Read Online The Four Ms. Bradwells by Meg Waite Clayton - Free Book Online
Authors: Meg Waite Clayton
Ads: Link
week at Cook Island might have been if we hadn’t shed our suits that first night, when we were still road dead after driving all the way from Michigan in that tin can of Mrs. Zhukovski’s. That’s what I’m thinking as my feet touch the rough wood of the Chawterley pier now. A night: mysterious, tender, quiet, deep; / Heavy with flowers; full of life asleep; / Thrilling with insect voices; thick with stars; / No cloud between the dewdrops and red Mars .
My biggest worry then was about the miniature Sonnets from the Portuguese I’d stolen, protected in a sandwich baggie all the way from Ann Arbor to keep it dry on the boat. Mother could have told you all about that goddamned “volume,” which was what she called it: that it was published in London in 1900, by Leopold B. Hill; that the cover was hand-colored (cream-yellow leather embossed with a rose-vine border of Christmas-morning red and green and gold, with a paste-down panel of a golden-winged peacock); that its value was so low that my theft of it was only a misdemeanor. She could recite every one of its flaws from memory, too: the fading o and first n of Sonnets; the slight bend where the covers overlap the smaller pages they bind; the missing corner fragment of page twenty-three. But it was the peacock on the cover I was drawn to when I was thirteen, when I slipped it from its proper place among Mother’s miniatures. The lovely peacock sitting on the shelf in Mother’s library, his unreadable face turned toward a puff of angel-white clouds, his elaborate back turned to me.
I have this idea that my relationship with Mother must have beeneasy at some point, when I was three or seven or nine. Every child imagines her mother loves her, doesn’t she? Every mother imagines she loves her child. So how is it that we cross over from love to something more … complex? Is anything more complex than love?
The first poem I wrote, when I started writing again, was about that night after Mia and Laney and Betts came with me to Cook Island, the moonlit bay water slipping over our skin. The second poem, oddly, was about the music Betts made on her zhaleika. Or that’s what I thought it was about. My teacher, when I went back to taking classes, decided it was about motherhood. So maybe it is. Maybe the bagpipe-y, oboe-y sound of that weird reed instrument, the giggle of it, is the sound of Betts and her mother, the sound I wanted to make with my own mother but never thought I could. The sound I want to make now with Anne.
Annie with her long, long neck. Too long. I used to wonder which possibility I should dread more for my daughter: that she would grow into that neck, or that she wouldn’t.
Annie would trade me in for Mia in half a heartbeat, but Betts assures me her Isabelle went through a phase of this excessive Mia-love, too. “Mia gets to parachute in from whatever exotic place she’s on her way to or from,” she says. “Bearing godmother gifts that our daughters mistake for pumpkin-disguised carriages. Ones that will take them off to exciting lives like hers. You can’t compete with that. You just have to let it blow over and be glad it’s Mia and not some nutcase your daughter has fallen for. Like that jerk you dated that first summer in law school. What was his name? Or his scrawny brother who thought he could take over when—Steve! That was his name. When Steve left for New York.”
I guess the truth is I’d trade me in for Mia, too. She hasn’t ever been the prettiest of us, or even the smartest, probably, but there is a casual joy in her that creeps up on you, that makes you reluctant to walk away from the way she makes you feel about yourself. So I try not to worry that my own daughter prefers her to me, that my son does, too. And I think I’m succeeding, but then every bullshit rejection I get back, from The New Yorker or The Atlantic or Poetry , comes with a scrawl of ink on the form saying they aren’t wild about motherhood poems, do I have
My biggest worry then was about the miniature Sonnets from the Portuguese I’d stolen, protected in a sandwich baggie all the way from Ann Arbor to keep it dry on the boat. Mother could have told you all about that goddamned “volume,” which was what she called it: that it was published in London in 1900, by Leopold B. Hill; that the cover was hand-colored (cream-yellow leather embossed with a rose-vine border of Christmas-morning red and green and gold, with a paste-down panel of a golden-winged peacock); that its value was so low that my theft of it was only a misdemeanor. She could recite every one of its flaws from memory, too: the fading o and first n of Sonnets; the slight bend where the covers overlap the smaller pages they bind; the missing corner fragment of page twenty-three. But it was the peacock on the cover I was drawn to when I was thirteen, when I slipped it from its proper place among Mother’s miniatures. The lovely peacock sitting on the shelf in Mother’s library, his unreadable face turned toward a puff of angel-white clouds, his elaborate back turned to me.
I have this idea that my relationship with Mother must have beeneasy at some point, when I was three or seven or nine. Every child imagines her mother loves her, doesn’t she? Every mother imagines she loves her child. So how is it that we cross over from love to something more … complex? Is anything more complex than love?
The first poem I wrote, when I started writing again, was about that night after Mia and Laney and Betts came with me to Cook Island, the moonlit bay water slipping over our skin. The second poem, oddly, was about the music Betts made on her zhaleika. Or that’s what I thought it was about. My teacher, when I went back to taking classes, decided it was about motherhood. So maybe it is. Maybe the bagpipe-y, oboe-y sound of that weird reed instrument, the giggle of it, is the sound of Betts and her mother, the sound I wanted to make with my own mother but never thought I could. The sound I want to make now with Anne.
Annie with her long, long neck. Too long. I used to wonder which possibility I should dread more for my daughter: that she would grow into that neck, or that she wouldn’t.
Annie would trade me in for Mia in half a heartbeat, but Betts assures me her Isabelle went through a phase of this excessive Mia-love, too. “Mia gets to parachute in from whatever exotic place she’s on her way to or from,” she says. “Bearing godmother gifts that our daughters mistake for pumpkin-disguised carriages. Ones that will take them off to exciting lives like hers. You can’t compete with that. You just have to let it blow over and be glad it’s Mia and not some nutcase your daughter has fallen for. Like that jerk you dated that first summer in law school. What was his name? Or his scrawny brother who thought he could take over when—Steve! That was his name. When Steve left for New York.”
I guess the truth is I’d trade me in for Mia, too. She hasn’t ever been the prettiest of us, or even the smartest, probably, but there is a casual joy in her that creeps up on you, that makes you reluctant to walk away from the way she makes you feel about yourself. So I try not to worry that my own daughter prefers her to me, that my son does, too. And I think I’m succeeding, but then every bullshit rejection I get back, from The New Yorker or The Atlantic or Poetry , comes with a scrawl of ink on the form saying they aren’t wild about motherhood poems, do I have
Similar Books
Double or Nothing: How Two Friends Risked It All to Buy One of Las Vegas' Legendary Casinos
Tom Breitling, Cal Fussman
