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Member
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 22
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Rose
She looks perfect and I wonder what I am doing. Her chest rises and falls and I imagine her rib cage is made of warm, freshly poured plastic, flexible and fragile blended into one. Her heart beats faster than mine; I feel it beneath my fingers as she grabs on as if she will never let go. She sleeps and I want to stay there forever, curled around her and feeling her warm exhalations on my cheek. I want to never leave her and she wants to never leave me and I wonder why I would ever suggest such a thing.
It’s Christmas Eve three years from now. She’s wearing a red dress and white tights, and Eli’s hair is a little shorter, cut like a businessman’s. She has red hair like his, and it curls under her chin, and I pin back a small section so that it tickles her cheek when she turns her head. I roasted a ham, and my parents came for dinner at our perfect suburban house in its perfect suburban neighborhood, and Eli kisses me and tells me that I am doing a great job with the cooking. Rose, that’s her name, Rose. She grins up at me, parting her red lips revealing flashes of perfectly straight baby teeth.
“Mommyyyy,” she whines, tugging at the hem of my skirt.
“Rosiieeee,” I respond, placing my hands on my hips and wrinkling my nose at her.
“Mommy, you look silly,” she giggles.
She looks perfect and I wonder what I am doing. Truths clutter my head like crumpled drafts of letters, and I want to rub my temples to clear them away, but I can’t take my arms from her. I trace the outline of her small, soft nose, down over her lips, down to her chin and up again. I close my eyes, play connect the dots on my Baby’s face, my memory of her depending entirely on the nerve endings in my fingertips. I graze my lips across her cheeks, and watch as her hands fold and unfold, then fold up again. There are tufts of reddish brown hair on her head, a fusion of my chestnut and Eli’s fiery red, and they tickle my nose as I memorize the scent of her. She smells salty and warm and like lavender and talcum powder. She smells perfect and I wonder what I am doing.
It is five years from now and I am opening a crisp pink Dora the Explorer backpack that smells like a new inner tube.
“Mommy, do we still get to watch Caillou in Kindergarten?”
“We get to watch it after school, Rosie.”
“But-but-but, not during?”
“No, you get to play all sorts of fun games, though!” I say, clasping my hands together and bouncing my fingertip off of her button nose.
“Like what?” she asks, rocking back and forth in her light-up sneakers, testing the waters of this Brave New World.
“Like…hide and seek, and duck-duck-goose, and…Tickle Monster!” I leap up and tickle Rose’s belly, and she throws her head back and tries to run away.
“Daddy! The Tickle Monster!” And Eli runs into the living room of our perfect suburban house in its perfect suburban neighborhood, arms outstretched, and tickles her too.
“But I am the Tickle Monster!” he shrieks, and Rose claps her hand to her forehead and tilts her head back and giggles until she cries.
Eli didn’t come to the hospital two days ago when she was born.
“Sara, I am going to let her go, just as you are, and I do not see much point in growing attached.”
My cheeks burned hot and I clenched my fists.
“But, Eli, she’s your daughter,” I’d said, “don’t you want to see her?”
“She’s not my daughter. And she’s not yours either.”
I run my fingers through her fuzzy hair and find myself wishing for a health complication or something, so that we will both have to stay in the hospital a little longer, and she won’t go home with Susan and Frank for another few days.
“What are you going to name her?” I’d asked, as I lay in the hospital bed, Susan and Frank sitting in the turquoise hospital chairs, Susan gazing down at my Baby – her Baby.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Susan sighed, looking over at Frank, who was looking over her shoulder at the Baby.
“I always liked Hannah,” said Frank, smiling, brushing the back of his hand over her cheek.
“You’d think we’d have a name picked out by now,” Susan laughed lightly, tucking her hair behind her ear, “but for some reason, we were so caught up in the prospect of actually having a baby that we didn’t even think much of the practical stuff, like a name. How silly.”
“We’ll think of something.” Frank smiled, crossing his right leg over his left.
“Sara, we would be honored to have you name her, if you’d like.” Susan said, raising her eyes from the Baby’s to look into mine.
“Oh, no, thank you, she’s not my baby to name,” I’d said, smiling lightly, a smile that tasted like something spoiling.
Her leg jerks as she stirs in her sleep, and she stretches, elongating her body by inches. I hold her tiny baby foot in my hand, feel the toes through the confines of the cotton booties. She is wearing a soft cotton kimono-style onesie, the onesie that Susan loved, the one she gushed about during Month Eight, the one that she found at Marshall’s for $20, marked down from $70.
It is eight years from now and it is Halloween. Rose is dressed as a washing machine, a silly costume that Eli crafted out of a cardboard box and white spray paint. We go out, she and one of her friends and me, and they run up the front walks of our perfect suburban neighborhood, a neighborhood where the lawns are emerald and no one poisons the Halloween candy. When we get home, Rose tries to sit down in her costume, but laughs when she realizes that that is not very possible.
“Mom? Can you help me?” she laughs, and I laugh too.
“Arms up.” I order, raising the box over her head. “This is like giving birth,” I laugh. I smile because when I gave birth to Rose, I kept her, kept her like most parents do. She was my baby, and I kept her. Rose and her friend sit at the dining table and sort their candy.
