Postcards from Cookie by Caroline Clarke

Author:Caroline Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Da Blues

Unearthing the Washington Square paraphernalia brings the days surrounding my birth rushing to the surface for Cookie. Whether she can’t stop the deluge or doesn’t want to for my benefit is unclear. All I know is that she allows her torrent of memories to flow, records them in a journal, and sends it to me. Finally, it explains so much.

I am trapped in that square circle of: Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. What can I do? Someone please, please help me. Tell me what I can do.

So-called smart people said this would be easy. They had a laundry list of Don’ts: Don’t look into her eyes. Don’t hold her. Don’t feed her. Let her go the moment she arrives. Don’t-don’t-don’t do anything other than sign those papers and walk-skip-run away. You can do that, can’t you?

Don’t worry about it. Everything will be okay. It will be like nothing ever happened. Lucky-lucky-lucky you . . .

But there was a baby. There IS a baby. MY BABY! My little girl, no longer umbilical bound. She is freely free to be my own bright red baby yelling Herself purple in the blue Christmas air. Proclaiming Her identity. Her legitimacy. Her right to be. She will not be denied. My One. My First. My Only Daughter.

You see, we were intimates, She and I. Intimates! Mother and Child.

I did what I had to do: I held Her, fed her, caressed Her satin cheeks, stroked Her brand-new hair. She was all aglow with Light. We swam into each other’s eyes. We understood that reflection, our connection. We knew The Story, a Christmas story like no other. A story full of silence, stillness without fanfare, family, friends or a father-husband. What would it take to keep you? To remain incognito? What’s the real risk of exposure? Whose life is this, anyway?

On a snowy morning, the day after Christmas, I bawled like my baby. There was something and nothing I could say. I said all that I could think to articulate. I begged. I pleaded into a telephone wire in a hospital phone booth. I reversed the charges and placed a very long long-distance call from the maternity ward in New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital to my parents’ house on Muirfield Road: three thousand miles away in Los Angeles.

I sang my song. “You have to see her! She’s so beautiful. She’s a gift, a blessing, a Godsend!” With hope in my heart, I sang, “Can you, will you come and see Her? Can Mom come and see Her? Can Dad? When you see her, you will know . . .”

Did some disembodied, disengaged female voice cut off my happy tune?

“Now you be a good girl, Cookie. Don’t create more problems. Do you hear me?” Defeated, I quietly hung up the phone.

I should have returned to that phone booth with my baby. I should have ripped that phone off the hook! I should have slammed that fucking folding door shut and blocked it with my feet, sealed it shut with all my might.

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