The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

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  • • •

  A new family was moving into number 43. On Saturday I sat on the wall opposite and watched the da carrying boxes in from a van. He hefted them up two at a time, one under each arm, and went back and forth until the van was empty and the house was full. I knew they must have a kid, because some of the boxes (lots of the boxes, most of the boxes) were full of toys, and I knew it must be a girl because one of the toys was a baby doll wearing a puffy pink dress. Boys didn’t play with babies, especially babies in puffy pink dresses. The da came back out of the house holding two mugs of tea and two slices of cake on two plates, and he passed one of the mugs and one of the plates of cake to the van driver and leaned against the van as they talked. I was too far away to hear what they were saying, but after a while the driver gave the empty plate back to the da and the da waved him off. The van went past me with a clanking growl and the da went back into the house.

  If I hadn’t seen the da giving the van driver a slice of cake on a plate I might not have knocked on the door of number 43, but my belly was seething with acid and empty air and at that moment I didn’t want anything in the whole world as much as I wanted a slice of cake on a plate. So I jumped down from the wall and walked across to the green front door. Reached up and knocked it with three clear taps. Listened for the patter of feet inside.

  It was the mammy who answered, and when she saw me she smiled a smile that stretched all the way into her cheeks. She had hair that flew in different directions, yellow like Steven’s, not knotty and dark like Mam’s. Behind her the hallway of the house was full of the boxes the da had carried in from the van, some of them half unpacked. I thought that was probably why her hair was flying in all different directions.

  “Hello, pet,” she said. I didn’t say anything, because I was busy realizing something, then quickly realizing something else. The first thing I realized was that she was the woman who hadn’t adopted me; the beautiful woman who had been there when Mam had left me at the adoption agency, who had said I was too old to love. The second thing I realized was that she didn’t remember me. She was looking at me with her head tilted to one side, yellow hair falling in a fringe over her forehead, and her eyes weren’t clouding the way they do for remembering. They were crinkling the way they do for meeting-for-the-first-time.

  “Can I help you, pet?” she asked when I still didn’t speak.

  “I’m Chrissie,” I said. “I live down the street. I live at number eighteen.”

  “Oh, do you, pet? How lovely. We’ve just moved in today. As you can see!” She waved her hand at the boxes.

  “I know. I saw the van. I just came to see if you wanted any help unpacking your boxes.” That was a lie, because I didn’t even slightly want to unpack any boxes, but I did want to be invited into her house and given a slice of cake on a plate. And most of all, now that I knew who she was, I wanted to meet the kid she had chosen instead of me.

  “Oh, bless you,” she said. “What a kind girl. Well, no need for you to help with our unpacking. My Pat has that covered. But come in anyway. There’s a fruitcake in the kitchen, and I know my little girl will be excited to meet you.”

  My little girl. My little girl. My little girl. At the very least the kid she had chosen could have been a little boy. It could just have been a little boy, and it could just have hurt a little bit less.

  In the hallway I had to watch my feet so I didn’t tread on any of the things spilling out of the boxes. One was stuffed with flower-patterned plates, another with cloth napkins and tea towels, but all the rest were full of kid things. Hardcover picture books without chewed corners or missing pages. A doctor’s set in a square red case, the same as Donna’s but newer, shinier, and without the broken clasp. The puffy pink baby doll was in a box with a baby-doll pram and a baby-doll crib and a baby-doll high chair. I leaned forward to see better, and the beautiful woman laughed and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “Mad really, aren’t we? All these toys for one little girl. I’m sure we spoil her. But I expect your mammy’s the same with you.” She crossed to open the door at the side of the hallway, so she didn’t see me shake my head. She didn’t see me reach up to stroke the patch of warm left on my shoulder where she had touched. She picked up the box of baby-doll things and walked into a room I knew would be the lounge, because all the houses on the street had the same rooms in the same places.

  “Sweetheart!” she said. “A special surprise for you! Look—a girl’s come to see you! A big girl who lives down the street!”

