Growing Girls Read online

  “You keep saying you’re not impressed, and yet you keep talking about it,” she said.

  “That’s exactly my point,” I said.

  She was lying on her back with her feet sticking straight up in the air, a posture of approval. Then she said: “Well, did they give that dog the chance to say goodbye to the kid?”

  “I don’t know, girly,” I said. “I do not know.”

  “Well,” she wisely observed, “I’m sure it was an emotional time for everybody.”

  Betty is already older than me. In dog years she’s about the age of my mom. She listens better than my mom, and certainly better than my kids. It takes years of togetherness to get like this.

  Now they’re saying Sasha doesn’t have apraxia. They’re saying that, anyway, the original diagnosis was “mild” apraxia, and now that they see how quickly Sasha is acquiring speech, they don’t believe the apraxia diagnosis was accurate.

  “Quickly?” I said.

  She was still largely unintelligible to anyone but those of us who spent our days with her and knew how to translate Sasha-speak.

  They said in her recent tests she could, at age four, form all the sounds of a profoundly delayed three-year-old, which was certainly not good, but wasn’t consistent with apraxia.

  “So what do you think it is?” I said to Miss Joy, the speech therapist Sasha had been seeing three times a week for the previous nine months.

  She shrugged. “There’s so much we don’t know.” I wasn’t sure if she was referring to the speech therapy industry or perhaps to Sasha’s earliest months in the orphanage where who-knows-what happened that might have so severely interrupted her ability to acquire language.

  It didn’t matter. The therapists simply didn’t know what was wrong, but the good news was Sasha now spoke the garbled language of hope. “With my young apraxic kids,” Miss Joy said, “I can’t get any of the sounds out of them that Sasha is now able to produce.” She was recommending we stop therapy for about six months, see what she was able to do on her own, and then retest her. Her guess was that Sasha had been through the worst of it, that her little brain had finally begun to figure this language thing out, and that we would now see tremendous progress.

  “We see this sometimes,” she said. “All of a sudden something clicks, like an engine that finally turned over, and pretty soon everything is running fine.”

  “So it’s just like … an ignition problem? Like she just needed a new starter?”

  “Sort of.”

  She gave us some exercises to do, most of them involving sentence structure since, inexplicably, Sasha couldn’t seem to master certain sequences. “The boy is running” came out “The boy running” or “The boy is run.” Ask her to do the verb with the “ing” and she got completely flummoxed.

  So we were supposed to do drills. We were supposed to work on pronouns. We were supposed to pretend not to understand her when she jumbled syllables, flipped words haphazardly this way and that inside a sentence.

  “You have to insist that she speak our language, not hers,” Miss Joy told us.

  “You don’t think I’ll be stifling her creativity?” I said.

  “Uh, no,” Miss Joy said. “No.”

  Right, then. Of course. Stupid question. Where did that come from? Whew. Parents go either one way or the other on this one, I think. There are those who regard their children as lanky, crazy vines that need to be tacked onto trellises, pruned, trained to grow straight and tall and to bloom their maximum blooms seasonally, and on command.

  And then there are those of us who stand in awe, so amazed by what we see growing in so many ways we could have never imagined, that we are humbled and afraid to inflict our own idiotic ideas upon the process. I’d been having a lot of awe attacks with regard to Sasha.

  We shared cookies and juice with Miss Joy, a little goodbye party, and then Sasha gave Miss Joy a potted geranium. “Woo yike it?” she said to Miss Joy, who nodded enthusiastically and hugged her. “I love it,” she said. “And I love you, too, sweetie.”

  “I wuff woo,” Sasha said, throwing her arms around her and planting a kiss on her left eye.

  “Awwww,” said the gathered crowd of therapists. “Awwww, she is so sweet!”

  Sweet. This is Sasha’s gift. It isn’t really about being sweet. It’s about winning. This is her game. She came up with this one all on her own—and maybe her lack of language had something to do with it. I don’t know. But Sasha can make anyone feel like a million bucks. She knows exactly how to do it and she has made of it something of a fine art.

