The Color of Family by Patricia Jones Page B

desk, it sat right there alongside her with no need for a chair, but there it was, the question of whether or not her mother nursed her. She searched her mind to look for some hazy splinter of a memory that might hold the warm comfort at her mother’s breast, but there was nothing. So she went off again in a day-haze of recollection to find a time when it might have come up. When her mother might have discussed the beauty of it all, and the bonding, and the nurturing, and the moment her mother watched her baby grow heavy with the tranquility of warm, sweet mother’s milk. Then again, she thought, her mother had never, in any moment she could recall, rhapsodized about anything, with the possible exception being the fantasy where she’d bring her dead brother’s son into her bosom to claim him rightfully as her nephew. And even then, Ellen recalled, though spoken aloud, those fantasies were restricted by the way in which they didn’t allow anyone else in or around them, and permitted only one man to enter—Clayton Cannon.
    Ellen had had quite enough of that thought’s devilment. So she picked up her phone and dialed her mother’s number. But after only one ring, she slammed it down with the force of her fear, her discomfiture. What would I say? she thought. How do I call up my mother and ask her if she breast-fed me? And the most devilish question of them all, she thought, was what she would say if her mother were to confirm that, no, indeed she had not breast-fed her? Would she then, in protest of her mother’s disregard, join Mrs. Simms in swallowing handfuls of herbs and breast-feeding her baby boy from the time he slips from the womb until he leaves her breast for college?
    She put her elbows solidly on the desk and cradled her head in the palms of her hands. Fretful thoughts about her mother as a mother swam round in her head. But there were moments, Ellen could recall, when her mother was fully present. She particularly remembered the way her mother gushed over the start of Ellen’smenses. And Ellen could even see it in her mother’s eyes, soaked with a misty melancholy, as she handed Ellen her first sanitary pad. Her gaze was filled with a longing to get back the years that had gone by. They were the eyes that showed the deepest part of a mother. As Ellen looked back to that day with a clear vision that put a reverence in her heart for the word Mother and all its derivatives—Mommy, Ma, Momma, Mummy—she recalled how she stepped from the bathroom and into her mother’s waiting arms. She remembered her mother taking her to Security Mall to shop for bell-bottomed jeans and clogs, and lunch at Friendly’s, all because her body had changed.
    And so now she felt shame. Shame for all those times, past and present, when she’d accused her mother of not completely living up to the integrity of that word because of Clayton. But Clayton was still a force, and his presence had, indeed, stolen something from her. What he’d stolen, though, she wasn’t certain of because on that day, when her menses began, her mother was conscious of her in every way.
    And there were other times too. Like the night of her ballet recital, Ellen recalled as she took her mind back to her seven-year-old self. It was the night when she, nervous and having completely forgotten the steps to her dance, fell flat on her bottom in the middle of the stage and then did not get up. While some applauded politely to assuage her humiliation and others gasped with the shock of it all, her mother leapt to her feet to give her daughter a standing ovation complete with cheers of “Wonderful! Beautiful! Bravo!” and then got nearly everyone else in the auditorium on their feet with the contagion of, or maybe the sheer sympathy for, her devotion. If this wasn’t a mother’s love, Ellen thought, she would never know the meaning of it. So it was then that Ellen could see, with a distant