Beads
"ALL MOTHERS WORRY, it's only natural," my mother assured me, as we rode home from the hospital. This, I suppose, was in response to my multiple worries—cracked nipples, not having enough milk, the baby choking in its sleep. We were marvelling at our both being mothers when I looked at my newborn daughter and exclaimed, "How beautiful she is!"
I heard my mother's distinct, "No, she's not."
Surprised, I turned around. My mother had taken a bright red ribbon from her pocket, and was wrapping it around Rose's tiny wrist.
"Your Grandma Eva," she said, "used to make me wear a string of red beads. She always said the evil eye was attracted to red, that the beads were a decoy. It would go after the beads and leave me alone."
"And when I was little, did I wear something red too?" I asked.
"Oh yes. And whenever anyone mentioned what a beautiful child you were," said my mother, "or how smart, I quickly put you behind me and said you weren't, in case the evil eye might hear and try to destroy you."
THE SUMMER I TURNED NINE I found out my Grandma Eva had cancer, and that the cancer had spread.
I remember being in my mother's bedroom before the funeral. As she put on a black dress she said for the first time in her life she felt truly alone.
I touched her on the shoulder. "You have me," I said. "You have Daddy and Grandpa."
"No darling, that's not what I mean. I took her for granted."
She was there in the hospital when my grandmother died.
"If only," my mother said, "I could have talked to her. I always wanted her to hug me. I never realized I should have put my arms around her."
I tried to picture my grandmother—she'd never laughed or smiled—but saw instead a toy she had given me. A red and white plastic chicken. You pressed down on the chicken and out came an egg.
THAT SUMMER MY GRANDFATHER MOVED from their tiny apartment in the city and came to live with us.
We were to host a party. In the morning I'd helped my mother prepare platters of pigs-in-the-blanket and dips from Lipton's onion soup mix and sour cream. Later, when guests began arriving, I found my grandfather in his chair under a tall oak at the edge of the yard.
"A good day to you, young miss."
He greeted me as usual, tipping an imaginary hat.
"Aren't you coming to the party?" I asked.
"It's all right," he said, "I'm quite happy here. You just run along."
"But grandpa," I said, "I'd rather be with you."
He bent over in his chair, picked up a smooth grey stone. Held it out in his hand.
"Julie, do you know what will melt even a heart of stone?" he asked.
I smiled: my grandfather believed in miracles. "Kooky" was what my father called him. That morning I'd woken up to their voices in the kitchen. Going downstairs, I heard my grandfather begin one of his stories. "Your grandpa lives in another world," my father said, turning to me with a sigh.
"I mean ‘stone' literally," my grandfather said.
He tilted his head slightly and I saw the pleasure on his face. I stared out over the yard silently. We lived in a blue and white house in the suburbs. Next door was a house exactly like ours but painted yellow, with the same neat lawn. A child had died in that house. I don't know when I first learned this. I can never picture our house, though, without seeing the yellow one too. It is as clear in my mind as the tall oak under which my grandfather sat. The stone in his hand. The way he began telling me this story.
HE SAID, "A little girl was lost in the desert."
These, I remember, his exact words.
The girl—she was also nine—was trying to be brave, not crying, though she had been lost for some time.
Eventually, the girl comes across a statue of a woman in a grove of trees. Weary, she goes to it, lays down to rest. Soon a great emotion comes over her. "Mother! Where's my mother?" the girl cries. Just then one of her tears falls like a pearl on the feet of the statue. The stone woman comes to life, reaches down and holds the girl in her arms.
"So, Julie," my grandfather said. "What do you think of that?"
I said I found the story hard to believe. How, I said, could a tear make a statue come alive?
"It was magic. Or, maybe, not really." He tapped the stone in his hand. "There's nothing, nothing in the world," he said, "like a mother's love for her child."
"Was she the girl's mother then, the statue?" I wanted to know.
My grandfather smiled.
I said I hoped I'd never get lost in a desert without water. I didn't want to die. "Lucky, she didn't."
"Lucky, yes." He nodded. "Like you."
THERE ARE THINGS you don't remember. Bits and pieces you can't connect. A party. Red beads. A girl in a desert.
"I was an unmothered child," my mother has told me. "And so was my mother before me."
Was this the reason, then, for my grandfather's story?
Tears to remember.
Tears to break open a stone.
One cannot go back to sleep when one is weeping.
IN THE NIGHT thoughts come to you. You have arrived at motherhood late. You have only one child, a daughter. She still wakes up every few hours and you comfort her, nurse her back to sleep. Sometimes, looking over at your husband's face, you think you see her: she has his eyes, his light brown hair. Often, long after you've put her back in her crib, you feel you're still holding her in your arms.
Neapolitan
MY FATHER DRIVES FAST. He calls it the desire for conquest. He likes to pit his skills and the machine against the elements. Stones on the road. A car coming from one side. Wet leaves on a rainy night. "If it normally takes an hour to get somewhere and you do it in half the time," he once told me, "you're annihilating both time and space."
This was in October 1962, when everyone worried that the Americans would start a nuclear war in response to Soviet missiles in Cuba, but all I could think about was my parents' likely divorce. My father and I were in his ham radio shack, my chair facing a picture of two apes writing
