Diary of a Childhood

Nat King Cole is singing ‘All in the Game’ and my mother is crying quietly in her chair, thinking I don’t see. I pretend I don’t. This isn’t the first time. What does it mean? Is it the song? 

Occasionally, in the late afternoon my mother would take a bath with me. I would get in first, into the clear hot water, and make tidal waves with my hands, trying to get the water as high as I could. My mother’s shadow would hover over me for a second, and then she would lower her bulk into the waves. Up rose the water, high up my small chest, and my legs would have to rearrange into discomfort to accommodate hers. My mother smelled. She smelled of something grown-up and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like any of the grown-up smells I’d ever smelled – the beer, the coffee, the cigarettes – and now this body odor. It must be very different, being grown up, liking those things. I looked down at my clean, hot bathwater and saw that it was murky.  

I had nightmares about water. Mostly it was the same one. I would be walking along the canal bank, usually at night, when the street lights shone yellow on the surface of that deep blackness, and I’d be drawn to it, unable to stop staring and it would pull me, pull me until I couldn’t stop it and I started to fall.  

Daddy and I go to the library every Wednesday night. We drive down to the town in the cold car with our breath making fog in the air. In the warm, yellow lit library I go over to Black’s Veterinary Dictionary and pore over the puzzling names of things that can happen to animals. I don’t really want to become a vet but I love this book. I love even its black leathery cover and rub my small fingers across it. I take out ‘Snow.’ ‘Do you like snow in your face? Yes, I like it any place!’ I choose books mostly by their covers.  We are parked next to a road sign with a big red O on it. The O has a line through it. In the car I sing:

            No waiting, no waiting, no waiting today,