be glad to see you.”
“I think she is beautiful, congratulations,” Aunt C said.
Who would