by Anne Lamott
Someone opened it slowly and a baby was brought out, a baby girl still alive, and I knew who it was. She was handed to me. I was amazed, just amazed. I looked at the face of the bright docile baby I was holding and saw the movie of what her future had been—in schoolyards and classrooms, in the branches of trees, at holiday dinners, at dances, in beauty salons, in rivers, at concerts, on mountains, on drugs, in bars and beds and churches. Here she was, just looking around, just taking it in; and I believed right then that I was being given back what I had been born with; or that at least it was still alive.
On the steps of the little white church my mother was rubbing my shoulder. “Casey’s snapping his fingers at us,” she said. There was a small white cloud on the very top of the mountain. The church bells had stopped ringing. My mother looked very pretty. Her hair was up somewhat more formally than usual, and she was wearing an evergreen silk dress my brother bought her last year for Lynnie’s wedding. I had made her put a little blusher on her cheeks. She leaned over to kiss me behind one of my ears and stayed that way, nuzzling me. She was wearing Peg’s gorgeous fake pearls, and I could feel them on my skin. Her breath was warm and sweet and a little smokey. She was breathing through her nose. I used to wonder if more air went in and out of her big nostril than in and out of the other. I sighed and looked down at my feet: I was wearing my mother’s old sky-blue heels. Pru taught me to walk in heels. She was as pigeon-toed as a shy person, even—or especially—when we were sitting down. Here on the steps the day Pru told me about her abortion, she was wearing green suede ankle-length boots, pointy and stolen, and black fishnet stockings. We wove garlands of tiny daisies for our hair, frail wreaths, one for my white-blond black-people’s hair, one for her bleached and straggly mane with its cap of mink-brown roots: we just sat there on the steps of the church for a while, looking out, looking down. My mother got to her feet and then offered me her hand. “We’d better go,” she said. “Now he’s tapping the face of his watch.” I looked over my shoulder at Casey, who was signaling us with extreme agitation. I smiled up at my mother and she smiled at me. She could see that I was more or less okay. I held up my hand and she grasped it, and as she pulled me to my feet I stared down at the sky-blue heels of hers I was wearing, at the orange moss on the cracked concrete steps, at the poppies and the sprigs of wild mint.