A Lotus Grows in the Mud (2 page)

T
he walls are white and the day is yellow. The warmth of my new pink feet signals the beginning of a broadly sensuous life. The taste of my toe is sweet; I like it. Gazing through the sunlit bars of my crib, my mother appears from the yellow, her face shining white. Love is blazing from her eyes, filling my heart with beams of light. She is smiling down at me, and I feel completely adored.

She bends her body over mine and gently with her loving hands gathers up my freshly suckled feet. Before she can whistle Brahms’s “Lullaby,” I am naked as a jaybird. It is a state I will always relish.

My mother nuzzles her face into my belly and makes me laugh. I kick my legs playfully, for there is a sense of joy in me that to this day I find indefinable.

Then she picks me up and puts me in a tub of warm water. Her hands cup the water and pour it gently over my body. I feel her soft hands cleaning my legs, my arms, my back. It feels like silk. All too soon, I am lifted out of my bath and swaddled in a soft white towel. Mom snuggles me close, and suddenly I am on my back again. She rubs oil into my brand-new skin and then dusts my private parts with Johnson’s baby powder. Its smell will always remind me of that perfect love.

My mother wrestles my moving arms and legs into a sleeper suit with feet and
snap, snap, snaps
me all the way up. With each snap cocooning me in, I feel a happiness inside, a safety that to this day I find difficult to describe, until I am wrapped right up to my neck in love. It is night.
Time for bed. The only thing I fear at that moment is the disappearance of her smile and the lights dimming.

T
hey say a baby smiles an average of seventy-two times a day, and a toddler laughs or smiles six hundred times a day. We learn to smile very early in life. It is one of the first things we do, after we learn to cry. And how do we learn to smile? By how much we are smiled at. Does our smile live somewhere in the double helix of our DNA, or is it nurtured?

Somewhere in there lies the truth, which is—it is nature, but it must be nurtured. To understand our mother’s smile is to understand our own smile, to know what triggers that physiological response.

A smile is an indication of a happy heart, and when you smile it changes your perception. It can create a better day. As frivolous as it might sound, studies have proven that even if you don’t feel like smiling, if you force yourself to smile, you will change your state of mind. By doing so, you can actually raise the immune-system boosters in your blood.

The question is, Where does that smile go? Why is it that as we grow older we smile less? Could it be that we are looking for happiness and fulfillment in all the wrong places? Is it fear that stops us from being happy? Have we forgotten how to seek those simple pleasures that brought us such joy as children? To find the spaces between our thoughts that allow these joyful memories to flood back?

I suppose the key to holding on to that smile is to try to remember how much you smiled when you were young. Never forget, because that smile still lives in you, no matter how old you are.

Happy to be in the Purple Balls reading group, the lowest grade, I thought I was special because I was the only one in it! (Author’s Collection)

M
y toes find their footing in each hole in the chain-link fence as, step by step, I climb my way to the top. The smell of chocolate chip cookies egging me on, I pray that I won’t snag my shorts on the sharp barbs of wire at the top.

I am making my daily assault on the barrier that separates me from my neighbor and first boyfriend, David Fisher. David lived a few houses away from our redbrick, three-bedroom duplex on Cleveland Avenue, in a suburb of Washington, D.C., called Takoma Park. To get to his house each day after school, I have to scale this fence in the yard of my next-door neighbor, Mr. Morningstar.

I could reach the Fisher house the easy way—by walking around the block—but that wouldn’t be as much fun. Instead, I relish the challenge of climbing that fence, because the minute I have achieved my mission and landed with a thump in his backyard I will be leaving my empty house behind and entering a world that is very different from my own.

Mrs. Fisher stays home all day baking and cooking and keeping house for her four boys. Mr. Fisher comes home each night after work and doesn’t go out again. Their home is filled with noise and school projects and fun. There is a miniature golf course they made in the backyard out of mud, complete with waterfalls, and, best of all, right next door to the Fishers lives my best friend, Jean Lynn.

Each afternoon when I return home from school to my dark and silent house, greeted only by Nixi, my pet Dalmatian, waiting for me on the front porch, I telephone my mom at the Flowers Gift Shop to let her know I’m home. My house always feels so empty, so lonely.

“Okay, honey, I’ll come and pick you up just as soon as I close the store,” she tells me. “Now do your homework, and be a good girl for Mrs. Fisher.”

David has two sets of teeth. He has grown his second set, but his old set won’t fall out, so his mouth is jam-packed. His lips can no longer meet. No one can understand a word he says but me. The teachers in school always sit me next to David. I have become his trusty interpreter.

My mom arrives on time to pick me up after work, sporting her straight skirt and pointy high-heeled shoes. She always looks so beautiful. She says hello to Mrs. Fisher and the boys. I can smell her perfume as she stands close to me, staring over my shoulder. She watches me color my elephants while David is reading his book.

“Why don’t you have a reading book like David, Goldie?”

