“Congratulations is a strange idea,” my mother said. “It isn’t an accomplishment. It happens to you—you don’t do anything—hardly.” She whispered this last word. From somewhere she produced a cigarette, lit it. I was glad to see that. She slouched, her shoulder blade supported by the door frame now. “What a thing, a dog,” she said.
“She likes you,” Aunt C said. Cleo, with her black smile, her big red tongue hanging over the side, was looking around in case anyone did something interesting.
My mother blew into the dog’s face. Smoke. Cleo sneezed two times, which made my mother laugh. Aunt C looked at me—as if she wanted to know what I thought. I shrugged. Maybe it was funny. My mother took a deep breath, and then a little bit more smoke came out. “I am trying to let Odile cry it out.”
Ooo-deeel was how she said it. It was her Charleston voice. She pronounced things differently for a line or two sometimes, especially when she was talking about the house, and us. O was “ooo.” Out was “oat.” “That’s what the pediatrician says. But whatever she cries aboat can’t come oat of her. She’s just keeping it in and in, and it’s not coming.” She went on, “Sidney will say she doesn’t cry, but the truth is she’s a nocturnal monster—just doesn’t let on in the daytime. I think she’s mad at us. She knows—” Then her voice dropped, and the vowels changed back—she could get out of it as easily as she went into it. “You know Connor expected a boy. The whole thing was—” She rolled her glance down to me and stopped. “She waits till Sidney leaves so she can raise hell.” Another drag on the cigarette, her hair falling into her face again. “You stick around and you will see. Doesn’t she raise hell, Claire?”
It was the most I had ever heard my mother say about Sweetie at that point. I didn’t think my sister raised anything. How could she? She weighed nine pounds.
The nights Sweetie had been in the nursery at my end of the hall, she hadn’t fussed much, except at four, when she wanted a bottle. She cried a little, and I got up, held her, and fed her. Both of us slept until eight-thirty or nine after that. I wouldn’t have called it “hell,” even if I were allowed to. But I didn’t want to be contrary, so I nodded.
Aunt C reached over and kissed my mother on the cheek. “Now you take care, darling. I know this can be a hard time—”
“You know?” she asked, and a high, half laugh came out of her. “I need a bath to get this milk stink off me,” she added. “Have you ever leaked? I still leak and I am not nursing. I took the pills and they aren’t working. I want to die. I do.”
“You smell fine,” Aunt C said. “You don’t mean it.”
I thought so too. She was beautiful, and she had us, so how could she want to die?
My mother smiled at that. “Beautiful if you like cheese. Lord. I am a mess.”
“No you are not,” Aunt C tried to tell her.
But it was true, she was.
More smoke billowing behind her, she shuffled back into her bedroom. It was good to see her with a cigarette, but that business about a boy was hateful. What an awful thing to have against a person. I had not heard any of this before. And what a stupid thing to want, a boy when you could have a baby you could dress in Swiss dot. There was no point to a boy in my mind, though, if I’d had a brother, I’d have found a way to love him.
Aunt C took me downstairs where Sidney and the baby were. She had a cup of hot tea and a piece of toast, and offered me the same. When we were done, she announced we were going to Thornton Park.
No one had thought of this before. It was a wonderful idea. There were swing sets, a garden around a fountain, and a broad expanse of sand where nothing would grow under the deep shade of oaks. The light there was always filtered and chalky, unlike anywhere else. The tree trunks were painted white up to a certain height, as if they were wearing turtlenecks. This was meant to kill insects, but I didn’t know how. The park was five blocks away. I thought of it as heaven.
The outing took a lot of preparation. We found the “pram”—what Aunt C called a baby carriage—on the laundry porch. Once it had been mine, apparently. I had no memory of it. We sponged it down and turned its mattress over, tucked soft sheets around it. We discovered a clean, tiny bonnet—a baby could not go outside without a hat, Aunt C explained to me. I thought that was a very good rule. We strung a set of silver bells Aunt C had brought across the hood so Sweetie would have something to bat at.
I liked watching Aunt C with our baby. Though she’d never had one, she knew what to do.
This was Sweetie’s debut, I decided. She had not been out of the house except on the porch since she’d come home. We slid her under a lace-trimmed blanket, gave her a pillow so people could see her face and she could look out. We showed her how the silver bells sounded. She loved them, I could tell.
We had the carriage out of the house and halfway down the paved path to the sidewalk when I heard the front door open.
I did not expect what I saw then, nor the great longing that came with it: my mother was standing on the threshold with her hair in a kerchief, a pretty lavender print skirt on, and pointed slippers with no heels. She hardly ever wore flat shoes. They meant she was being “down to earth.” Her hair seemed wet, what you could see of it below the edge of the scarf.
We stopped short. I meant to go get her hand, bring her with us, but Aunt C put her arm across my chest.
“Well Diana? Shall we wait for you? Come—” Aunt C called to her.
“Where are you going?” She sounded like someone my age.
Cleo was pulling at us.
“The park,” Aunt C said. “Some air—why don’t you try?”
She stood in the doorway staring out at us for quite a while without answering—two or three minutes.
I was about to call to her to come on, but Aunt C said, “Claire, let your mother decide. And let her rest, if she wants. You have to think of her—” She took my hand and placed it next to hers, on the handle of the pram.
My mother didn’t speak or move. She was held there, frozen.
We waited.
Finally, she stepped back.
She just couldn’t go to Thornton Park and have a lovely afternoon. She had put it to the test, and she didn’t have it in her.
There was a turn I felt, inside—a little revolution at that moment. I would have denied it, yet there it was, and I would feel it over and over after that, and it would be stronger and stronger.
Aunt C, Sweetie, and I, with Cleo on the leash, took off. How could we, so easily? But we did. My mother became a pastel figure through that thick glass, and then she shrank away into the darkness of the foyer, the second parlor.
We walked west. I was thinking of her and not thinking of her. Half a block away, I could hear her loudly pounding the Heroic Polonaise on her piano, as if she meant to accompany our march. Be with us in some spirit.
I put my attention to the daylilies edging our yard, to the interesting pattern of the cracks in the sidewalk, broken by big, old oak roots—everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, except to the desire for her within me.
II
That season—it was late summer—starting with Sweetie’s debut, we set up a separate world at our end of the hall.
For all the windows on the sleeping porch, Aunt C bought shades on sale at Woolworth’s. Then she sewed canvas curtains and coaxed Daniel La Fever, a handyman Sidney knew, to come to the house to hang them. He put the curtain poles in brackets he made with a jigsaw. When he was done, the place was romantic, like the inside of a tent.
There was no air conditioning in that old