5
The summer I was twenty-seven. Two weathered folding chairs on the balcony overlooking the alley between us and the building next door. The string of white paper lanterns I hung had somehow made palpable the creeping smell of hot garbage from below. That was where you said to me over glasses of crisp white wine, ‘Let’s start trying. Tonight.’
We’d talked about it before, many times. You were practically gleeful when I held other people’s babies or got down on my knees to play with them. You’re a natural. But I was the one who was imagining. Motherhood. What it would be like. How it would feel. Looks good on you.
I would be different. I would be like other women for whom it all came so easily. I would be everything my own mother was not.
She barely entered my mind in those days. I made sure of it. And when she slipped in uninvited, I blew her away. As if she were those ashes falling into my orange juice.
By that summer, we’d rented a bigger apartment with a second bedroom in a building with a very slow elevator; the walk-up we lived in before wouldn’t work for a stroller. We drew each other’s attention to baby things with small nudges, never words. Tiny trendy outfits in store windows. Little siblings dutifully holding hands. There was anticipation. There was hope. Months earlier I had started paying more attention to my period. Tracked my ovulation. I’d made notes to mark the dates in my day planner. One day I found little happy faces drawn next to my O’s. Your excitement was endearing. You were going to be a wonderful father. And I would be your child’s wonderful mother.
I look back and marvel at the confidence I found then. I no longer felt like my mother’s daughter. I felt like your wife. I had been pretending I was perfect for you for years. I wanted to keep you happy. I wanted to be anyone other than the mother I came from. And so I wanted a baby, too.
6
The Ellingtons. They lived three doors down from the house I grew up in and their lawn was the only one in the neighborhood that stayed green through the dry, relentless summers. Mrs Ellington knocked on our door exactly seventy-two hours after Cecilia had left me. My father was still snoring on the sofa where he had slept each night for the past year. I had realized only an hour earlier that my mother wasn’t going to come home this time. I’d gone through her dresser and the drawers in the bathroom and the place where she stashed her cartons of cigarettes. Everything that mattered to her was gone. I knew enough by then not to ask my father where she went.
‘Would you like to come for a nice Sunday roast at our house, Blythe?’ Her tight curls were shiny and hard, fresh from the salon, and I couldn’t help but reply directly to them with a nod and a thank-you. I went straight to the laundry room and put my best outfit – a navy blue jumper and a rainbow-striped turtleneck – in the washing machine. I had thought of asking her if my father could come, too, but Mrs Ellington was the most socially appropriate woman I knew, and I figured if she didn’t include him in her invitation, there was a reason.
Thomas Ellington Jr was the best friend I had. I don’t remember when I’d given him that distinction, but by the time I was ten, he was the only person I cared to play with. Other girls my age made me uneasy. My life looked different from theirs – their Easy-Bake Ovens, their homemade hair bows, their proper socks. Their mothers. I learned very early on that being different from them didn’t feel good.
But the Ellingtons made me feel good.
The thing about Mrs Ellington’s invitation was that she must have somehow known my mother had left. Because my mother no longer allowed me to attend dinner at the Ellingtons’. At some point she had decided I needed to be home by a quarter to five every night, although there was nothing to come home to: the oven was always cold and the fridge was always empty. By then, most evenings my father and I ate instant oatmeal. He’d bring home small packets of brown sugar for the top, ones he stuffed in his pockets from the cafeteria at the hospital, where he managed the cleaning staff. He made decent enough money then, by local standards at least. We just didn’t seem to live that way.
I had somehow learned that it was polite to bring a gift when invited to a nice dinner, so I had clipped a fistful of hydrangeas from our front bush, although late September had turned most of the white petals to a crispy dusty pink. I tied the stems with my rubber hair elastic.
‘You’re such a thoughtful young woman,’ Mrs Ellington had said. She put them in a blue vase and placed them carefully on the table in the middle of the steaming dishes.
Thomas’s younger brother, Daniel, adored me. We played trains in the living room after school while Thomas did his homework with his mother. I always saved mine for after eight o’clock, when Cecilia either went to bed or was gone for the night to the city. She did that often – went to the city and came back the
