Lilacs May-lee Chai (bio) There was a photo from my childhood that I hated of me and the lilacs. I was standing in the backyard of our house in New Jersey, and my mother had asked me to pull a lilac blossom closer to my face. I didn't want to pose with the lilacs in my face. It felt artificial and weird. "Now take off your glasses, May-lee," my mother said, and I hated it even more. I liked my glasses. I had liked my glasses since I got them in third grade because they allowed me to see. Without them the world was blurry and distant, something I could not find my way through, like a viscous fog between me and the real world of sharp edges and clear lines. I scowled. "I always wear my glasses. It won't look like me without my glasses." This was who I was, a girl with glasses. A girl who could see. "Don't you want to look pretty? I want you to look pretty!" "I like my glasses," I said helplessly. How old was I? Eight? Nine? Ten? When my mother insisted I must take off my glasses to be a pretty girl. "Won't you take them off for me?" my mother changed tact. "I'm your mother. Won't you make me happy? Won't you listen to your mother?" My mother was very good at getting what she wanted. I was miserable, shamed. I took off my glasses. "Smile! Now smile!" But I didn't feel like smiling. In the photo I saw the lilacs and my eyeglass-less face. I didn't recognize this girl, the one for whom the world was blurry. I remembered being in the head of the girl who wanted to see clearly. That was the girl I wanted immortalized in the photograph, not the girl who obeyed her mother. ________ My mother was of the generation that was taught strict notions of pretty and unpretty, feminine and unfeminine, good and bad. This was a line that must not be crossed. [End Page 79] My mother understood this line because it had been beaten into her by her own mother. The first time my mother was beaten until she bled, she was six years old. It was 1940 and she was living in Indiana, and she had been caught talking to a black person. Grandma had recently given birth to her third child and was too busy to pay attention to her eldest—my mother—whom she locked outside the house during the day. My mother and her family had recently moved from Indianapolis to the countryside. Mama said she liked to take their big farm dog, Penny, on walks on the gravel road that led to a family of white hillbillies on one side and to a childless black couple on the other. The hillbillies kept their grandmother in a baby's crib where the old woman scratched the paint off the walls with her overgrown toenails as my mother watched. The hillbillies were friendly, but the black woman liked to talk, had a doll collection, and made my mother biscuits, which made her my mother's clear favorite. The black woman must have been lonely, all by herself in the countryside while her husband was off at work, so she welcomed my mother, a lone white child, told her stories, and fed her. Eventually my mother told Grandma about the woman with the doll collection, neglecting to mention that the woman was black. My mother at six had no vocabulary to talk about race. So Grandma told my mother to invite the woman over for pie. She couldn't have a woman feeding her child without thanking her. And perhaps, too, Grandma was hoping to make a friend. She was lonely herself in the countryside with only the children to keep her company while my grandfather was at work. My mother extended Grandma's invitation to the black woman, who showed up at the house one day, dressed up as if for church, in a pretty dress with a hat and gloves. Grandma was shocked. She talked...