Her mother always called her little girl ‘precocious’ in front of company because she knew that there was something wrong. She didn’t want to call attention to the peculiar way that the three-year-old interacted with adults or her strange habit of sitting in the grandmother’s wing chair that stood proudly in the grandmother’s living room. No one wants to admit to raising a strange child.
It seemed like the wing chair had always been there, a staple in the matriarch’s home that stood as a testament to the family’s resilience over time. It had once been upholstered in soft pink and white stripes when Nana Swaine bought it years before. But by the time the baby was old enough to lift herself up on the seat the fabric had begun to blend together, carefully fading the past deeper until all that remained was a handful of memories and anecdotes. The strings of roses that had been carefully stitched into the stripes feigned their color. The chair gave off an odor that can only be described as the amalgamation of many generations who had taken their turns shifting their weight against its cushions, rubbing their scent deeper into the thread count.
When the mother saw her girl sitting in the chair she could see the past through her posture. The baby took control of the wing chair, her marshmallow palms pushing against the lumpy cushions. She sat with her brow knit and the red curls on top of her head carefully dropping down against her neck. Her backside sat firmly against the back of the wing chair while her shoulders leaned forward, as if she were about to participate in the discussion about Great Aunt Edie’s health problems even though she had discovered her own toes only a few years ago.
And she would sit there—at Christmas, at Easter, on weekends when three children proved to be too much work for the mother. They would go visit the grandmother so that the mother could have a break and the baby could sit in the chair and worry everyone further. No child that age should have so much feeling written across her forehead or sorrow in her eyes. The aunts and uncles and other relatives worried that their baby had already taken too much of the sadness out of life—that, somehow, the experiences of the previous generations which had been crushed against the pink stripes for so many years had found their way into her skin. So they looked away when she sat there during those Christmases and Easters and those certain weekends when her mother needed a break. They carefully took hors d’oeuvres from the coffee table in front of her, tip-toeing in fear of the baby. They would tickle her side and pinch her cheek to show her that they knew she was there, to show her that she was still their baby, but they never looked in her eyes. They knew that even precocious children didn’t have the same presence that she did. The baby didn’t know more than she was supposed to, just more than they wanted her to, and that was enough to make them fear her. Only humans who had seen the best and worst parts of life could fill up that chair with so little room.
But it wasn’t the sitting there that made everything feel so backwards and upside-down. It was what she said while she sat in Nana Swaine’s old wing chair. She would ask simple questions that seemed normal for a curious child to pose, but all the more disconcerting in their construction and delivery. Things like—what if it never rains again? Or, is it better to follow your mind or your heart? The first of these questions could be dismissed with a quick answer—‘I don’t know’ or ‘Ask someone else.’ But as she continued to sit in the chair the questions would get more persistent. What if this is the last time I get to hold your hand? What happens when we finally get buried by all our own filth and can’t move? How will you know that I am safe after I die? What if we get in an unforgivable fight and never talk to one another again? What if I never fall in love? What if I do?
They were questions that everyone has thought about at least once or twice. The kinds of things that pop up in your head—completely unannounced—and you forget about until you do something, twist a certain knob or look in the mirror a particular way, and you remember it again. They weren’t pleasant thoughts, but they weren’t unpleasant either. They were just thoughts. And how do you tell a baby to stop thinking them? They tried to distract her with toys, her mother stuffed her mouth with food so she wouldn’t say anything. But they all knew what she was thinking anyways. It was something in the way that the chair cradled her body with the perfect resistance so she almost popped out of it.
They started pinching the baby every time she spoke—a Pavlovian suppression of the most basic fears. But she wouldn’t stop. The pinches made it worse which made them madder. They could feel the verbal manifestation of their innermost thoughts coming from the smallest, most controllable being in the world. They had created her, hadn’t they? Although they hadn’t all created her directly, each of them constructed a part of her in a sense. That’s what family is, after all. And just as equally as they were creating her, they were destroying her. The mother wrapped her arms around her child as Aunt Judith pinched the baby’s mouth to sever her words. She sobbed helplessly as Cousin Ivan shook her ankles to suppress the kicking. The family continued, each boxing the baby’s ears to keep her from thinking these things as the mother screamed silently that it was all in their head. They were just words, only words, that the Baby had learned from their own mouths. Where else could she have learned them? The mother grasped at the doughy flesh of her child until all that laid in her hands was a body in a dress.
A dress that she had spent days making as a present for her little girl to wear so that she would be good for her family. She was just a baby, the mother cried at them, beating her fists against the sides of the wing chair that held her daughter. The redness of the baby’s curls now crushed against the pink fabric so that it almost blended in. The mother’s tears fell against her baby’s face so that they dripped down her cheek as if they were her own. She was just a baby, the mother screamed from the back of her throat, with a voice that no one could hear.
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