  A big girl. A too-big girl. A girl too big to love.

  She beckoned and I picked my way through the boxes to the door. The lounge was bare, but there was a new-looking couch against one wall and a telly on a telly table against the other. The little girl was sitting in the middle of a round white rug on the floor. She had tiger-colored hair. She was Ruthie.

  The beautiful woman knelt down and beckoned me to come closer. I felt like I was being beckoned toward an expensive puppy, and I wanted to tell her I didn’t need to be beckoned, because I knew Ruthie already. I knew all about Ruthie and her hundreds of toys and her mammy who dressed her like a doll and bought her everything she wanted. I just hadn’t known that that mammy was the beautiful woman who should have been my mammy.

  “How old is she?” I asked.

  “You’re three, aren’t you, angel?” said the beautiful woman, leaning over to cup Ruthie’s cheek. Her hair had been gathered into bunches either side of her head and tied with ribbons the same pink as her dress. She looked the same as she had when I had seen her in the playground with Donna: neat and smooth as the dolls Linda’s mammy kept in cabinets in their lounge. Ruthie looked like she was made of china, and the beautiful woman touched her the same way Linda’s mammy touched her dolls, slowly, with her fingers, not her hands. I wanted to ask the beautiful woman whether she had chosen Ruthie and not me because Ruthie was pretty and I was ugly, or whether it was because she was three and I was eight, and at what point between three and eight a kid got too old to love.

  Ruthie ignored all the cupping and cuddling. She didn’t tell the beautiful woman she had met me before, or that I had slapped her arm and pulled her off the roundabout. She didn’t seem very interested in me at all, only in the metal xylophone she was bashing.

  “Clever girl, Ruthie!” said the beautiful woman. “You’re showing Chrissie how well you can play your xylophone, aren’t you?” Ruthie scowled and did some more bashing. I thought if that was playing the xylophone well, I really didn’t want to hear someone play the xylophone badly. It sounded like tin cans being thrown in a dustbin. I knew I was meant to be watching Ruthie, but I watched the beautiful woman watching Ruthie instead. She was drinking her in, letting her flood into her bones, as if Ruthie was a peppermint humbug turned over on her tongue or a can of cream soda made salty by sweaty lips.

  “Well, who’d like a slice of cake?” the beautiful woman asked. She rubbed her hands together, and they didn’t make the scritch-scratch noise mam’s hands made when they rubbed. The skin was soft and the sound was smooth. I nodded that I did want some cake, and Ruthie nodded too, but as the beautiful woman turned to go to the kitchen Ruthie screamed, “Mammy, I only want choccy cake, not yucky raisin cake.”

  The beautiful woman laughed her tinkle-bell laugh. “Honestly, Chrissie. I spend a whole afternoon making a lovely fruitcake and as I’m taking it out of the oven Ruthie tells me she doesn’t like raisins! But luckily the nice lady in the corner shop found us a choccy cake, didn’t she, Ruthie?”

  “Was it Mrs. Bunty?” I asked.

  “The lady in the corner shop?” said the beautiful woman. “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Just that if it was Mrs. Bunty, she’s not nice,” I said. “She’s actually really horrid and mean.”

  “Really?” said the beautiful woman. “Well, this lady certainly seemed very nice. She loved you, didn�
��t she, Ruthie?”

  Ruthie nodded, and it was like she was saying, “The thing is, I’m little and pretty and my clothes match, and that means everyone likes me, even mean old women who don’t normally like anyone except God.”

  “Which would you like, pet?” the beautiful woman asked me. “Fruit or chocolate?”

  “Both,” I said. And then, when I remembered, “Please.”

  She laughed again. “Now there’s a girl who knows what’s what, eh? Of course you can have both.”

  When she went to get the cake Ruthie took the baby doll out of the box and laid a blanket over it.

  “Baby’s going to sleep now,” she screamed, not particularly to me, though I was the only one in the room. “Baby always goes to sleep in the morning. That’s her nap. She’s only a baby. I don’t have a nap anymore. I’m not a baby.”

