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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

My seeds are sprouting in two wombs
Hank Pellissier, giver of sperm, is about to receive. Last heard from while contemplating insemination, he's now got a girl coming with the wife and a boy on the way with the lesbian gal pal.
By Hank Pellissier
[10/12/99]

Dump the big bang, bring on the blue ox
Kansas isn't going far enough with changes to its science curriculum
By Vicki Rosenzweig
[10/11/99]

Cold plunges and sport singing: Life in a Russian kindergarten
A wee New Yorker is sent to Rodnik, a temple of rigidity and complex grammar. And he loves it.
By Mary MacVean
[10/11/99]

Who was Carolyn Keene?
An interview with Mildred Wirt Benson, the original ghostwriter for the Nancy Drew mystery novels.
By Amy Benfer
[10/08/99]

Fathers, sons and football
I spent my NFL career struggling to escape the long arm of my judgmental father -- and the coaches who took his place. Was I fated to subject my sons to the same treatment?
By Pat Toomay
[10/08/99]

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Julian is almost a year and a half old. The furniture is pulled away from the southern corner of the living room, where his babysitter, Liu Yen, practices Chi Gung each day. When I come home, Julian is lying in her lap. She holds his hand with the pink palm up.

"How was he today?" I ask, tossing my bags and kicking off shoes at the same time.

"Oh, OK," she says, looking at her slippered feet.

She is still mad about our conversation yesterday. That must be it. I had told her for the last time that Julian must not go in any cars without his car seat. It's not only dangerous, I told her, it's illegal. I had tried to make my ultimatum less personal, less my own neurotic mothering. Liu Yen didn't like being told to do anything. It's why she married a younger man, a taboo in her culture. It's why she took part in the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. It's why she left China.

"Is anything the matter?" I ask.

Liu Yen speaks softly, but her eyes are direct, sure in their gaze to the floor, then to me. She holds Julian's fat little starfish hands that never stop grasping at things.

"I have thought many times to leave here," she says.

She had been a chemist in Beijing, an apprentice to a scientist researching traditional Chinese medicine. She is precise, intelligent, spiritual. I was drawn to these qualities and to her warmth, her laugh, the way she lifted Julian from my arms the first day she met us and distracted him from a cry by taking him to the window. "See baby? See the bird. Ah yah." He was transfixed.

Now Liu Yen opens Julian's hand and strokes his palm.

"You are lucky I have stayed so long. It is too much responsibility." She says "responsibility" slowly, getting every syllable right.

"You see," she says, looking down into his palm, "his lifeline is broken. It stops here."

She looks at me. I don't understand.

"Whenever that happens," she says, "there will be a terrible accident. I knew a girl who fell out of a third-floor window, and another, worse ..."

I think I am smiling.

"But he will not die." She lifts his hand. "You see?"

I am nodding.

"The line continues over here. But there will be an accident. That is why I can't ever take my eyes off him. I sit by the cradle when he sleeps."

When Liu Yen left for the day, I moved Julian from my hip to my heart and held him with both arms.

In the midst of this sort of trauma, the kind that breaks your faith, not your bones, things happen in slow motion. Fear brings astounding clarity to detail. Vision narrows to prevent sensory overload. When I was 15, a friend told me she was pregnant. She told me how they told her at Planned Parenthood. They said to her, "The test was positive," and she was thinking, "positive, that means good. I'm not pregnant." Then they said to her, "That means you are pregnant." She remembers those words and the dent in the silver coffee pot with the black handle that sat on a small table across from her.

I remember flickers of that afternoon with Liu Yen: Julian's hand in hers, the sofa with its pattern of bronze squares stamped on brown cotton. Between us there is something. I imagine that she has tossed me a stone, and I can't catch it. It's a rock that in traversing the arc between us grows bigger and heavier. I start taking steps backwards, sensing the weight of it coming toward me, trying to figure out how I'm going to hold it when it lands.

Six months later, in the July heat, we tethered balloons to the fence for Julian's second birthday. Inside, twisted streamers crisscrossed the ceiling and the dining room table was pushed to one side of the room and covered in a paper table cloth. I can't remember what was printed on it. I remember the tablecloths of other years, talismans of his changing passions: farm animals, pirates, the Beatles. Maybe I don't remember this one because there were no pictures taken for his second birthday party. We left the moment it began.

We heard the first guest: It was his best friend, Coleman, with his parents. At last! Julian ran out to see them. As soon as he reached them and knew that the party was really going to be now, he turned and ran toward the house, a blur of blond. I turned away to reach for a bowl of chips to bring outside. Then I heard the wail, one of those screams that follows a too-long delay of breath after the thunk of a crash.

Then blood. Blood was pouring out of his mouth. I dropped the bowl and ran. Held him. Felt his blood soaking through my shirt. Brought him inside. Tried to calm him. Get a towel! I don't know what happened! Calm him. He is arching his back. He wants me. He doesn't want me. People are coming in. His grandfather, my father-in-law, laughs. It's one of those tales we'll tell, he's already thinking. OUT! My mother shoos my father-in-law with a gentle arm behind his back. My own father, Julian's other grandfather, slips up the carpeted stairs. There is nothing he can do.

We apply ice, and things begin to slow. His face is red from blood and tears and fear and rage. He is on my lap all this time, all these four minutes, maybe five. I can see: His tongue is still whole, but his lower teeth have gone all the way through his lower lip. His father, by nature so calm, raises his voice. Fucking shoes! He yanks the brand-new navy blue sandals from Julian's feet.

And I'm thinking, is it bad enough? Is this swelling gash across his lip the break in his line, the empty section in his palm? And as soon as the thought comes to me, I know it isn't. It's going to be worse.

Next page | Watching Julian's body fly in a great arc on the trapeze