I shrug my bony shoulders and carry on with my drawing. “I don’t know, Mommy. Maybe because I’m in the Purple Balls.”

“The purple what?”

“The Purple Balls, Mommy,” I say, proudly. “It’s a special reading group, and it’s really neat.”

“Why is it neat, honey?”

“Because I’m the only one in it.”

“David, why doesn’t Goldie have a reading book?” Mommy asks him when she can’t get a sensible reply out of me. He mumbles something, but my mother can’t understand him, so she turns to me and asks, “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Because she’s too dumb,’ ” I reply, without even looking up from my happy elephants.

“You’re too what?” my mother asks, screwing her cigarette into the ashtray. “How come I don’t know this?”

She gives me a strange look, and helps me pack up my things. “Come on, honey, it’s time to go home.”

The next day, Mom comes to the Silver Spring Intermediary Elementary School with me, something she never does. Instead of going straight to class as usual, I am taken to the principal’s office for a meeting with my teacher, Mrs. Povitch. I sit silently listening to their conversation.

“Yes, Mrs. Hawn,” Mrs. Povitch confirms, “the Purple Balls is the lowest reading group in second grade, I’m afraid. It’s not that your daughter doesn’t try, or that she isn’t a good girl. She just gets easily distracted.”

“Anything else I should know?” Mommy asks with a sigh.

“Yes, there is, actually.” Mrs. Povitch laughs. “Every time we ask Goldie to color in the fruits in the coloring book—red for apples, purple for grapes and so on—she paints everything in yellow. When I ask her why, she says, ‘Because I like yellow.’ ”

“Well, it is her favorite color.” Mom bristles defensively.

“Oh, and she’s such a sweet child,” Mrs. Povitch says, throwing her head back and laughing. “She always signs her unfinished papers ‘Love Goldie XX.’ ”

“Well, that’s my Goldie,” Mom replies. “She must love you very much.”

S
tep, two-three, glide, two-three, pirouette and turn. The moves are etched into my brain in a continuous loop. Now balancé, two-three, and into the arabesque…

Dancing is my sport, my life, my purpose. Moving my body, challenging myself, sweat dripping from every pore, I feel the music vibrating within me, sending me to ecstasy. Competing with no one but myself, just moving molecules in the air, I reach such an emotional high in physical expression.

Everything goes away when I am dancing—schoolwork, boys and my loneliness. Dancing is something I can do. This is where I belong. I am good at this, and I know if I practice really hard I can make myself even better. When I am dancing, I am able to escape to my own little world. And, for the first time in my life, I realize that my unusual father is just the same; he dances to the beat of his own drum.

Picking me up from dance school one night, I overhear my mother talking to my dance teacher, Aunt Roberta.

“There’s a talent show at Goldie’s school next month,” she says. “I thought she could do the parasol dance she did in her recital.”

“No, Mommy,” I pipe up as I peel off my tights and leotard and wriggle back into my school dress, “I want to improvise to ‘Sleigh Ride.’ ” This is the song I whirl and twirl around the living room to every night when I get home.

“Don’t you want to do your parasol dance?” Mommy asks. “You know it really well.”

“I want to dance to ‘Sleigh Ride,’ Mommy,” I insist. “It makes me happy.”

Happiness was always important to me. Even at the young age of eleven, it was my biggest ambition. People would ask, “Goldie, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Happy,” I would reply, looking in their eyes.

“No, no,” they’d laugh. “That’s really sweet, but I mean…what do you want to be? A ballerina? An actress maybe?”

“I just want to be happy.”

And “Sleigh Ride” makes me happy.

The day before the show, all the contestants are gathered in the school gymnasium. “Wait here for Mrs. Toomey,” a teacher tells us. “She’ll be along in just a minute.”

Mrs. Toomey is a very severe woman, with gray hair and bony fingers. I am a little scared of her, to tell you the truth. Sitting on the wooden basketball floor, I can hear her shoes clunking along the corridor toward us, and then, suddenly, she appears, standing over us ominously.

“Now, children, this is very exciting, and we are going to have a wonderful show. I am glad you are all here, but I want you to know that you must be absolutely perfect,” she says, peering at us sternly with steel blue eyes.

Perfect? I think, the blood draining from my face. But I’m not perfect. I will be improvising to music. Anything could happen. I feel stricken.

“Your moms and dads and lots of people will be watching, and I don’t want them to see any mistakes.”

Panic-stricken, I keep thinking about what she said. Perfect? I won’t be able to do that. To me, perfect is doing a pirouette without falling over, and I can’t always manage that. My mind flashes hotly back to the maypole dance the previous year in this very gymnasium. I accidentally took a wrong turn and wound my ribbon on the outside instead of inside. Mrs. Toomey got so mad and started screaming at me, but I tried to hold on and not cry. The problem is that I can’t control the tears that are streaming down my cheeks.

Walking home from school, I think long and hard about what she said, her words spinning round and round in my mind.

Perfect? I ask myself as I pass the old woman who always sits in her window crocheting. I wave and smile.

