The mothers of Aberdeen sighed and envied my mother. They didn’t know that every night she stayed up late—sometimes till two in the morning—devising ever more elaborate costumes to set off her daughter’s remarkable beauty. While my father slumbered beside her, she squinted in her weak pool of bedside light and smocked the fronts of dresses. She embarked on a marathon of embroidery, embellishing Serena Jane’s new winter coat with rosebuds and silk ladybugs. She crimped extra ruffles onto cuffs, edged collars with ribbon, replaced plain bone buttons with mother-of-pearl. When she finished stitching, when her hands ached, she would climb out of bed and iron the layers of Serena Jane’s clothing for the coming day.
Only when the little shoes were spit shined, the socks rolled together just so, did she haul her huge self back into bed and allow sleep to claim her. Although she hadn’t said so to my father, or to anyone, for that matter, she was looking forward to the birth of a boy, to a creature she would not have to decorate every day like a cake. Then she drifted into the mire of pregnant sleep, her dreams muddied with bats, and baseballs, and vibrating with the hopeful color blue.
Take her,” my mother said to my father, handing over a stiff-legged Serena Jane when she felt the first pain claw at her back like an impatient animal. It was a Sunday in July, the air sticky, unpleasant, and inclined to fight its way down into people’s lungs instead of sliding. The pain was two weeks early. My mother grabbed the nicked edge of the bureau and tried to hold on while another jolt jigged through her with molten feet, then she staggered her way into the bedroom, where her water broke. Saucer-eyed, my father and Serena Jane stared at her. “Don’t just stand there like twin monkeys,” she barked. “Go get me Bob Morgan.”
By the time my father returned, my mother had smashed the Union Oil alarm clock, her bedside lamp, a vase of flowers, and gone on to shred the sheets. Bob Morgan found her in a knot on the floor, gnawing at the cotton, her hair a conflagration around her face and neck. A lodestone of calm and reason, he set down his black bag and turned to my father and my sister.
“I’ll take it from here,” he told them. “You’d best take that child into the kitchen and get her something to eat.” Dumbfounded, my father obeyed.
Everything about my mother’s labor was sized to scale. The puddle of her water on the bedroom floor invited comparisons to a small sea. Wrenching jabs shook her body, then the bed, then rocked the house so that all anyone in town had to do to know how the birth was progressing was saunter down Maple Street and stand outside number seven. Over the next several hours, a curious knot of spectators developed on our front lawn, growing from a few concerned neighbors to the better half of the town. Soon, picnic baskets appeared, along with frosted bottles of ginger beer and lemonade. Estelle Crane, the brand-new mayor’s wife, arrived with a cherry pie she was saving for supper that evening and began passing pieces of it around.
“Ten pounds, seven ounces,” said John Hinkleman, who owned the general store, slapping five dollars into Ebert Vickers’s outstretched palm, and the Reverend Pickerton countered him with a guess of eleven pounds even.
“I’ll go even higher than that,” Roger Thompson blustered. “Put me down for eleven-five. Doc Morgan says this kid’s going to be some kind of record. He still can’t believe Lily’s not having twins.” His remarks led to a new whirlwind of furious betting, men revising and upping their stakes.
“With a boy like this on the team, Aberdeen’s bound to win every time.” Dick Crane, the youngest mayor Aberdeen had ever seen, took a long swallow of beer.
“Got a few years yet there, Dick,” John reminded him, but Dick shrugged.
“Still.”
The men thronged tighter, resuming speculation, until—from far away, it seemed, the voice was so quiet—a question was offered.
“What if it’s a girl?” The group of men, and several of the nearby women, fell silent. Heads swiveled to regard August Dyerson, the town oddball, resident collector of junk, unsuccessful horse breeder, and general outcast.
“What if—what if—
what
did you say?” Ebert Vickers stuttered, his chubby fist full of humid dollar bills, a pencil clamped between his steadfast teeth.
August repeated his query slowly and carefully, as if enunciating for a particularly stupid, non-native speaker. “I said. What. If. It’s. A. Girl?”
Roger Thompson spat and gurgled like an incontinent whale. “August, what the hell are you talking about? Lily’s in there about to give birth to a tank. No female infant is that robust. Besides, look at Serena Jane. She’s not exactly gargantuan.”
August ignored Roger’s reasoning, squared his shoulders, then handed Ebert Vickers a wad of notes. “I’d like you to put me down for Girl.”