  “Stop screaming,” I said.

  “When you’re a baby you have a nap in the morning,” she screamed. “I don’t have a nap in the morning. My baby’s having a nap in the morning. She’s a baby.”

  “How long have you been living with that woman?” I asked.

  “My baby—”

  “The woman who was just in here. The woman who made the cake.”

  “Mammy?”

  “She’s not really your mammy, is she? Did you go to the adoption agency? Did she see you there?”

  “Come on, baby!” she screamed into its face. “It’s time for breakfast!” She picked it up by its ankle. I thought maybe it needed to be adopted too.

  “How long have you been living with that woman?” I asked, nearly shouting. “How long has she been your mammy?”

  I would have shaken her to get her to listen if the beautiful woman hadn’t come in with the tea tray. She put it in the middle of the rug because there was no table, and she gave Ruthie the plate with the chocolate cake on it and herself the plate with the fruitcake on it and me the plate with both cakes on it. I remembered to chew on the right side of my mouth, so the cake didn’t even hurt me, it just filled me up. Ruthie only played with hers—peeled off the crackly chocolate layer and dug out the icing with her fingers. Brown smears outlined her mouth, and the beautiful woman spat on a cloth napkin and wiped them away. If I had known she was going to do that, I would have tried to make a mess of my face too.

  I had just finished my squash when the unpacking man came in with another box of toys. Ruthie saw it, abandoned the baby, and ran to him. He stroked her head. I had never seen two grown-ups kiss and cuddle and stroke a kid so much. You could almost forget what Ruthie’s cheeks and top of head looked like, because there was barely a second when they weren’t hidden under a grown-up hand. She put up with the kissing and cuddling and stroking the way you put up with bedbug bites: they were annoying but you knew they weren’t going to go away, so you just had to try to ignore them.

  “Pat, this is Chrissie,” said the beautiful woman to the unpacking man. She put her hand between my shoulder blades and my insides shivered. “She lives down the street. Did you say it was number eighteen, pet?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She came to meet Ruthie. Ruthie’s so excited to have another girl to play with.”

  The unpacking man leaned down to shake my hand.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Chrissie,” he said. He wore glasses with fine gold rims around the edges, and there were two little patches of steam at the bottom of the two lenses. “I’m Ruthie’s da. Lovely for her to have a big girl to play with.”

  “Yes,” I said. Too-big girl, I thought.

  “How’s it looking?” the beautiful woman asked the unpacking man as he sat down on the couch.

  “Not too bad,” he said. “Put most of the boxes in the right rooms. Just need to unpack them now. Chilly up there.”

  “Have you put the heater in Ruthie’s room? Ought to turn it on for a couple of hours before she goes for her nap.”

  “Yep, it’s on.” He leaned back, steepled his fingers on his chest, and closed his eyes. The beautiful woman gave me a look that said, “Honestly, my silly husband, going to sleep in the middle of the morning!” and I gave her a look that said, “Yes, honestly, your silly husband, going to sleep in the middle of the morning!” I felt cozy when we made that look to each other, like we were wrapped in a blanket that was squeezing us together until our noses touched. Then Ruthie’s voice came, a shrill squawk, and she was in between us.

  “Is my room big, Da?” she screamed.

  “Your room is the perfect size for a little girl like you,” he said. “Why don’t you take Chrissie up and show her?”

  In the hallway the cold bit my bones. It was sunny outside, but the house was chilled the way houses get chilled when no one lives in them for a long time, the way the alley houses had been chilled since the poorest people had stopped living there. Ruthie led the way up the stairs, her soft-soled shoes stamping on the bare wood. When we got to the landing and I saw the open door at the end I realized her bedroom was a twin with my bedroom, in her house that was a twin with my house, in her life that should have been my life. Inside, I sat on the bed, not listening to Ruthie clattering more toys out of more boxes, and my ticking turned on like a light. It rang in my ears, pumped to the tips of my fingers, so loud I thought I would explode. When it was pulsing in every bit of my body I pulled back the bedclothes, crouched, and peed on the mattress. It sounded different to how it had sounded in the blue house, more muffled, and the pee stood in a round puddle before soaking in. It made the ticking quieter. When I finished I put the covers over the wet patch.