Perfect? What is perfect? I pass the man who constantly mows his lawn, with his pipe posted between his lips.

Perfect. Like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers?

I climb the front porch, where Nixi is waiting for me. We walk together into our home. I don’t feel like climbing the chain-link fence to David Fisher’s today. Instead, I go upstairs to my bedroom, where I sit staring at my dolls, waiting for Mom to come home.

Sitting at the kitchen table when she finally does, I plunk my elbows on it and rest my head in my hands. “Mommy, what is ‘perfect’?”

“‘Perfect’ is when people don’t make any mistakes, I guess.” She purses her lips and looks at me askance.

“Okay, then I’m not doing the talent show.”

“What? Goldie Jeanne, what do you mean you’re not doing the talent show? Honey, you have to do the talent show; you’re the only one up there who can do anything. You have practiced and practiced every night in the living room. You looked beautiful. You didn’t make a single mistake.”

“But I’m not perfect, Mommy.”

“Well, nobody’s perfect. Who said anything about perfect?”

“Mrs. Toomey said.”

My mother raises her eyes to the heavens and shakes her head. “Oh boy. Here we go. Another trip to the school.”

The next morning my mother picks up our precious copy of “Sleigh Ride” and escorts me to the school with it tucked firmly under her arm. We sit side by side in a small room with Mrs. Toomey, who seems a little panicked that my mother has come to see her. She leans forward in her chair and gives me a thin smile.

“Now, Goldie, I’m sure I didn’t say ‘perfect,’ ” she says defensively.

“Oh yes you did, Mrs. Toomey,” I counter. “You said ‘perfect,’ and I’m not perfect.”

My mother shakes her head in exasperation. “Now, Goldie, clearly Mrs. Toomey didn’t mean you have to do everything exactly right.”

Mrs. Toomey chimes in, groping for words. “Yes, that’s right, honey. I just meant you have to be the best you can be. Goldie, I want you to be in the talent show.”

“But I’m not perfect.”

“Goldie, it doesn’t matter,” my mother insists.

After relentless pressure from them both, I finally give in. “Okay. I’ll dance. But I’m
not
perfect,” I add, under my breath.

My mother is so relieved she flops back down into a chair. Unfortunately, it was the wrong chair, because she sat on the only copy of “Sleigh Ride” we possessed. It shattered into pieces beneath her. There was a moment of silence before my mother wailed, “Oh my God! What did I just sit on?!”

“My record, Mommy. You sat on ‘Sleigh Ride.’”

She pulls herself up, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she says, picking up the pieces helplessly.

Mrs. Toomey tries to comfort her. “Don’t worry,” she says.

My mother says, “What do you mean, ‘Don’t worry’? This is the only one. I have to go downtown and get another one.” Bubbles of sweat lace her brow as she speed-walks down the corridor in her torpedo-shaped stilettos.

I pull my sequined costume up over my shapeless hips in a classroom next to the gym and listen to the music coming through the walls. The show has begun. Some of my classmates are singing, mostly off-key.

My mom brushes my hair away from my face, which I hate. As soon
as she is done, I tease out some strands and pull them down over my forehead. As she fusses over me, fluffing the crinkles out of my tutu, she occasionally stops and stares into my face. I don’t speak. I am too mesmerized by her heart-shaped face and her orangey red lipstick. I love to watch as she sits in front of the mirror each morning, with her big eyes and her auburn hair, and precisely follows the voluptuous contours of her mouth. Pressing her lips together, she always pouts and examines herself critically, one side and then the other, before slipping her feet into her high heels and trotting off to work.

Pushing my bangs away from my eyes again, my mother’s face softens. “When you grow up, I want you to put my aunt Goldie’s name up in lights.”

“I will, Mommy,” I reply dutifully.

Her eyes twinkle. “She was a wonderful woman.”

I am still young but I will do anything for my mother, even the impossible. Great-Aunt Goldie Hochhauser, a jovial redhead—known in our house as “Tante” Goldie—raised my mother when she was orphaned at three years old in Braddock, Pennsylvania. She died a year before I was born. I was given her name, and I’m very proud.

“Okay, Goldie,” my mother whispers in my ear as Mrs. Toomey signals that it is time for me to go on. “Remember, nobody’s perfect.” She takes the precious 78 and hands it to the stage manager before running to take her seat in the front row.

I walk to the edge of the stage, mimicking all the great ballerinas I have ever seen. My arms out in second position, my toe pointed in front of me, I am ready to be swept up by the music. Looking out at the audience, I feel my heart hammering on my ribs.

Somewhere out there is David Fisher and his brother, Jimmy. “Don’t worry, Goldie, we’ll clap extra hard,” they assured me before I went on.

A few feet away from me, the stage manager places the needle onto the new copy of “Sleigh Ride,” and the opening bars crackle through the loudspeakers. Closing my eyes, I allow the sound of my favorite song in the whole world to flood my head and my heart.