On Saturday evening, when I got home from work, I was exhausted. Clara greeted me from her booster seat, where she sat wearing only a diaper, a thin sheen of cheese sauce covering her tummy and face. Remnants of an enormous pile of cheesy noodles and ketchup were smeared across her tray.
She hadn't seen me since midday. When I'd left for work, she'd been napping.
"Mommy," she said, by way of greeting, but she wasn't looking at me. She was looking at my skirt. Because I tend to spend most of my days doing grubby things (gardening, changing diapers, scrubbing toilets), Clara hardly ever sees me dressed up. I got the skirt at Fred Meyer's sidewalk sale for seventy percent off. It's floor-length--a maxi skirt, as they like to say. It's silky, with a Celtic/Persian pattern in different hues of blue. It's pretty unremarkable. Hardly a fashion coup. The elastic waistband works well with my post-pregnancy ripple.
But Clara could not believe her eyes. The extravagance of it!! The richness!!! If she could have eaten it, she would have.
"Done!!! Down!!" she demanded as I sank onto a kitchen chair.
Simon unstrapped her from her seat and washed her down. As soon as she was clean, she came over to me for a hug and a kiss. Then she gathered up my skirt in her hands and rubbed her face in it. She burrowed up under the skirt, holding onto my calves and leaning forward so the silky fabric stretched taut across her face. She crooned softly to herself in a high-pitched voice.
Finally I took the skirt off for her to play with and went and put on some shorts.
She laid on the couch and wrapped herself in it.
"Ban-kit, 'eep," she said, pretending to sleep.
Then she wanted me to lie down so she could lay it across me like a blanket. She put it over her head and wanted me to give her kisses through the fabric. Then she yanked it off quickly until her hair was plastered to her head with static electricity. She wrapped it around herself like a turban and a sarong.
Simon made the egregious error of trying to snap a picture of her with my phone.
"Bee-bee! Bee-bee!" she yelled, grabbing at the phone. She wanted to see the photos of the "baby," i.e. herself, in the phone. We let her look at the photos of herself for a minute, but then she started playing with the apps. She can inadvertently re-arrange my icons, reprogram my preferences and hide my favorite photos faster than I can snap my fingers, so I took the phone away. To keep her from shrieking, I set it to play some music.
As "The Air Near My Fingers" by the White Stripes came on, Simon and I, as if heeding some deep, primal, parental call to goofiness, began to dance. It was as if we were synchronized swimmers, such was the depth of our mutual impulse. Same expression: Startled. Same dance moves: Jogging-in-place. High knees. Jazz hands.
Not yet understanding how terribly, desperately uncool we are, Clara tried to mimic us. She shrieked with laughter, pivoting on one foot. She crouched to jump and managed to get one little foot off the ground.
It took forty-five minutes to wind her down for bed.
My body was twitching with exhaustion.
No comments:
Post a Comment