  Ruthie had stopped screaming. She was watching me with her big, serious eyes. “That’s for the toilet,” she said.

  “You’re for the toilet,” I said.

  She didn’t seem to realize what a very clever and mean thing that was to have said, because she didn’t gasp or cry. She went back to grabbing toys out of boxes and throwing them on the floor.

  I wanted to do a lot of things in that room. I wanted to cut a long slice in my skin, wet my hands with the blood, and drag them over the floor in cherry-colored trails. I wanted to empty out the boxes of toys, seize them in armfuls, and throw them out of the window. I wanted to run to the shop and steal cans of spray paint, run back and write ugly words all over the walls, the same as the words I had scribbled on the walls of the blue house. I wanted to climb into the wardrobe. I wanted to curl up small enough to lie on the floor of the tall wooden box. I wanted to stay forever in Ruthie’s beautiful room, with Ruthie’s beautiful mammy. Without Ruthie.

  Julia

  Describing the five-to-five-thirty slot at Linda’s house as chaotic was like describing a tornado as a slight breeze. It was difficult to count the number of kids present, because they never stopped moving and most of them seemed to be twins, but I thought there must be at least twelve. They ranged from boys and girls in school uniforms to a baby in a bouncer, who glared at us when we came into the kitchen. I sat down at a dining table covered in bowls of congealed shepherd’s pie. It had been a long time since I had eaten. If Linda hadn’t been swooping in and out I would have clawed up the leftover food with my fingers. Molly went into the garden and started telling a younger girl how to hula-hoop. The doorbell seemed to ring every few seconds, and with each ring Linda scooped up a different kid and returned them to their parent. She smiled at me whenever she came in, and gave me a look that said, “Isn’t this crazy? Isn’t this mad? Me, Linda, in charge of all these kids!”

  By five forty-five the crowd had thinned. “Phew,” she said. “Sorry. It’s the busiest time of the day.”

  “When are the others getting picked up?” I asked.

  “Who?” she asked. I looked into the garden at the kids around Molly: a toddler, twin girls, and an older boy.

  “Oh,” she said. “They’re mine.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yeah.”


  “But there’s four.”

  “There’ll be five soon.”

  “Really?” I said. I tried not to look at her belly. “When?”

  “Not until October. A while to wait.”

  “I don’t think I could cope with more than one.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  It was one of the things I had thought about on the train, during the peace of Molly’s sulk. “Perhaps I could get back here,” I thought. “I could find someone else to sleep with, and start again with a different baby, and not mess things up. I could be better. I could follow what the book says more carefully. I’m good at starting again. It’s the only thing I’m good at.” It had been a cold, deadening thing to think, because I knew it wouldn’t work. If Molly was a gift and no-kid was neutrality, then a not-Molly kid was a curse. I could throw away my life and replace it with a new one over and over again, but it wouldn’t work with her. She wasn’t disposable.

  I watched her take off her coat and throw it on the grass. I called for her to bring it to me. She came in scowling. “That girl’s rubbish at hula-hooping,” she said.

  “Don’t be rude,” I said.

  “It’s just true,” she said.

  She lingered for a minute, looking at the bowls on the table.

  “Are you all right, sweetie?” Linda asked.

  “No,” she said. “I’m actually very very badly hungry.”

  “I’ll get you something later,” I said, but Linda was already on her feet.

  “You can have some shepherd’s pie, Molly. There’s loads here. It’s still warm.” She looked at me. “Will you have some too?”

  I wanted to refuse, but I also wanted to eat. The urges tussled until Linda took two bowls from a cupboard.