those children playing safe in the warm rain. She heard their rhythm laughter as they ran like a troupe of high-wire performers through beach grass along the blistering creosote-coated bulkhead. She heard their plans to sneak up the cliff through wild roses. She heard them chase, race, and pant at the hose rinsing off sandy feet before daring to come inside onto her crewel rugs.
Rhythm witness the slow heat of afternoon sleep. Wakeful but dreaming. She didn’t care how many little eyes watched the wheel go round or the wooden pedal pressing rubber down over and over. Rhythm dunk lift and twist in the dandelion dye. Rhythm dunk lift and twist all the wool-washing kinds of preparation that she did out back in big steel pans of blue borax water nested in deep, cool shaded sand near a feeder for birds. Just like she did to rhythm dunk lift and twist ten swim suits at the end of the day. Tart lemonade refreshed burnt-skin children that stood watching the sun catch slow drips off the row of hung-up suits. Rhythm breath and blinking.
Huge screens inhale and exhale on maybe-a-storm’s-coming breeze. Warblers pretend to be lost in the grapevine. The smell of sandalwood drifts through the slow-tossing briar and locust brambles as does the sound of laughter. Some loved ones are playing cards.
Up and down stairs. Up and down suns. Up and down flags. Up and down drop-spindle, round and round wooden wheel, spinning on, making wool, making sweaters, making blankets, making hats, making mittens, making gloves, making scarves, making socks, making enough layers to keep us all cozy. She was rhythm witness and a BLT; one blue foot on top of the other in the kitchen. Emphysema laughing over on you, holding your arm—with strong, strong hands.
EVE
I almost couldn’t bear to watch what I knew was coming.
She’s growing up fast but you can only learn so much in twenty-six months. When it was over, and it was over so quickly, she just screamed in agony—cried out with her knowing—until I rushed over and grabbed her up off the floor.
“Oh. My sweet baby girl.”
Five minutes before I did, I just waited and watched while she discovered her world. I could hardly breathe. But I knew I had to let her do it.
From a doorway, or a window, I guess, one may look in upon a child, playing alone. One thinks of white canvas, and rain. Her room’s too much like a doll’s house with one side open to the world. She is there in toto: Wrist. Neck. Little folds of skin. Fingers. A big toe folded against the floor. Head tilting—thought and compassion. Before words. Before all the many words, she is there taking it in.
The doll, another American Girl, is ragged with insipid eyes worn thin from bathing. Her stringy plastic hair is pretend-brushed. Her dress is smoothed by awkward fingers. How can anyone be expected to grip a soft plastic foot with its molded toenails, to let a favored toy girl flop backwards upside-down with her hair hanging, and climb, careful-toddler climb, up onto the window-seat toy box? But my daughter did it and relegated the doll to its little blue plastic rocking chair near the plant on the broad sill.
Ambivalent and then decided she went down again. A toy car drove through a wooden maze of forgotten blocks.
Needing it. Having to have it. She grabbed a book. Upside down. Sideways. Right side up. The fermented paper pages were yellowed and old and must have felt scratchy to little fingers, always learning. It is a golden-spined book called The Seven Little Postmen about one special letter they each carry for a distance through wind and rain and driving snow.
But as the sun streams in, she tires. She lies down on her belly. Her fingers touch the carpet. For the nursery my husband insisted on Berber with two layers of the thickest padding underneath. So my baby girl lolls on that nice floor her daddy made her and the hand goes over and over the places her fingers can reach without stretching before it slows. The little fingers rest easily against the knots in the fabric of a pillow lying on the floor nearby. And she is still for a moment.
The room slows. I look up and gaze around the room. It seems the toys watch over her. Outside the window summer hits glass like a starling stunned and the elm tree shades that side of the house. I look down at my daughter again. She’s almost asleep with her little cheek resting against the nubby floor.
I was about to turn and go. Then her head sprang to attention. Again desire. Total focus on something that must have rolled under the rocking horse. And I’m riveted with her in the moment. She wants it. She crawls around. She slides under. She throws out blind hands. Not quite. She tries again. Still she cannot reach it. So she gets up and drags the stumbling rocking horse back enough to go in underneath and push out her find.
Kaleidoscope. And sunshine through the other window.