“Pew, Mounds!” she gags, pushing it to her friend.
“Ew, I don’t want that!” her friend yelps. Eli sweeps by, back from work in his navy business suit and red-and-yellow striped tie, and pops the Mounds bar into his mouth.
“Dad, that’s gross,” Rose crinkles her nose.
“Yeah, Dad, that’s gross,” I say, smiling up at him.
I am supposed to be saying goodbye. I am supposed to be telling her the truth, whispering honesty in her tiny pink ear, saying that I cannot care for her because of money and circumstances and all of that other bullshit that is so true it hurts. She opens her eyes slowly, yawns so I can see the little hangy-ball thing at the back of her throat, the ridges on the roof of her mouth, her small, smooth pink tongue, no plaque yet to stain it. She closes it and her face relaxes and she leans into me, and I want to push her away - as Eli said, don’t get attached. But that’s utter foolishness. How was I supposed to not get attached to my own baby? The baby that lived in my womb for nine months and my arms for two days and my heart forever?
It is eleven years from now and Rose is hiding in her room, the door shut with a chair leaned against the doorknob to keep it that way.
“Rose?”
“I’m not coming out.”
“Well then can I come in?”
“I dunno.”
“Please?” The chair scapes away from the door, and Rose turns the knob just enough for the door to open a crack. I hear her scurry back to her bed and lift the covers over her head and cocoon away inside herself. I open the door all the way and close it behind me. There are posters on the wall. Some pop artist, a Thoroughbred jumping over a stone wall, a puppy and a kitten playing with a ball of yarn.
“Rosie..” I say softly, sitting on the bed next to the shaking lump beneath the covers. “Rosie, Baby, don’t cry.” She cries harder, and I rub her back through the cotton and polyester. I curl up around her the way I did when she was a baby, lying on my chest and I wanted to stay there forever, feeling her warm exhalation on my cheek.
“It’s just not fair,” she says finally, her voice warbled and choked. I hold her tighter. I wait for her to say more. “I didn’t even do anything to her.”
“Who?”
“Lucy Eldridge. I told her once that I had a dream that I was married to Ben Watson, and she told everyone. And I don’t even like him, Mommy,” she whimpers. “He’s mean and smelly, and now everyone knows, and Henry made kissy faces at me, and Mom, I’m never going back.”
She sobs and her body shakes, and I lift the blanket and kiss her wet cheek.
When I told Eli, he thought I was joking.
“No, Sara, there is no way.”
“Are you telling me that I just have a stomach flu? Are you telling me that I stopped getting my period just for kicks? Do you think I think this is funny?!”
“Oh, come on, you know what I mean!”
“Don’t ‘oh, come on’ me. You do not have a person growing inside you!”
“I’m sorry,” he said, holding his hands up, “I just – I just don’t get how this is possible.”
“Me neither, but it is. It is. It is happening and it is.”
“Well, what are you going to do?” he asked, folding his hands and looking at the carpet.
“What am I going to do? This is our baby!”
“Sare, you just said yourself that I don’t have a person growing inside of me! You, however, do.”
“That person is half you, Eli.” He looked worried, and he folded his upper lip over his lower.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” We sat there for awhile, looking at the carpet together. After an hour or to, Eli asked,
“You hungry?”
“I dunno,” I responded, folding my legs underneath me.
“You have no idea if you’re hungry or not?” He squatted so that he was at eye level with me. I find my eyes welling over.
“I can’t have a baby now, Eel.”
“I know,” he said, holding my hand, “I know we can’t.”
I can feel Susan and Frank waiting outside,sitting hunched over in the waiting room with its coffee vending machine and other people waiting, just as anxious. They wait for different reasons, but Susan and Franks' are hopeful, and they hold each others’ hands waiting for Sara to say goodbye. I am sure they’re scared too, scared that I’ll change my mind. They love me, they took care of me for months, buying me maternity clothes and bringing me over lasagnas in Pyrex pans covered in tin foil. They love me, but they’re scared of me, treat me like a delicate piece of porcelain. Tread wrong and she changes her mind, tread wrong and The Birthmother changes her mind. My heart hurts, and I can feel it choking in my chest, and my Baby, my Baby Rose stretches her hand out and lays it on my chest. I hold it there, and know that she is there, that she cares about me.
It is fourteen years from now and Eli is sitting in the living room interrogating a young man with braces and pimples and shaggy brown hair. I am upstairs with Rose in her room, helping her curl her hair with hot rollers. When we remove the rollers, each curl cascades down as if in slow motion and her red hair shines metallic. It looks like there is fire in her hair. She smiles.
“You look beautiful,” I say, softly, my hands on her shoulders. She is wearing a white dress that hits at the knee and a gold necklace and emerald earrings. They’re mine but I lent them to her. Eli got the necklace for me for our fourth anniversary, the earrings for our seventh.
“Thank you,” she replies, lightly, looking at herself as though she is no longer herself, no, now she is some beautiful maiden, a woman.
“Ready to go?” I ask, taking her hand to help her stand from her vanity.
