I serve in this fashion
I trace an outline of my daughter’s hand on thin
tissue paper. The paper is pink as cotton candy and
her hand is limp. She is asleep.
I’ve spent the last weekend tracing her limbs and
torso while she sleeps, working my way up to her
delicate head and wispy hair. I just want to catch an
idea of that hair, a tendril here, a mass of frizz
there. In her sleep her toes flex like a
dancer en
pointe. I
follow the stretch of the arch of her foot, sweep up
the ball to the tip of her big toe. Elizabeth stirs
and tenses as the felt-tipped marker grazes her
flesh, but I am stalwart and stay the course, capture
the foot for posterity’s sake.
Elizabeth is three years old, red-haired and long of
limb. Her knees are like mine were when I was her
age, stretched and knobby all at once, awkward joints
connecting leg bones. I can already see how her hips
will jut out at thirteen, will buffer themselves in
fat and muscle. Buying pants will become almost
impossible for her, will become a source of
frustration, and she will start to wear slimming
flat-front trousers with wide legs no matter the
going fashion. Her skinny legs will protrude from an
ample rump, those now-slight hips will grow to
temporarily house the wide skulls of ten-and-a-half
pound babies. She will slap the first man who remarks
on her child-bearing hips and then she will marry him
and bear two children in three years.
They will exhaust themselves with fights over money
and discipline. When she discovers that he's been
sneaking out to Bible study meetings and is on the
road to becoming born again, Elizabeth will leave
him. I'll take the family in, my 26-year-old daughter
and her two preschooler boys, will put aside my plans
to redo the upstairs in preparation to sell the
place. She'll be practically unemployable, her only
experience being reproducing and windexing the glass
off the windows, running a vacuum cleaner across the
floor so thoroughly that you could eat off of it. It
will be as though she were a teenager again, the
petty little fights over who left what dish in the
sink without washing it, her stealing my cigarettes
and popping diet pills so she can stay up all night.
I will wonder what happened to my golden years, my
"me" time. She'll get an earful every night.
Eventually she will go back to nursing school, will
find a new place to live and get a job. One of the
night-shift orderlies, an atheist, rational and
compelling, will seduce her with stories from his
service in the Persian Gulf. He'll move in after
their third date and will start whipping that
fatherless household into shape. The boys, teenagers
by this time, will be desperate to escape the two of
them, sick of the discussions of Ayn Rand and the
tyranny of other people's gods. There are other
things that will keep them away, the sounds that leak
from the too-thin walls of the tract house, the
atheist's cries in the middle of the night followed
by the low dove-coos of their mother soothing him.
They will visit me for dinner almost every night and
I'll serve them roast beef and potatoes, spaghetti
and meatballs, fish sticks and french fries.
Sometimes one of the boys will sleep on the pull-out
couch, his brother in a sleeping bag on the floor.
But for now Elizabeth is a little girl with chubby
feet and dimpled elbows. Her neck is thick, strong
muscles leading to an unremarkable chin that dips out
blandly from under her lower lip. Her dad and I are
still debating about whose nose she will have. All
children have cute button noses. It takes the
hormones and stretching of adolescence to reveal the
nose’s true nature.