She is on her back. Her feet are in the air. They wriggle. Now they rest on the rocking horse where stirrups are painted. Now on the pillow, then kicking the floor. And her eye looks in as her little hand turns.
Red. Before she knows the names of the colors they fall over her in their mixed-up rainbows. With that sandy rattle from inside the pretty world turning.
Brilliant yellow.
Blue.
Flowers
And pink.
Enthralled, she laughs out loud.
Uninhibited.
Amazed.
Enraptured.
But curious.
To be in that world. To find one’s way into that world. Colors tossing easily and free-falling with shaken, circular gravity into the middle of the world. There is a drunken moment when she believes in the place inside. She wants it.
She takes her eye away. She hits the toy on the floor. Looking in again but her hand covers the aperture and with no light she sees little. She hits it repeatedly on the floor. And again on the rocking horse.
She turns it, looks in backwards, and sees nothing. The world has disappeared. But turning it again the furious rage dissipates; she is satisfied. And she has learned how to hold it up once more towards the light for soothing patterns and a falling sound. Again she is amazed. Enraptured.
But still curious.
She carries the kaleidoscope over to her toy box. Standing up she puts the handle of the toy box lid at such an angle so as to be able to pry the thing apart. She works diligently. Pushing from one side and then on the other. To be inside. To live in that world.
Finally!
A half-smile. She got it.
Then.
Beads hemorrhage for an instant.
Little one-sided plastic nothing mirrors lie motionless.
The cardboard is bland inside the pretty paper.
And I cannot get to her fast enough.
ANGELS ON HORSEBACK
Kitchens breathe easily in big families. There is a blur of aunts and uncles leaning on counters. Teenage cousins avoid obligation in the basement surfacing only to refill a bowl of tortilla chips. Little nephews play with string cheese on the floor. At the end of the kitchen there is an island where neighbors are sitting on bar stools drinking mai tais, white wine, and sangria. They get up to take turns throwing a doll’s head (a beloved dog toy) into the living room. Charlie, the golden retriever, bounds back to the slow-swirling group and looks around among different friendly faces before choosing one and offering up his drool-covered prize.
A twenty-six-year-old woman, the new wife of one of the older grandchildren, stands awkwardly apart from the group. The loudest neighbor demands that she come toss the doll’s head. She declines but so as not to seem too standoffish she instead makes a large gesture of maturely closing the basement stairs door in an effort to improve her political position in the familial hierarchy. Who does that surly nineteen-year-old think he is to let a door stand open in the middle of the way as he rushes and rumbles down the steps?
But. Who is she to care? So she leans over and picks up the lone tortilla chip he dropped from his refilled bowl lest it get crushed and require whatever reprimand might come out with the vacuum.
Mrs. Hamel from church is carrying serving dishes out to the screened-in porch. She seems never quite pleased with the platters’ spacial relations. T
he buffet under the kitchen window goes through different permutations. Deviled eggs, potato salad, coleslaw, orange Jell-O and carrot salad, teriyaki chicken wings, and mint-frosted chocolate chip brownies dance, leapfrog, slide around, and push back in her old, gnarled, manicured hands until she’s satisfied.
No one is listening. But Mrs. Swindan answers what must have been a question posed by that new wife of one of the older grandchildren, “Angels on horseback are just baked oysters wrapped in bacon,” then raises her voice to shout toward the porch, “Mrs. Hamel. How do you make your Christmas fruit salad?”
Mrs. Hamel hears the question but doesn’t bother raising her voice much. She’s folding napkins corner-to-corner and making a pinwheel pile. “The oranges are from Central America. None of this grocery store nonsense. Mine come directly from the grove to my back door. Lord knows what infestations I’m ushering in on the fruit, but I don’t care. I’m an old lady, I like good oranges, and I hate pesticides.”
When the twenty-six-year-old comes through the doorway carrying the fruit salad, Mrs. Hamel points to one of two empty places of honor, and the prized dish gets turned ninety degrees counterclockwise.
“So you cut the oranges. Lots of them. Let the juice run in too. Then the apples. I like the Gala from Washington State, but you can be more flexible with the apples. Just don’t use those big red ones covered in soapy wax from the store. They’re mealy and awful. Use