  Her usual targets are women, although she can easily enough work the magic on men. It happens at parties, or the playground, or whenever she is in a safe place with a cast of at least vaguely familiar characters. She’ll pick one. She’ll hold her arms up. “Up! Up!” she’ll say, her posture pleading and pathetic and convincing. The person will say, “Me?” The person will say, “Aw.” The person will look at me to see if it’s okay if they pick her up and I’ll nod. Soon she will be in the person’s arms. She will look that person in the eye, and sometimes will place one hand on each cheek, grabbing full attention.

  “Woo,” she will say. “I yike woo.”

  Anybody can translate that. Anybody. And each of the anybodies are transformed into somebodies, right then and there, thanks to Sasha. They glow. They have been chosen. They hug her. “Aww.” They tell her how sweet she is. They go about their days feeling special. (And she just got a ride from here to there, on somebody’s hip.)

  Sasha has thus charmed preschool teachers and swimming instructors and dry cleaner clerks and even, for my sake, a judge at traffic court who let me off with a smile. She is my secret weapon and she knows it and so I have to be careful. She and I, we could be criminals together, like in Paper Moon We could sell Bibles to Sunday School teachers and simultaneously clean out the church coffers. She could dance a jig for the pharmacist while I slip in the back and steal the drugs. It’s not good to imagine entering a life of crime with your kid, no, there is nothing good you can say about it. But when you have a kid who knows how to turn on the charm this well, your dreams go into overdrive.

  She is the only reason the principal at school is nice to me, if you can call making eye contact nice. It’s a big step for Miss Martha, an ex-nun with a military haircut who might have had a very promising career in the marines, or else in the air force piloting fast planes with explosives. She is a serious woman dedicated to order, one of those people who can make you feel like a slob on impact. Sasha knows how to get through. Sasha will hold her skinny little arms up, pathetically. “Up! Up!” It’s all so urgent and pitiful even Miss Martha can’t resist, so she will pick Sasha up. And so Sasha will go at her with her cheek, and an embrace, until she has that cheek locked right there on Miss Martha’s jaw. The lady can’t help but melt. “Aw,” Miss Martha will say, awkwardly. “Aw.”

  “Woo nice yay-yay,” Sasha will say, which in Sasha-speak translates to “You’re a nice lady.” She says this in such a way as to suggest that she does not say it to virtually every person who answers her pathetic plea to carry her, which she does.

  “Well, thank you,” Miss Martha will reply. You can tell the inner nice lady dying to get out has just been activated. She’ll smile broadly in a way that makes her face look grotesque, so unused to the position is that face.

  Sasha will simply rest her head on Miss Martha’s shoulder, and sometimes she’ll give her a little pat on the back. Onlookers will actually gasp at the transformation, and I’ll stand there watching, feeling not exactly proud, but certainly inspired. God, Sasha’s got that lady so transfixed I could probably go Into her office and root through her files… I’ll find myself thinking, shifting into opportunist mode, a clever fox, and then I’ll snap out of it. Sasha, what are you doing to me? What do you do to people? You can hardly even talk and yet you have the power to convert.

  Sasha has, I know, a very promising political career, and I am doing everything I c
an to stay on her good side.

  A few days ago, my mother sent me an e-mail:

  guess what for the first time in years i did a little pastel of sasha & her lamb not great but not bad considering the difficulties i had finding my pastels and making do, hard to see the details i will try again how about me–

  This came through in 18-point type, her default setting because she has so much trouble with her eyes. My mother isn’t much of a typist. She is eighty-two. She might be eighty-three. She can’t remember. She’d have to ask my father if you really wanted to know. Details have never been her thing.

  A whole new relationship has emerged between my mom and me ever since she got the computer, her first. She is now Mrs. E-mail. Her favorite thing to do is to send animated greeting cards. If she sees a good one that happens to be, say, a Father’s Day card, she’ll e-mail it to me anyway and tell me to just go on and ignore the greeting and watch the dancing duck.