Ebert thrust the money back at August. “We’re not betting on the sex, Gus. We’re betting on the weight. Either put your number in or step aside.” August’s arm flagged a moment, as if independent of his body, then took the money and shoved it into his sweaty pocket. The men roared with laughter as he sidled toward the white hot strip of summer pavement.
“There’s no accounting for women and fools,” Dick Crane said, wiping his eyes.
“There’s no accounting for the likes of Gus,” John Hinkleman replied.
The shoving began again.
“Twelve-seven!”
“Twelve-nine!”
The digits went up and up, rising like bread in the moist July air.
Inside the cool cave of the house, my mother and Robert Morgan IV were floating in their own detached universe, one that ticked along at the slow rate of bones expanding. On the slumping mattress, my mother lay with her legs bent back like a pair of exhausted wings. The insides of her pale thighs glistened, as if snails had danced down the length of her. When a contraction gripped her, rattling her teeth, Bob placed his hands on her cheeks and riveted her stare with his own. “Not yet,” he instructed her. “Don’t push yet.”
But I wanted air and light. I was brutalizing her with my impatient head. “I can’t,” my mother whispered, her voice crushed. She pictured all the cells of her body neatly ironed and creased, ready to be folded up and put back on a shelf. All the cells, that is, except for the stubborn ones in her breast. Nothing, she knew, would stamp them out. In the past four weeks, the lump had grown from a minuscule egg to a child’s fist. She hid it from my father with the padding of her maternity bra, turning her back to him when she dressed in the morning.
“Yes, you can,” Bob insisted, and by saying it, he made it so. My mother felt Bob Morgan’s hands palpating the gap between her legs and winced as he inserted gloved fingers into the doughy depths of her. She knew he had delivered twelve babies in Aberdeen, including his own son and Serena Jane, but she still felt shy in front of him.
“Lily…” Bob anchored her with his eyes again. “I’m going to prop you up with pillows and then you can push.” He tucked pillows and a blanket behind her and pushed up the hem of her nightdress farther. A pain arrived that was so enormous, my mother ceased to care what Bob Morgan saw, was grateful, even, for his gaze, which was needle-sharp and capable of remembering who she was before the layers of pregnancy camouflaged her.
“I have blue eyes,” she muttered to remind herself of herself, high-pitched, feverish words. “I like the color green,” and then her tongue loosened and gave way to an unbroken wailing pouring from her throat, a noise like a cat bleeding in the rain.
She was still lost in the delirium of her mental catalog—a letter to her son she would write down when the pain was finished with her—when Bob Morgan pulled me out of her, using no small amount of muscle and marveling at my hefty shoulders, the Neanderthal sprawl of my cranium.
Corned beef
, my mother thought, her favorite supper.
“Amazing Grace,”
her favorite hymn.
Dear Son,
she thought, her fingers stretching for a pencil, eager to begin composing the details of herself. She wanted her boy to know these things about her before she forgot or was no longer there.
Christmas
, her favorite holiday.
Dahlia
, the flower she loved best.
She missed Bob Morgan’s squawk when he finally pulled me free from Lily and saw that I was a girl. His hands slipped under my slimy head. He almost dropped me.
“Lily,” he whispered, moving up beside her. “Look, it’s a girl, not a boy. You have another girl.” Then he saw the indiscriminate puddle of red seeping into the bedclothes. “Lily?” he rasped again, just as I began to squall. He glanced from my mother’s pallid cheeks to my pug-nosed face. He put me down on the soaked sheets, the umbilical cord still attached, and when he reached to my mother’s neck to feel for a pulse, his fingers left a bright red smear on her throat. A faint throb beat under his fingers, but not, Bob Morgan knew, for much longer. He didn’t bother with the afterbirth, merely cut the cord from my stomach and knotted it, ignoring my furious cries.
“Lily,” he demanded again, shaking my mother’s shoulder and leaving more red smudges on her chest so that she resembled a savage painted for war. He laid me on top of her. “Lily, you have to give your baby a name.”
But my mother’s head lolled, and her eyes stared back at him, jelly in their sockets. Inside the cage of her skull, her mind was still wheeling through its marvelous inventory of herself, the list she would present to her child—favorite pastries, films.
