gendered repetitions
Mommy is getting me ready to go to the birthday party. My dress has a sprawling floral print, with a white lacy front to frame pearlescent buttons. The skirt of the dress puffs out a little and my hair is just as much a bouffant. The girl’s gift is carefully wrapped, shimmering in our best wrapping paper and even adorned with a bow.
Suddenly I’m standing at the door ringing the bell. Her mother invites me in.
Leaving one world for the other
Papa has come to visit. Tall, dark-haired, deeply tanned, and mustachioed like a Muppet, he is sitting in Mommy’s reclining chair and speaking in tongues that I don’t always understand. Je veux manger vos doigts, he growls. I can’t remember exactly what this means, but I remember that it’s a joke because he tells it every time, so I giggle and flail as if to flee as I’m supposed to. When he isn’t speaking English I get bored and my gaze drifts from his dark face and mustache and over to the chair, with its overlapping threaded pattern of brown, black, and white. The cologne he wears hangs thick in the air, overpowering the safe and familiar musky-damp smell of Mommy’s chair.
His Face
Filed under: Family, Forum | Tags: childhood, Family, Forum, memory, microfiction, spectacle, toys
He hands me toys; new wonders, treasures of blue and red shapes filled with glittery tinted gel. I hold them, one in each hand, to study and consider more seriously. I don’t know what to do with them, so I stare at them to tell me.
When he finishes his hushed talk, he picks me up and takes me back out to the living room where everyone is waiting. He sets me in front of him. I stand, still staring at the toys, twisting my arm around to look at them from every side without dropping one. Everyone is gathered in the room around me, watching. Mommy is filming me.
My scalp hurts because my pig tails are tied too high and tight on my head. My dress is tight, too, and getting short for me. I feel pinched and pulled and arranged and it makes me itchy and empty-headed. I ignore everyone and look down at the toys in my hands, my purple floral dressy shoes with frilly bobby-socks, and then down to the floor’s expanse of speckled orangey-brown.
I stare at them to tell me.
Filed under: Family | Tags: childhood, Family, grandmother, memory, peas, subordination
Grandma is sitting across from me at the dinner table. She spies me looking at her, not touching my food. Discretely, she draws up her hand from her lap. It is lily white to the point of near transparency, wrinkled and sunken; a large blue vein bulges out and runs across the top of the back of it.
She reaches to pick up a green pea from the top of the pile on her plate. She sets it delicately down beside her silverware, positions her fingers in an OK formation, and flicks it with surprising force across the table to me.
