Mother Box and Other Tales Read Online Free Page B

occupied while she attended some task of the house. “Just bounce her a little,” Dannie would say. “She likes it when you blow on her head.” But Sylvia was discomfited by the girl child. She found herself constantly fighting the urge to pinch her on the inside of her elbows or the backs of her knees, to take the tiny fold of her ear between her lips and, very gently, bite. It was different with the boy. She respected him. She supposed she felt deferential to him and to what she inferred were his clear preferences. Peas, for example, over pears. The flash of the keys on Dannie's keychain over the sandy cush-cush of the white-noise machine. Both of the babies' eyes had darkened, but the girl's had become a sort of mossy green while the boy's had complicated—a blue shot through with indigo, a gray striated by navy. Like clouds, Sylvia thought, like these clouds lowering now over their heads as they turned down the alley. Like the lid of a bucket levering shut.
    Sylvia thought too much, that was for certain. Her mother had always said this about her with something in her voice both of pride and approbation. In church, her mother said this about her to the other mothers as they gathered around the folding metaltable spread with platters of pastel cookies and Styrofoam coffee cups, the rims smeared with equally pastel lip-prints: shimmering pink, oyster cream, chill lavender. Sylvia's own mother had never worn lipstick, and where were the other children? Sylvia scoured her memory for them, but found only her mother in a green serge skirt, her hands thrust into the skirt's deep pockets, rocking back on her kitten heels. A thinker, her mother had described her to the other mothers, but Sylvia had always thought of herself more as a witness. She saw the colors, heard the whispers, felt the damp heat of the breeze. She remembered the nap of the carpet in the church basement, a hard industrial nub, and the coarse, split feel of her mother's knuckles as she reached into her mother's pocket to take her hand. There was so much all around her. So much always going on between the bay and the ocean, the weather, the demands of the seasons one after another, and now her neighbor, Dannie, whose motion lights were too sensitive and struck on at the slightest breeze to shine in her bedroom window, who left the television on for company in her dark house so its blue light gathered and pattered and flashed into the dawn, who thrust her torso over the porch railing and called to her—“Sylvie! Sylvie! Are you there?”—to come over, come over, for a minute come over, come with her on another walk around the block.
    When would there ever be time to think about any of this? It seemed to Sylvia as if she had been gathering herself for the effort. As if, for a long time, the materials she would need had been washing into her like flotsam caught in an eddy, and soon she would array them all before her, the stuff of her life, and really think about it the way her mother had always assumed she would.
    What would her life have been? Ladyfinger cookies and paper plates, a lace embroidered handkerchief, an aquamarine hairnet and jet beads hanging in an unraveling fringe from the flap of a handbag.
    What would it have been? A loose screen flapping against the window, the pop of ice fracturing in a glass, the rustle of underskirts, nylon thighs, the clack of short heels measuring up and down a hall.
    What else could it have been? The taste of cream fillings, of powdered cheeses, the bite of grass sucked at its sweet root. The raw iron oyster of blood. The brine of the ocean. The thick massy rot of the bay.
    The baby boy made a sound almost like a bark and when Sylvia peered over the sun-shade to check on him, she found he had twisted against the strap that held him in place, craned his neck to look up at her. The metal joints of his braces glinted an oily light at his knees and ankles. His bare feet flexed at the end of this armature and looked