Big Girl Small by Rachel DeWoskin

Author:Rachel DeWoskin [DeWoskin, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2011-05-01T21:00:00+00:00

2 The hot pink eighties were already over when my parents moved from St. Louis to Michigan with my older brother, Chad, and opened a restaurant called Judy’s Grill. It would be more touching if they’d named the restaurant after me instead of naming me after the restaurant, but whatever. I could pretend I was born before it opened, and was such an adorable baby that they couldn’t think of a better name for the place where they’d throw globs of meat on a grill, but in fact, Judy’s came first. My mother got pregnant the same spring they arrived, and stood behind the counter, with Chad in one of those mechanized swings that rocks a baby back and forth until he falls asleep watching animals rotate above his head. She poured coffee, served sizzling foods to customers just starting to become regulars, and loosened her apron ties more and more until she was too pregnant to work. Then she went to the hospital and had me. My dad found her sexy, even bloated with the fifty pounds she gained pregnant; there are pictures of him leering at her giant ankles, even one of him grabbing her Hottentot ass.

As for the birth, my mom was kind of a peasant about the whole thing. I mean, she spent only a week at home after I was born before she brought me to work, where she nursed me in the kitchen between shifts. Even though I had some medical problems, my mother stopped working only when I was actually being cut open like tropical fruit to have a trach put in because my tubes were too small to let me breathe right. I don’t remember that, by the way; it happened when I was a baby. But my mom remembers it like it happened ten minutes ago, because every time I cough, I can feel her start running from wherever she is in the house. When I was healthy, she always had me at Judy’s Grill with them. She was like the Chinese woman in that book The Good Earth that we read in eighth-grade English. The wife, I mean, who keeps getting knocked up over and over and going into the back room and giving birth by herself, gnawing off the umbilical cord and rushing back to work in the fields the next day like a slave, with the baby strapped to her back. My mom’s that type. Uncomplaining, I mean. I think it’s a point of pride with her. I’m a complainer, myself. But I guess my mom was also desperate to get back to work with my dad. She likes work. And she likes my dad. She never stops moving, racing, doing—except at night, when everything she’s had to do all day is done—and then she reads New York Times bestsellers. But not brand new ones. Older ones that she checks out of the Ann Arbor District Library. When she’s finished with them, she leaves them on my nightstand with the due-date cards sticking out like reminders that I have a deadline.

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