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I always have. It makes my mother crazy. to wake me for school or work and find me face down-- not dead but sleeping-- she'd tell me this story: Living in the no air-conditioning no-color duplex apartments off-base in rural North Carolina, where Army wives and young mothers spent the days outside by the creek talking and watching their children. How she'd look across the yard, a yard filled with white diapers and t-shirts, but never joined the other women-- same life; different language. How she'd only wait for her soldier-husband to come home with the day on his tongue. She shows me pictures of us: me sitting in her lap, her sitting on a kitchen chair that has skinny metal legs. Back then everything was thin, she says. she'd never let me sleep on my stomach, because at the shower her aunts and mother had filled her with stories and the house with gifts. She tells how she'd watch the curious maybe careless U.S. girls, most of them her age put their babies down for naps face down on blankets or pillows, and she'd wonder how those babies could breathe. the times she'd put me between them so she could hear any sound of trouble or, when I was old enough to sleep alone, how she'd entered my room several times to roll me. when a woman's pregnant by looking at her head," my father assures me. "A pregnant woman will have enormous ears and her imagination grows bigger than her baby. Everything you say grows." I started that recently after moving away from home. My mother doesn't know: it would make her worry, and she'd tell me another story. |
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