Little Women
, the book she loved more than any other. Not that a boy would want to read such a tale—the small dramas of burned dresses and chopped-off hair, the stuff of sisters. She tried to think of a book for boys, couldn’t, and so decided to end her letter.
Yours truly
, she whispered into the swampy air of the room, but it was hard. There was an animal sitting on her chest, plucking at the lump in her breast.
Take it
, she thought.
I never wanted it in the first place.
“Truly?” Bob Morgan puzzled, wiping his hands with a cloth, glistening finger by glistening finger. “Lily, what the heck kind of a name is that?” But he never received an answer. By the time he removed me from my mother’s breast, cupping my enormous head with the spread palm of his hand, my mother’s lips had gone as blue as the sky outside.
“Well,” Bob Morgan said, looking into my eyes, “you may be ugly as sin and heavy as an ox, but I guess your mama loved you truly.” Wide-eyed, I suckled my fist and took in the doctor’s words with a look of gravity, as if I knew that for the next three decades, it would be the only direct reference I would have to the word
love
.
H
ad August Dyerson insisted on sticking with his bet of Girl, he would have won a substantial sum of money off the men of Aberdeen, but as it was, no one profited from my birth because I outweighed even the highest estimate. There was mirth and much laughter when Dr. Morgan announced the official figure and then silence when he explained how all of that was irrelevant owing to my mother’s death. Chastened, people shut up their picnic hampers and clustered empty bottles to their chests in clumsy bouquets. The next morning, Ebert Vickers returned limp dollar bills to their rightful owners, making a door-to-door town circuit on foot, his hat held over his heart in sympathy for my poor, dead mother and her monstrous newborn babe. No one in Aberdeen said so, but it was clear they all believed I had killed my mother. A baby as big as me was just not natural.
Bob Morgan took careful pains to explain to my father that the birth had been messy, yes, but that my mother didn’t have much time left anyway. He described the lump riddling her breast, lurking in her body like a spy, ready to send out emissaries. “It would have been a losing battle in the end, Earl,” Bob said, “a fight she never would have won. You wouldn’t have wanted her to go through that now, would you?”
My father, muted by grief and stuck with two motherless daughters, stared at the lank body of his wife stretched out on their bed and felt as though the walls of his throat were about to gum closed. It was unacceptable, he decided—the brown clots of blood seeping into the mattress, the metallic sour smells in the air, all of it. Like a meal left half-finished on the table, the candles still burning, someone’s fork poised at the edge of a plate. He looked at my mother’s body—a scrap, a leftover from life—and then at Robert Morgan IV, and he intuited that the man was asking to be let off the hook. His black medical bag gaped in his hands like a dumbfounded mouth trying to explain.
My father didn’t want to hear it. He almost pushed Bob out the door, away from his house and girls, right down his porch steps. “You go on,” he said. “Get. I’ll take it from here.”
Still shamed from the ruinous carnival of my birth, nobody in town wanted to attend my mother’s funeral, so it was just my father, my sister, and I who clustered at the lip of her grave to watch her disappear into Aberdeen dirt. Reverend Pickerton read a few hasty Bible verses, then beat a quick retreat, dabbing his forehead with the immaculate and reassuring corner of his handkerchief.
“My condolences, Earl,” he muttered, squeezing my father’s biceps with crablike fingers and studiously avoiding the moonscape of my newborn face. My father, stunned by the weight of his grief, blinked. Reverend Pickerton hesitated, then squeezed my father’s arm again and jutted his chin in my direction. “I’m sorry the baby was a girl,” he said, and squeezed once more before fleeing.
The afternoon thickened around my father. In front of him, my mother’s grave leered like a jester’s laughing mouth. Next to him, my sister snuffled, her head bowed like a bluebell, the bow of her upper lip only enhanced by all the snot. And then there was me—more of a boulder than a baby, rough-skinned and bug-eyed, impervious to the significance of the chasm yawning in front of me. My father tilted me toward it. “That’s your mother in there. Tell her good-bye.”
My father watched in horror as I gummed my pacifier, broke the teat in half, and spat the remaining plastic down on top of my mother’s crude pine coffin, where it clattered and spun like a lost top. Later, much as he wished to chalk it up to the stupidity of infancy or to a soul trapped in the primitive and clumsy cage of the body, it still seemed to my father that I knew exactly what I was doing. And in a way, he was right. Even back then, I guess, I suspected that sometimes the only available choice in life is to spit on death and run.