Eleven Things I Have Left Now That My Daughter is Gone

Abstract

Eleven Things I Have Left Now That My Daughter is Gone Vickie Fang (bio) 1. The Walk down Wilkins When she was a baby, I used to hold her in my arms and walk down the worst part of Baltimore, Wilkins Avenue. Warm feel of her up close to my chest, little patch of blond hair against my neck, I walked right by those other females, lying passed out on their front stoops or sitting on the curb waiting for their regulars. I thought: Let the corner boys ride their bikes. I thought: Let the old men drive that strip with their eyes all over me. There wasn't anything I was going to buy from the boys, and nothing I was going to sell to those men either. I was holding my baby in front of the world like I was saying, "This is mine. This little Promise is mine. And she is better than all of you." And what did the world think? I didn't even notice. We were our own little two-girl parade. Fat whore and fat baby—call us that—and both of us sailing down that street like a door had been thrown wide open and we could go anywhere we wanted. Those days and that feeling didn't last. Of course they didn't. But I let myself think they would. I never even left Wilkins, but when I walked with Promise, the clouds rolled over us like the first day of creation, and I really believed that my life had started all over again. 2. Five Clean Years Five years go by: no dope, no whoring, no anything but keeping my baby safe. Her laying up in bed with me at night, me right beside her. But outside? A whole parade of cars with their lights crawling up the wall and across the ceiling. Nonstop men driving in from the county looking for women, especially the white ones. I'd lie there for hours, thinking about what they wanted and ask myself the same question: out of all the sad things in the world, what was the worst—to go out to that street and get back in those cars, or to lie there in the dark, remembering? One time Promise woke up and asked me what the lights were, and I said they were the stars. I said they crossed the sky above us, and we didn't care because we were like fish in the sea. And for a long time after that, when she got under the blankets, she wiggled like she thought a fish would, pointed her baby hand up, and said "stars." It was funny to her. Promise'd laugh at the lights, and I'd stare into the dark and see my mother. She'd say, "Be good girls." My sister and I were eight and nine years old, but we knew we had to lay down. She watched for that—then she left and the men came in. My sister was in a bed beside mine, not looking at me, not talking. Not saying anything about what happened in that room afterwards either because when men climb on top of you like that, you turn into dead girls. [End Page 55] Sometimes the men would be late, and I would start to hope they weren't coming, make believe that my mother said she didn't want their money anymore. Maybe my sister was hoping too, but mother never did send the men away from us, not one time. It's when you're clean and lying in your own bed with your baby that you remember what your mother did to you. It might be worse than going back out there and getting in cars again to lie there in the dark and think about how it all got started. So all those nights were not the good thing I wanted them to be because Promise was a child asleep, and I was a woman caught on a train I could never get off of. That was the kind of daughter she was to me. That was the kind of mother I was...