  “Cool!” I’ll write to her. “Thanks!”

  Then she’ll call me and we’ll discuss the transaction. How cute the duck is. How amazing it is that she knew how to send an e-card. The minor technical difficulties conquered. I’ll tell her how great she is. How proud I am of her. We’ll hang up and an hour later I’ll get another.

  “Did you get that one?” she’ll say, calling to verify “Did you get it?”

  “Mom, you don’t have to call,” I’ll say, trying to explain. “It kind of defeats the purpose.”

  “But I’m excited!” she’ll say. “Isn’t this amazing? Can you believe how good I am at this crazy computer?”

  I’ll tell her how great she is. How proud I am of her. This has been the classic mother/daughter role reversal. Nothing I ever accomplished was complete without my mom’s approval. I suppose it’s still this way, but now she needs me, too.

  One morning she called to discuss her success at downloading a batch of photos I sent of the girls. She loved the one of Sasha feeding Emily. She spoke of printing it, even forwarding it. Another challenge! She said the thing about the computer was it got her living again. “I’m alive when I’m learning,” she said. “And there’s so much to learn about this dumb thing.”

  Summers when I was home from grad school we would talk like this, about living to learn. We were so busy. She was studying painting at a fancy fine-arts college, and I was trying to write stories. I worked upstairs in the little yellow bedroom and she painted down in her studio. We would meet at lunchtime for tuna and iced tea and we would marvel at the similarities between a blank page and a blank canvas. When it came to the creative process, fear was fear, no matter what the medium. We would suffer this fact together, cheer each other on. “Just go make a mess,” one of us would say, before heading back to our separate rooms. Scribble anything. That was the way in.

  That was a million years ago. My mom stopped painting when her legs and hips gave out on her, then her eyes. My sisters and brother and I nagged for years, and she made a few efforts. She’d painted portraits of all her grandchildren, and when Anna came along she made sure to do a little picture, if only for the sake of tradition. But by the time Sasha came, well, that was after the disease that temporarily paralyzed my mom, and after the breast cancer, and after the hip surgery, after her eyes went. My mom’s health was way too far gone to paint.

  “This photo makes me want to paint,” she said to me a few days ago when I sent the photo of Sasha and the lamb.

  “So go paint,” I said. She made her excuses. I told her I was going up to my office to crank out one thousand words and if I could do it, she could, too. “Go make a mess,” I said.

  This kind of talking is the best communication my mom and I have ever mastered. It’s the most genuine and the most productive. It’s two people fundamentally understanding one another, and fundamentally wanting to help. Maybe this is as good as it gets between a mom and a daughter. You have one subject you really excel at, can communicate about with a wink and a nod and little more than a buzz phrase, and then the rest of your talking is a lot of noise back and forth, a content-free ritual keeping you connected.

  Shortly after I told my mother to “go paint,” I got the e-mail announcing that she had. It came through at about five in the afternoon. I wrote back with a lot of exclamation points, telling her to scan the painting and send it to me. She called immediately. She said she didn’t know how to scan a picture. I gave her a few tips.

  So then I got a new e-mail, with an attachment. I clicked and saw Sasha, through my mother’s eyes. She was set against a field of green, and her head was leaning in toward the lamb, a tilt that was utterly Sasha. I felt like dancing.

  My mom called me right away. “Did you get it? Did you get it?” she said.

  “I got it!”

  “So how about me!” she said. “I can scan a picture!” She went on about the difference between a JPEG and a TIFF format and how she chose.

  “Mom,” I said. “The painting. You painted a picture. Hello?”

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s not up to my standards. But I knew you’d like it.”

  I told her I loved it. I told her how proud I was of her. I went on and on trying to convince her to frame the picture, to take it around to show her friends at the retirement village.

  “We’ll see,” she said. “I’ll look at it in the morning with a fresh eye. Maybe throw some darks in.”

  “Well, I think you should congratulate yourself,” I said. “This is really an accomplishment.”

