Mother's Helper

Abstract

Mother's Helper Kirstin Allio (bio) My youngest, Bowie, was three. You could have put him on the city council, but I was still lactating. A picture in the paper of an Ecuadorian boy who had waded across the Rio Grande, planted pigeontoed now at the edge of his new schoolyard, backpack strapped on tight, tummy slack, and I would begin leaking. Daniella was seven and Fin was 12. I'd spread my children out so I wouldn't have to answer for my lack of heat, my failure to distinguish myself career-wise. I worked part-time, from home, another hedge against the big contemporary questions. I'd been able to count on expressing a few drops in the shower for years. We lived on College Hill in Providence, an historic grid heavy with trees. The Ginsbergs—the story begins—had arrived the fall I was newly pregnant with Bowie. They took it upon themselves to rescue a house hopelessly incompatible with the 21st century: 8,000 square feet of lacrosse team slums, Suboxone dispensary, and most recently, tax write-off for a developer who defaulted before bringing it up to code, so that it was sold to the Ginsbergs minus heating and cooling, with all its best windows knocked out by lacrosse balls. Lucia Ginsberg's daughter, Anaklara, and my Fin were in the same 3rd grade class. We often walked to school together, the six of us, that fall; I, a little seasick against a private undertow, and Lucia in narrow, tailored work skirts that caught her at the knee, chopping her stride. I can still see Daniella in the stroller, twisting around in excitement. But by October, Lucia had concluded that the neighborhood was safe enough to send Anaklara and her older brother Jerome alone, and if I was miffed to be cast as chaperone, I was also honest with myself about having forfeited some stature, and it was true that Lucia could count on me, so there was no use resenting the fact that I was part of her plan. The lovely Anaklara, blended name from two grandmothers, an old soul of a girl with chipped fingernails and shoulder blades like broken wings, assumed an immediate and effortless intimacy. "Laurel!" she'd call out, running to catch up with us in her uncoordinated, almost nerveless way, as if she weren't quite sure whether it was her arms or her legs that should exert themselves. She'd grab my hand to pull herself the last few paces, while [End Page 96] Jerome jogged behind, and I found myself feeling rewarded. The males of the species talked wall ball; Jerome old enough to know he could toy with Fin, but making a point to abstain. Anaklara always had sweet words for Daniella, but it was to my adult intelligence that she was drawn. In fact, even though she and Fin were the same age, I can't remember I ever thought of Anaklara as one of his friends, and although he would soon enter a boy-centric phase, a kind of developmental misogyny, in 3rd grade he still respected girls. When I gave birth to Bowie (Beau a family name from when boys were suckled on sugar water, like hummingbirds) in June, Anaklara came to visit me in the hospital as she and I had planned, Lucia accompanying her, trying as best she could to tiptoe in her high heels. She stood awkwardly apart, flowers in a tight cone, while Anaklara knelt to peer at Bowie in the swaddle. "Look at him all nestled." Those hospital cottons, ergonomic cocoons. I had the sense that Lucia was fighting the impulse to apologize for her presence—we both knew it was unearned—but at the same time, she didn't want to draw attention to the fact that her daughter's and my relationship not only took precedence, but might not, to us, seem strange. There was something complicated, too, unexpressed, about Anaklara as my initiate. But then Raffi came back from the vending machines and relieved Lucia of the bouquet, and in a neighborly way prompted her for details on the earthworks, feigning interest in the fact...