Chapter 83

83

Her brush was tangled in my long, wet hair. My mother sat on the toilet and pulled strand after strand from the bristles. I told her again she could cut it out—I was eleven years old and I wasn’t concerned yet about how I looked. But she insisted I wouldn’t like my hair cut short. I wondered why she cared so much about this, but not much else. I was quiet while she yanked at my head. The radio played in the background and the static cut in every few seconds. I stared at the faded rainbows on my nightgown.

“Your grandmother had short hair.”

“Do you look like her?”

“Not really. We were similar in some ways, but not in our looks.”

“Will I be like you when I grow up?”

She stopped pulling at my hair for a moment. I reached up to feel the tangled brush, but she pushed my hand away.

“I don’t know. I hope not.”

“I want to be a mom, too, one day.” My mother stopped again and was quiet. She put her hand on my shoulder and held it there. I arched my back—the gentleness of her touch felt strange.

“You know, you don’t have to be. You don’t have to be a mother.”

“Do you wish you weren’t a mother?”

“Sometimes I wish I were a different kind of person.”

“Who do you wish you were?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She started pulling at the knot again. Static filled the radio, but she let it hiss. “When I was young I dreamed of being a poet.”

“Why aren’t you?”

“I wasn’t any good.” And then she added, “I haven’t written a word since I had you.”

That didn’t make any sense to me—that my existence in the world could have taken poetry away from her. “You could try again.”

She chuckled. “No. It’s all gone from me now.”

She paused, my hair still in her hand. I leaned back into her knees. “You know, there’s a lot about ourselves that we can’t change—it’s just the way we’re born. But some parts of us are shaped by what we see. And how we’re treated by other people. How we’re made to feel.” She finally pulled the brush free and whisked it against a fistful of my hair until it was smooth. I cringed while she finished. She handed me the brush over my shoulder and I uncrossed my bony legs to stand.

“Blythe?”

“Yes?” I turned around in the doorway.

“I don’t want you learning to be like me. But I don’t know how to teach you to be anyone different.”

She left us the next day.