01.14.05
my honey period
On the way home, my mother plies my sister with sweets. She plods along slowly and heavily. She wants to be picked up and covered in her large sunbonnet instead of walking, and so mother tells her, �Look, in 15 more steps there is a sweets shop and I will buy you pink coconut candy.� She points and she says to her, �look, there is the Chinese store, I am friends with the owner and he will sneak you a cookie if you are good.� �Look,� she says as we near the end and the big pink house on the corner, �there is home and your father will be waiting for you to jump in his arms.� He is always upset if we are late. He thinks mother spoils her.
I think that if we were to trade places, it would be the same. I would want to be gathered up in mother�s arms, shading my pale skin from the sun though it would not burn. She would then be there beside us, walking somberly in her bonnet and hoping not to get too much sun, not to burn her dark skin because then it would peel in layers from her cheeks and nose. We both, in braids, would run home excitedly to father.
Oh, how I adore her.
She plays in the afternoon with her dollhouse. There are boxes of clothes, of furniture made for her, boxes of knock-off Barbie dolls that they sell to the children here. She longed forever to have a real Barbie, to watch MTV like the Americans do. Yet, she is happy. I watch her from the slit of the door as she dreams with her hands fluttering, dolls kissing, cars driving to exotic locales. I flutter away before she notices I am there, before my breathing disturbs her dream.
My father tells me sometimes that he wishes I were a boy, that they had tried again for a boy but instead had gotten me. He had wanted someone to go fishing in the creek with, someone to teach football to, a boy to be his as my sister was my mother�s. Instead, he had me, and I was not a boy.
So it was that I was given books. I have not learned to play with doll or cars but only with the toys of my imagination. Like all young girls, I imagine that I am an African princess and that my parents are not mine, but someone else's entirely. I imagine that there was a mix-up at the hospital. These things must surely happen regularly, for babies all look so much alike when screaming and red.
At night, the curtains tremble against the soft cool wind. My father is out front, reading the paper and drinking iced water every so often. It wets his fingertips and they smear the ink as he touches it. My mother lies in her bed praying for his soul again, hoping that he will be saved, and my sister, she sits playing with her dolls in the coming of twilight.
shi-ou-sama at
