Читать книгу Risking the Rapids - Irene O'Garden - Страница 18

Between the Lines

This Family Journal item is one tip-off that not all is well in Tangletown:

“The race between MK and Tommy is waxing hot and heavy. This battle is to see who can grow long nails.” What’s making these children anxious? Why are they biting their nails?

Skipper joins the contest, showing “strong will power.” He is only three years old, and he is already chubby as well. What makes him so nervous at this tender age? It is he who wins the competition.

Kako and Tom continue the contest between the two of them; Tom wins. He spends the $5.00 prize on a new Missal and Valentines (which indicate the breadth of his values).

Why does Kako lose? The pages answer. Kako, not Mom, reads us bedtime stories. Kako is making doughnuts and cookies and raspberry pie, comforting us and herself with them. O’Brien stress goes into our mouths.

Kako is even buying my clothes: when I’m a year old, she brings home “sox, a shirt and a darling little plaid dress—blue top and a plaid skirt, on the pocket in red it says ‘Me.’ ”

I wear it the next night when the family goes to a restaurant—a rare event, indeed. According to the paper I try “out-staring the ladies at the next table and won.”

Kako, not Mom, takes note and proudly reports.

The most startling entry concerns a little brown bump of birthmark at the nape of my six-month-old neck. It lies smack in my hairline.

“Have it cauterized,” the doctor advises. “Hairbrushing will aggravate it later on.”

Dad drops us downtown at the Medical Arts Building, but it says here—surprise—Kako, not Mom, accompanies me to the procedure, then takes me home on the streetcar. Mom stays home to print the paper.

“You sure didn’t like the elevator,” they said when I was older. “You wailed all the way up to the twelfth floor and all the way down.” Yeah, and I might have been wondering where my Mom was.

I still do.

And I am not the only one.