Lift - Kelly Corrigan [3]
When I finally started having contractions, forty-one weeks after the Guinness, Dad said, “Stay here. I’ll get the good darts. We’ll play to pass the time.”
“They’re on the corner of the table,” I called after him. “Underneath some bibs and board books.”
I have the video from that day. It’s not much to watch—it took seventeen hours and an IV of Pitocin to start active labor—but every so often, you can see me bend over and wince. I’ll show you, assuming you’re old enough to hear me say “sweet-Jesus-mother-fucker.” You know the rest of the story—the three-foot umbilical cord, the Jackson Browne song that was playing about soothing a fevered brow, the stork bite on your forehead that I can still sometimes see traces of when you get really hot or terribly upset.
I saw it last week, actually, when you came downstairs with a Safeway bag filled with paperback books and said, “I have to give these away.”
“What?” I asked.
“I have to find all my other books and give them away too.”
“Honey, why? What’s the matter?”
“Because—I don’t understand them,” you said, as your bottom lip quivered. “I don’t understand the words. You know all the Harry Potter books I’ve read?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t understand any of them. I read them but I don’t know what’s happening in them.”
You stood there, totally sick with the sense that you were not smart like I told you you were, and now you had to tell me, and how could I ever love a kid who didn’t understand Quidditch or the Dark Arts, divination or transfiguration?
“Oh honey, no one understands Harry Potter.” I held out my arms but you didn’t come.
“Margaret Faust does. Even Ruby does—and she’s six and I’m eight.”
“Well, I don’t. All I know is that I’m a Miggle.”
You sighed.
“Come here. Tell me what you were reading just now that got you so upset—”
“I was reading a book that the librarian said is perfect for third-grade girls! So obviously, I should not even be in the third grade because I am so stupid!” Then the collapse into me, then the cry that sounds like a sewing machine at full speed.
Eventually, you went upstairs to get the book so we could read together. You opened to page one and read aloud.
“It says Pru would give her eye-tooth. What is an eye-tooth?”
You stopped at every word you didn’t know—utter, ransacked, pitch-perfect—no longer willing to skate past all those words and idioms.
“You feel better?” I said, after we finished the first chapter.
“Yeah. Can we keep going?”
“Of course.”
“And Mom, it’s Muggle.”
It won’t always be so easy to make your stork bite disappear.
During the four-month maternity leave that became the next eight years, I made a job for myself as a photographer. It was pretty nervy, I guess, since I didn’t have any training in composition or light or printing—just a one-night seminar at Elmwood Camera. But trust me when I say there’s a lot you can figure out as you go. You don’t always have to be Qualified or Experienced. Nobody really knows what they’re doing, except maybe gene-splitters, and even they’d probably admit that there’s an un-teachable art to everything.
I specialized in family “candids,” even though when I got to people’s houses, the kids looked like they’d just come from that glossy green salon in Oz where the Cowardly Lion had his hair curled. I shot kids in the sandbox, on the swing, in the bath; making mud pies, blowing bubbles, smelling flowers; twirling, running, laughing. The trick to pleasing the client, I figured out pretty fast, was cropping out every nick, scrape, and bruise, along with the pimply parts, the second chins, and any flash of impatience or disappointment in either parent’s brow. It’s embarrassing, how much we want to idealize family.
Before I photographed you girls, I licked you clean like a mother cat and then sat you in a patch of open shade where the sun wouldn’t make you squint or drape you with shadows. I framed out the dirty cuffs of your shirts and the neon plastic toys you wouldn’t put down. I shot down on you so your eyes would seem bigger. I made you smoother and more beautiful than you