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LIKE many young mothers, I am overworked, underpaid, and in serious need of a makeup intervention. Every time I look in the cracked mirror above my bathroom sink—which I try to do about as often as I make pie dough from scratch—I hear my mother’s voice: Oh, April, you could be so pretty if you’d just take a little time with yourself.
It’s sad that this is the only time I hear my mom’s voice, and unfair as well. Right up to the end, even as she lay in a narrow hospital bed that smelled of starch and hopelessness, she loved me. I remember how tightly she held my hand, her knuckles bony and blue-veined and sadly translucent for a forty-two-year-old woman. She’d looked at my swollen, pregnant stomach and started to cry. “I just wanted to hold your baby’s hand,” she’d whispered brokenly. “Is that so much to wish for?”
There was nothing I could do but pick up a scrap of white tissue and dry her cheeks. We both knew she would die in a sterile white room tucked into the southeast corner of a concrete high-rise that was miles away from our hometown. That she would never hold my baby in her arms.
I was seventeen. Young and naïve. I didn’t know how much I would come to miss her. Like the horrible night when my milk first came in… or during midnight feedings… birthday parties… tooth fairy visits. I didn’t know then that every happy milestone in my life would carry with it a shadowy lining of loss. But she knew.
Probably it’s just as well that I remember her scolding me. Although it’s been years since her death, the other memories are still tender to the touch.
Besides, I am pretty, in an I-got-pregnant-too-early-and-never-fulfilled-my-potential sort of way.
It was because of the town I grew up in, really. That’s the realization I’ve come to. If I had grown up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, or New York City, the only daughter of two Nobel Prize–winning scientists, I am certain my life would now be different. I would look beautiful and polished and self-possessed at twenty-seven, instead of more than a little tired and old before my time. These are the things my mother wanted for me. The road I turned away from.
I grew up in Mocipsee, Washington. It was—is—a town not unlike a million others in America. Population 4,320. Mostly dairy farmers. Every spring the river floods the valley and the nightly news flashes pathetic, heart-wrenching pictures of toothless men saving stranded animals. Packing sandbags is a normal after-school activity during the soggy months of the year.
High school football is king in Mocipsee. In 1986 we almost won the state championship, and though we lost, the town went crazy, closing down the shops and streets to party in celebration of how close we’d come.
That was the night I first met Ryan. I knew who he was, of course. In a town that idolizes football, the team quarterback is God. But guys like Ryan didn’t talk to girls like me.
We were out in the Kupacheks’ cow pasture—the standard party place in town. A hundred drunken teenagers crowded around a handful of silver kegs. Someone had brought a battery-operated radio. Tinny, scratchy songs hacked through the night, one after another.
I couldn’t believe it when Ryan came up to me. “Hi,” he said. “You’re April Palmer, right?”
I knew even before I opened my mouth that I was going to say something incredibly stupid. What I said—precisely—was, “Uh-huh.”
That was all I could come up with. I winced, waiting for him to laugh at me and walk away, but he just stood there, one hip cocked out, his hand curled around an empty plastic glass, his blue eyes fixed on my face. I offered to get him a refill—anything that would prolong the moment.
“I don’t drink,” he answered. “If I’m going to make the pros, I have to stay in top shape.”
I remember staring at him in shock. A goal. A goal for the future. No one in Mocipsee thought about life after high school. No one went to college. A job at the makeup counter at Nordstrom’s was the best we could imagine. Most of the men around town wore their letterman’s jackets well into their fifth decade, and in the taverns there was always a discussion going on about some football game that had taken place fifteen years before.
Naturally, I fell in love with Ryan right then. That, in and of itself, was hardly noteworthy. The amazing thing was that he fell in love with me back. From that second on, we were as tight as shoelaces. It was only a matter of time (it could be tallied in nanoseconds) before we were having sex in the backseat of his old Ford Fairlane.
I was seventeen when I got pregnant. The first semester of my senior year. It wasn’t all that unusual, a girl my age getting pregnant. None of my girlfriends thought much about it. We laughed and giggled and designed imaginary nurseries, drawings and all. In home ec, we looked up layette patterns and asked what babies ate. We pictured a tiny, pink-faced girl with my black hair and Ryan’s blue eyes.
Now, of course, I see the sadness in all of it, the tarnished truth that we were girls who’d grown up in the rain shadow of the women’s movement and still thought Mrs. Cleaver was the ideal woman. We asked so little of ourselves—and most of us got exactly what we asked for. Funny how that works.
The boys weren’t any better. The football team rallied around Ryan, slapping the “stud” on the back. As if knocking up a teenaged girl was tantamount to throwing a touchdown pass.
The first time I really thought about what it meant to be pregnant was when I told my mother. I remember so clearly how I felt that night, all filled with pride and fear. When I squeezed Ryan’s hand, I could feel his slick nervousness, too.
“Mrs. Palmer?” Ryan said softly, after the dinner dishes were cleared. He stood alongside the fireplace, his hands jammed in his jeans pockets. He shifted from foot to foot, rocking on the linoleum floor like a tiny wooden boat in a rough sea.
My mom came out of the kitchen and looked at us. I wonder now, all these years later, if she missed my father in that moment, if she’d wanted a hand to reach for, but it had been years since my dad had visited any of us.
I went to stand beside Ryan. “We have something to tell you.” I didn’t realize that my hand had moved to my stomach, that I was gently caressing the worn flannel of my shirt.
But Mom noticed. It hurt me, those silent silver tears streaking down her cheeks. “Oh, April…” She sighed, staring down at her work-stained hands. “I wanted so much for you.”
They were words I’d heard many times. My mother was always talking about what she wanted for me. She always told me I could be anything—an astronaut, a cardiac surgeon, a ballet dancer.
I always wondered where my mother collected her big dreams. She had grown up in Mocipsee, the third daughter of five children. She’d gotten pregnant at sixteen, dropped out of school, and gotten married. By twenty, she was a divorced woman raising two small children on a cleaning woman’s wages. We used to drive by Grandpa Joe’s sometimes when I was a kid, and Mom would always point to the tiny white clapboard house and say, “That’s why you go to college, April, so you don’t end up renting a place like that for thirty years and then die without a penny to show for it.”
Now that I’m a parent, I understand. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I wake up in a cold sweat. In the quiet moments before I reach Ryan’s hand beneath the covers, I wonder if I’ve planted dreams in my children’s hearts and souls. I wonder if they believe they can be anything.