“I’m nervous,” she whispers, looking at me with pleading eyes.
“That’s what makes it so much fun,” I smile, squeezing her hands, “your palms sweat and your heart races, but you feel so wonderful when he smiles at you and compliments you, and-”
“Is that how you feel around Daddy?” She asks. I smile,
“Yes.” And it is true, there is no doubt, and no ‘I am going to let her go, no poin in getting attached.’ I love Eli with every fiber of my being and we kept our Baby.
“Alright, I think I’m ready now,” she says, inhaling deeply and reluctantly letting it out.
A tear falls from my eye and splashes on my Baby’s forehead. Then another. And another. I see it like it is someone else crying, see it like it is beyond my control, see it from God’s bird’s eye view. I find myself shaking violently, clutching my Baby to my chest. She is my Baby.
“She is my Baby,” I whisper through the sobs. “My Baby.” She stirs, and begins to cry softly, and it is like our storm in that room, tears and whimpers, and she begins to thrash and I try to hold her still. I breathe shakily and try to control myself to control her.
“Shhh,” I whisper, “Rosie. Rosie, Baby, don’t cry.” I am holding her and she is crying and I am in the hospital bed, and her rocking chair, and her first bed, and the sidewalk when she skinned her knee, and her bed when Lucy Eldridge told everyone about her dream, and at the kitchen table when she failed a math test, and her bed again when that first date broke up with her, and-
“Sara?” I look up, and Susan is sticking her head through the door.
“Yeah?” I ask, looking up and brushing the tears from my cheek, trying to pretend they had never been there.
“How’s it going?”
“Well,” I say slowly, “I don’t think there things are supposed to go good or bad – they’re just supposed to happen.”
“I know,” she says, walking over to the bed, her wet sneakers squeaking on the linoleum. She sits on the bed and rubs my knee. I don’t know what to say, so I sit there quietly for awhile, not looking her in the eye, both of us looking at the linoleum like I looked at the carpet with Eli.
“I just, I know it’s best, it just doesn’t feel best.” I murmur, and Susan doesn’t say anything for awhile. What can she say, really? She sits there with me, though, her hand on my knee. She rubs my back and whispers that it will be okay, whispers that she is sorry, whispers that she loves me and the Baby.
“I’ll leave you alone with her awhile longer.” She says, standing up to leave, the squeaking beginning again. She turns on the way out, her shoulder-length blond hair slapping her in the face, “Please, don’t rush or anything. Really, we understand. We’ve lost babies too.”
I chew the inside of my lip and look down at my Baby, who’s awake now, and looking back up at me. Her eyes look like a dinosaur’s, or something, a dinosaur that’s just now hatched from its egg.
“You’re Mama’s little dinosaur, aren’t you?” She continues to stare at me, unfazed. She grabs at the air and yawns again.
I think of everything. I want to run with her, to run away somewhere, to jump out the hospital window with her tucked in my jacket and run home to the apartment. I’d call Eli, and he would see her, maybe, and would understand, trace his fingers over her head and say that it was okay, she was with Daddy now.
I feel sick. My stomach gurgles, and I’m not sure if I’m hungry or sick or if the storm inside me is spiraling and devouring everything. Is Eli even her Daddy? Eli didn’t even want to see her, he wanted to hide at the apartment and pretend that we didn’t have a baby. He didn’t desert me when I was pregnant, true, but he stayed like it was a chore, staring longingly at other women, and telling me not to take pictures because I wouldn’t want to remember this. Just pretend it isn’t happening, Sare, it’ll be over soon. Maybe it will be over soon for him, but for me it will always be here, always.
I will jump out the hospital window and bring her home and Eli won’t care, and he will scream at me to bring her back and she will cry and I will look up at him with pleading eyes like Rose when she was nervous and tell him that she’s our baby, and he’d storm out and tell me to get my head on straight.
I’d raise her alone, probably, and I would love her and we would play Tickle Monster, but Eli would not be the other Tickle Monster, he’d be with someone else, scared, and wondering about us in the back of his mind. Wondering, but not acting. Not a bad guy, just a scared one. We wouldn’t live in a perfect suburban house in a perfect suburban neighborhood, no, we’d live in an apartment by the highway. I try to cram in more hopes for my Rosie, more dreams of Suburbia and Eli and Rosie and her red hair, but they’re gone. I understand now. I remember.
It is Christmas Eve three years from now. She’s wearing a red dress and white tights and she has red hair like Eli’s, and it curls under her chin, and Susan pins back a small section so that it tickles her cheek when she turns her head. Susan roasted a ham, and her parents came for dinner at their perfect suburban house in its perfect suburban neighborhood, and Frank kisses her and tells her that she is doing a great job with the cooking.
“She’s so soft,” Susan smiles, dimples showing in her cheek. Frank sits close, and I sit a little farther away. “I swear, you forget how soft she is.” Susan lifts her Baby to her shoulder and burps her.
“Any thoughts on a name?” I ask, trying to numb the pain with words.
“Yes, actually,” Frank smiles, his hand holding Susan’s hand whose hand is holding her Baby’s.
“Well,” I smile, “what is it?”
“Rose.”
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