  “Right.”

  She was remarkably unimpressed with herself, or maybe I was hyping the whole deal too much, embarrassing her.

  “Thank you, Mom,” I said. “It really means a lot to me that you painted a picture of Sasha.”

  “You’re welcome, dear. Now leave me alone.”

  “All right.”

  “Everything else okay?” she said. “The girls are okay? Alex?”

  “Everyone’s good. Hey, did you get my e-mail?”

  “I couldn’t open it,” she said. “It was something about a dog?”

  “Yeah, it was an article about a dog in Nairobi,” I said. “You didn’t read it?”

  “I clicked but I couldn’t get anything to happen,” she said.

  “Well, there was a stray dog in Nairobi and she found an infant in a garbage bag and dragged it back to her litter and took care of it.”

  “The baby is alive?”

  “Yeah, they named her Angel.”

  “God must have plans for her. God was looking out for her.”

  “Yeah, but what about the dog, Mom? The dog.”

  “You have always been an animal person,” she said.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Sweetie, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “The dog! How about that dog!”

  “How do they know the dog really did it? Someone stood around and watched? That’s odd …”

  “You have always been a cynic.”

  “Skeptic.”

  “Well, I don’t know how they know it happened,” I said. “But it happened. And I can’t stop thinking about the dog. It’s like a song playing over and over again in my head.”

  “You have always been an animal person.”

  “It’s more complicated than that…”

  “I’m tired, sweetie. I’m glad about the Nigerian baby, really I am.”

  “Nairobi,” I said. “And I was more thinking about the dog.”

  “Well, it’s nice to hear some good news once in a while. Your father and I are so sick of all the bad news on TV.”

  Right. Whatever. Some daughters are good at being heard, whereas others should have just stopped back at “Waaah!”

  It’s okay. This is all okay and par for the course and everything that I’m used to. I learned long ago that my mother would never really understand me. I learned not to go to her with problems, or doubt, because she can’t sit in problems, or doubt. She has to fix things. This is probably true for most good moms. It goes back to Ba
nd-Aids. The kid is crying, you have to pick her up and make her feel better. But sometimes a kid really does need to just sit in doubt, to wonder, and sob. This wasn’t exactly what I was feeling about the dog in Nairobi. I just wanted, I don’t know, to talk.

  “Hey, what about your birthday?” my mother said. “Anything special I can get you?”

  Oh, jeez. My birthday was only a week away and I really hadn’t had time to think about it.

  “Anything you want?” she said.

  Well, I had no idea. It seemed a strangely monumental question. I’d been so busy. My life was feeling like a Venn diagram of intersecting tasks. One big mess of responsibilities. “You know what,” I said finally, “I just don’t have time to want anything.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s wonderful!”

  Wonderful? To be too busy to know what the heck you’d like for your own birthday? “I’m not sure it’s wonderful,” I said. “What do you mean, wonderful?”

  “If you’re too busy to think about wanting, it means you’re leading a full life,” she said, throwing out one of her maxims.

  “If you’re too busy to think about wanting,” I corrected her, “it means … you’re too busy. It’s not good to be too busy. People need downtime. People need to remember to play, smell the roses and all like that.”

  “A lot of people are very busy wanting,” she said.

  Maybe. I wondered why she was hammering the point. Was this some sneaky way of getting out of buying me a stinkin’ birthday present? No. My mother doesn’t sneak. And she loves to buy presents.

  “People spend all their time wanting more and more,” she said, “thinking that’s the answer to happiness. But you know that the wanting train goes nowhere. That’s why I’m proud of you.”

  Oh, brother. She had me way elevated beyond my original point. This virtuous me she was conjuring was not, well, me.

  “Mom, I don’t have the energy to get on the wanting train,” I said. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I do!” she said.

  “I’m saying that in order to open the ol’ boxcar of personal desire,” I said, choosing my words very carefully so as not to be misunderstood, “I’d have to find a way to stop this barreling locomotive I seem to have gotten myself on.”