Three years old, I hear my mother say. I remember when your mom was three.
Our girls ask her a thousand questions, and I hear her laugh, and I can see her smiling though I can’t see them.
She was wild, she says. Always naked. She learned to swim at two and would have spent all day in the ocean if she could.
The buzzer starts to buzz and people trudge up the three flights of stairs to our new place. There are too many people, says my husband. We have the single window unit in the window, but we are all in the same small room next to the kitchen, and the stove’s still on from the cake that’s baking and all of us begin to sweat and the kids run back and forth between the kitchen and their room.
I watch my mom the whole time. She kneels down to talk to all the children. Her arms are very thin, her shoulders thick with freckles, and she gestures a lot when she talks, like me. The Chilean writer comes in, and I hug her. I stand in the hall with her a minute and she holds my elbow and I think that I might tell her all of what the last six weeks have been like, but instead I hug her again and she leads me back inside. My co–homeroom teacher has driven from New Jersey, where she is now in med school. The twenty-four-year-old sits on one of the small IKEA chairs and eats from a bowl of popcorn, though he’s six feet three at least and it looks like, any moment, the chair might break beneath him; he hunches over, and I try to offer him a beer.
Gifts pile up on the table next to the food and the cake and the water pitcher that we’ve set out. I’ve set up a roll of butcher paper on the floor of the girls’ room with paints that, I hope, I tell the other parents, are mostly washable. The kids paint the paper, then each other. The parents all go back out into the kitchen to get more wine and beer. My mom takes pictures and my dad sits on the couch with my other younger co–homeroom teacher and asks her about grad school. He holds his ankle on his knee and I watch him as she smiles as he asks her another question and she answers and he smiles back.
We have forgotten candles. The Chilean writer takes my keys and walks the two blocks to the bodega and comes back with candles that turn out to be trick candles and the two-year-old blows six times before the fire’s finally out. Everybody laughs and, though I worry that she’ll cry, the now three-year-old thinks the fire’s magic and she claps and when the candles are all out she looks sad. I give her all of them piled on a plate so she can lick the frosting off and she seems better. We serve the cake and everybody tells me it’s delicious and I have to keep saying, It wasn’t me, it was my husband, and they all look at him, then me again, and I shake my head and he smiles from the kitchen with the four-year-old up in his arms.
Someone gets paint on the girls’ sheets and someone else pees in the kitchen. My mother posts a whole album of pictures on the internet in real time, and the twenty-four-year-old leaves early and as he leaves he shakes my hand. I hug my co–homeroom teachers as I walk them to their cars and tell them not to forget to call me. The Chilean writer sits on our couch and makes my husband laugh. My dad starts cleaning up the girls’ room by himself and I tell him to stop but he doesn’t listen. My sister’s holding someone’s baby but I don’t know whose.
ELIZABETH, SAYS MY, says my mother. She’s the only person in the world who can say my name and make it mean; I hear her close to me and I turn.
The apartment’s mostly empty. I can hear my husband and the Chilean writer still talking in the other room.
I think of all the ways this isn’t what it should be, that I’m not. That there is a corner of the bathroom where grout and mold have become one and even though I scrubbed at it for half an hour, she would have known how to make it better and I don’t. The floor of the girls’ room is covered in paint and toys and Duplos. There’s half a piece of cake smeared into the four-year-old’s pillow.
It was nice, says my mother.
I shrug, looking down at my feet and all the Duplos.
I go to pick one up and throw it in a bin. She leans over behind me and hands me a small pink My Little Pony, another Duplo. I pick up a doll’s dress, a stuffed dog, a stuffed horse, three tiny plastic dinosaurs. I listen as she throws magnet tiles into a bin. I try to scrape the frosting off the four-year-old’s pillow with my fingers. Once, when I was up in my room crying—when I was fourteen and often up in my room crying, and she often stayed downstairs and made the dinner and talked to my dad and sister and pretended that I wasn’t there—but once, she climbed up the stairs and held me on her lap though I was bigger than her and she rocked me back and forth and held my hand.
We both stand up straight, the floor mostly cleared, though I can see toys still underneath the kids’ beds. My girls run by and I think that she might touch me but she doesn’t. The baby comes up to grab hold of my leg and her sister barrels in behind. My mom watches them and me, I think, though I don’t turn toward her.
She says:
