The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard by Erin McGraw

Author:Erin McGraw [McGraw, Erin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

8

Her hands were as tiny as seashells, her flushed skin the precise color of the roses that lolled on the windowsill. Her laugh—she laughed often, even as a newborn—was a ripple of silk. She had George's wide eyes and dimples, and her curls were just the size to fit around a finger like a ring. I was her slave.

Feeling my heart grow huge, I remembered the reverend's wife's advice to wait one year to love a child. What stupendously silly advice. What impossible advice. If I could have given Mary a second's pleasure by lying down on the streetcar track when the Red Car was bearing down, I would have run outside with my pillow. Waking or sleeping, my thoughts moved toward my baby like water running downhill. I held her for hours, sought out reasons to touch that petal skin, and patrolled every room in the house for carelessly placed saucers that might fall, needles that might scratch—anything that might smirch my perfect child.

Everything about a new baby is a wonder. The wavering hand, its fingernails as fine as paper, the foot like a rosebud, the warm smell of milk and powder—a hundred times a day, I felt my heart brim over. From one moment to the next, the world is remade, made larger, because a meaning exists that was not there before.

I had never had such thoughts before, and normally I would have been embarrassed at my grandness. Meaning! Wasn't I la-di-dah.

I had not completely slipped my tether and knew better than to share my thoughts with anyone but Mary. As a result, we talked quite a lot. Finally! I told her, in the sink or at my breast. Finally I had age enough to love a baby. Finally I did not have the hungry, angry sense that her breaths were snatched from my lungs. Rocking Mary and looking back to my young self, I saw—it had to be said—a madwoman. That furious girl had rarely sat and looked at her children. Instead, she had paced resentfully with an infant slung over her shoulder, crossing the length of the soddie in three raging steps, then three steps back again. No wonder Lucille had howled. A spasm of shame seized me. Partly in appeasement, I flew to Mary's side at every opportunity, until George laughed and told me to give the child a moment's peace. Ha! He was hovering beside her cradle, too.

The baby in the house made us young again; even on the sleepless nights when Mary would not be comforted and my legs and arms ached, I felt myself blossoming. The old frantic need to make progress, to hurry, hurry, had vanished, blown away by our California Zephyr. The mornings were joy because Mary was in them, the nighttimes, too. "Look!" I would say to George, pointing at her wrist. Pink as a little apple, it was irresistible. I picked her wrist up and kissed it over and over while Mary chuckled. George, meanwhile, was speaking reasonably to her foot.

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