Now Bodhi comes up to me, clutches my knees, pushes between my legs, flings her head and arms out, and reaches up to me. I grab her and lift her into my arms, stand up and kiss her cheeks, my dark hand in her lit curls.
The woman says, “Wow. She’s really attached to you, isn’t she?”
I turn around and stare at her. My eyes are slitted; the blood is slow in my veins. “Why wouldn’t she be?”
The color jumps into her cheeks, two spots like a painted doll’s rouge. “Oh, I just meant that … you know…”
“Yes, I know what you mean. I’m not the nanny. I’m not the babysitter. This is my child.”
“Oh I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean…”
I want to say, “Fuck you, you racist piece of shit.” The words slide down my throat, thick, unspeakable. Tears springing in my eyes, I turn on my heel and walk away with my girl draped over my shoulder, leaving behind us the woman’s unslapped face.
*
She is always quiet, always meek, and it reminds me of my mother saying, “You used to sit so quietly. We would leave you sitting in a room by yourself, and if we came back much later you were still sitting there. You didn’t move. You weren’t rowdy like the other children. Our friends’ children.”
Bodhi has inherited my childhood stillness. But unlike my mother, I am not fooled. This is not obedience. When a baby bird falls out of the nest, it does not chirp to alert the slinking cat. The kittens in their turn are silent when left by their mother. They are aware of the shadow of the owl. No matter how long she is gone, they will not call out. Only at the edge of starvation, weeks later, will they cry out, desperate for salvation.
My girl’s stillness is likewise a certain careful gauging, a waiting to see how things will unfold. She is watching to see from which direction danger comes. My mother had thought it was some inherent goodness in me. Instead it was an act of survival.
*
At the playground I sit on a bench while Bodhi plays and smoke cigarettes to the bitter stub, trying to suck down enough nicotine to get me through the long evenings ahead, the sleepless nights. I sit on the edge of the bench, my knees jiggling high, and smoke and try not to slip into the bottomless pit.
Before Daniel came, my soul had been cloistered. I had been reconciled to isolation, and in this, there had been a kind of contentment. But I had let him inside and I had swallowed happiness. I had feasted on his flesh; I had dwelt within it. I had fallen into the arms of this country that was first his. Then she had come and my world had swelled with love, but had also shrunk down to the size of a pinhead. There is the sensation of a shroud dropped over my head, no more air to breathe. I don’t like this, I realize. I don’t like being the mommy. I love my child, but I don’t like motherhood. Motherhood is the constancy of a pair of eyes seeking you out, wanting you, needing you. It is the feeling that there is no darkness, no private place, no escape from those small but piercing eyes. I had not thought that a child could intrude so completely into one’s solitude. I see now that she does not share my serenity but rather disrupts and shatters it. Now wherever I go, her eyes track me like a hunter’s.
I remember the trip Daniel and I had taken once, that deep mountain lake. All those corpses he had claimed lay at the bottom of the freezing depths. The sun is shining, but I can’t feel it on my skin anymore. The water has reached out once again and dipped its pointed finger into my jugular. I feel what it would be like to fall through miles of dark water, the horror of coming to bed in the mud surrounded by smashed, water-torn bodies.
A sharp cry, and I look up to see that Bodhi has fallen, her knee skinned. She looks at me with tears trembling unshed from her eyes. We have an important and silent conversation then. Her asking for succor and my replying, “I am not the one to come to. I will not help you. This is the nature of my maternity.”
“Who should I go to, then?” her eyes ask, and mine reply, “No one. There is no one in the world to go to.” I look away, I take a drag, and when I look back she has brushed off the bruised place and already turned away. I don’t think she will ask again. I’m teaching her to be tough, to be strong. No one else can teach her like I can. There are people in the world who can hurt her like they hurt me. But if she is as strong as iron, if she can lock up that inside place where no hands can reach, then she will survive the world of men as I have survived.
*