Love & Darts (9781937316075) by Nath Jones Page B

making blankets, making
hats, making mittens, making gloves, making scarves, making socks,
making enough layers to keep us all cozy. She was rhythm witness
and a BLT; one blue foot on top of the other in the kitchen.
Emphysema laughing over on you, holding your arm—with strong,
strong hands.

 
EVE

    I
almost couldn’t bear to watch what I knew was coming.
    She’s growing up fast but you can only learn
so much in twenty-six months. When it was over, and it was over so
quickly, she just screamed in agony—cried out with her
knowing—until I rushed over and grabbed her up off the floor.
    “Oh. My sweet baby girl.”
    Five minutes before I did, I just waited and
watched while she discovered her world. I could hardly breathe. But
I knew I had to let her do it.
    From a doorway, or a window, I guess, one
may look in upon a child, playing alone. One thinks of white
canvas, and rain. Her room’s too much like a doll’s house with one
side open to the world. She is there in toto : Wrist. Neck.
Little folds of skin. Fingers. A big toe folded against the floor.
Head tilting—thought and compassion. Before words. Before all the
many words, she is there taking it in.
    The doll, another American Girl, is ragged
with insipid eyes worn thin from bathing. Her stringy plastic hair
is pretend-brushed. Her dress is smoothed by awkward fingers. How
can anyone be expected to grip a soft plastic foot with its molded
toenails, to let a favored toy girl flop backwards upside-down with
her hair hanging, and climb, careful-toddler climb, up onto the
window-seat toy box? But my daughter did it and relegated the doll
to its little blue plastic rocking chair near the plant on the
broad sill.
    Ambivalent and then decided she went down
again. A toy car drove through a wooden maze of forgotten
blocks.
    Needing it. Having to have it. She grabbed a
book. Upside down. Sideways. Right side up. The fermented paper
pages were yellowed and old and must have felt scratchy to little
fingers, always learning. It is a golden-spined book called The
Seven Little Postmen about one special letter they each carry
for a distance through wind and rain and driving snow.
    But as the sun streams in, she tires. She
lies down on her belly. Her fingers touch the carpet. For the
nursery my husband insisted on Berber with two layers of the
thickest padding underneath. So my baby girl lolls on that nice
floor her daddy made her and the hand goes over and over the places
her fingers can reach without stretching before it slows. The
little fingers rest easily against the knots in the fabric of a
pillow lying on the floor nearby. And she is still for a
moment.
    The room slows. I look up and gaze around
the room. It seems the toys watch over her. Outside the window
summer hits glass like a starling stunned and the elm tree shades
that side of the house. I look down at my daughter again. She’s
almost asleep with her little cheek resting against the nubby
floor.
    I was about to turn and go. Then her head
sprang to attention. Again desire. Total focus on something that
must have rolled under the rocking horse. And I’m riveted with her
in the moment. She wants it. She crawls around. She slides under.
She throws out blind hands. Not quite. She tries again. Still she
cannot reach it. So she gets up and drags the stumbling rocking
horse back enough to go in underneath and push out her find.
    Kaleidoscope. And sunshine through the other
window.
    She is on her back. Her feet are in the air.
They wriggle. Now they rest on the rocking horse where stirrups are
painted. Now on the pillow, then kicking the floor. And her eye
looks in as her little hand turns.
    Red. Before she knows the names of the
colors they fall over her in their mixed-up rainbows. With that
sandy rattle from inside the pretty world turning.
    Brilliant yellow.
    Blue.
    Flowers
    And pink.
    Enthralled, she laughs out loud.
    Uninhibited.
    Amazed.
    Enraptured.
    But curious.
    To be in that world. To find one’s way