Red

by Claudia Smith

You have everyone fooled, but not me, my mother says. Her skin is hard, gray, and the friends who meet her tell me she seems to come from another century, with her starched skin and iron eyes and hair pulled over her ears. She is younger than their mothers.

We look out. Our slatted blinds are the color of spoiled milk. Babies in broken strollers, white kids with sticky fingers throwing things, black kids down the street, houses that flood twice a year.

My father moved us here because, he said, no landlord was telling him when to move. My mother sits a lot, drinking coffee, her eyes on the plastic flowers, plastic-covered sofas, big stereos. What she calls ill-gotten gains.

She whispers, and I drink the black coffee with her. I stop calling her Mama, now she's Mom. She shows me the bruises at her throat, her abdomen, the lines across her back. I sew badges into a doll's soft skin, trace the chew marks over her pointed feet. Inside of me, chunks of gravel, leftovers, flesh pressed against the path. She tells me, and I tell no one.

One man says, stop being everyone's pet. We live in a snowy state. I am gentle, soft drifts, and know that it is all dream drifts from now on. A doctor once asked, how did this happen and she said, a fall from a tree and when she said it, the tree grew. I see it now, oak, old, hammered ladder steps and a brick-red tree house. Fall leaves around it. It's the tree house he'd have built me, the one he drew in the pavement, the one we jumped into, holding hands. See, another man says, you can't even talk about it. Tell me everything. I tell him nothing.

Pillow dreams leave me sick and weepy in the morning. All thinned syrup. I lick my fingers and then wash them under hot water, rub them with rags. The fierce one is gone, the girl who painted his toothbrush with mud, the one she said was so like him. There is only me. Big, soft, sweater unraveling, frayed hair, sloppy, me. I'm parked in the lot with the heat blasting, toddler red faced in the back.

She lives in the country now. I haven't been there. Behind my eyelids it is a Photoshop landscape, all beiges and sepia browns, washed-out beauty, and there's the deep red of a little house behind branches. I taste rust when I bite my tongue. I can drive all the way. We'll fill our pockets with pecans, acorns and eat the sweet potato pie. He won't be there this time, she says. She's Grandma now. She says, You were born inside the caul. They don't do that anymore, I read, it's too hard for the mother to push. You were beautiful. At first, when you were new. Even more so than your son. I know you don't believe me, she says, but you were.

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