After my daughter was born, my psychic friend determined that Arianna was the reincarnation of my mother, a woman who’d been brought up Catholic and didn’t believe in sex before marriage or in using birth control. My teenage years were like a radio station that played the same commercial without breaks. I was warned to “save myself” and “to be careful,” but wanted to know for what I was saving myself since my father (her husband) had left for the West Coast with his secretary.
According to my younger sister, whenever any of the relatives asked about me, she’d shake her head and say, “I hope God watches over Miriam because I can’t anymore,” which I was relieved to hear. But I hated everything about the church, especially when I discovered at the end of high school that our priest was poking several of the choirboys behind the confessional curtain, including one of my friends.
A few years after I’d moved out, my mother died from a heart attack. I never really got to know her. By this time, I was pregnant and living in a one-bedroom apartment with Marsha, the psychic. She needed someone to help share the rent. Marsha supplemented her living as a housekeeper by doing horoscopes at birthday parties. She said she wanted to move from Boston to study with her guru in Santa Cruz.
“That makes no sense,” I said. “Arianna’s an infant. How can she be my mother?” I looked at my newborn whose head was bigger than the rest of her. I felt like I was holding Rosemary’s Baby, a child who would dictate what I should and shouldn’t do.
“I studied her chart, did the numerology,” Martha said. “It’s as clear as the nose on my face.”
Marsha’s nose was hidden beneath several layers of pancake makeup. She had a lot of black heads. I thanked her and went back into my bedroom. She was letting me have the bedroom until I could find my own place. Arianna began to bawl and wouldn’t shut up until I shoved my nipple into her mouth and she finally fell asleep with her crocheted pink hat slumped to one side like a French beret. Oh Lord. I prayed for a few hours of solid sleep, up and down several times a night breastfeeding the babe, and in my drowsiness, reached for a diaper that happened to be a glass of water. Crash, bang, soak. Things continued like that for several months while I cursed the man who had left with a guitar strapped on his chest hoping to make it big on the college circuit.
I didn’t have time to mourn. Arianna was a little dictator who sapped every ounce of my strength. If I wasn’t feeding her, I was changing diapers. Forget about having time to take a shower. All along I had planned to leave her on a church doorstep or maybe in front of the Emergency Food Bank where a caring soul would feed her from a can of evaporated milk. But then the unexpected happened. Her five fingers curled around one of mine, her toes searched the air like her own reconnaissance system, brown hair marked her fontanel with an airy spiral. I wiped her drool and throw-up and swore that her shit smelled sweet, nursed my daughter beneath the circle of a tensor light. I was falling in love.
Marsha snored from the living room couch.
In her generosity, Marsha had given me three months to find a new apartment because the couch was killing her back. But after the three months were up, she gave me an extension. Very psychic of her. I gazed into Arianna’s face and watched her mouth and tongue go to work. We fell asleep. We took baths. We grew up together.
I guess my mother would’ve called me wild, but life eroded me.
Tech firms were hiring anyone who knew how to run a routine. I’d signed up for an online course in computer programming and began picking up assignments. Slowly, I got contracts, even basic medical benefits.
Later on, Arianna blamed me for not having a father. “Who was he? Do you have his number? Do I look like him?”
“I can’t tell you that, honey. But you have his hands.”
“What does that mean?” She had slender fingers that reminded me of her father playing a Richie Haven song. “If you told me I have the same color black hair, or that my hazel eyes were shaped like his. But instead you talk about hands.” She turned away in frustration, a 16-year old who mostly stayed in her room reading graphic novels about alien worlds. “What does that have to do with anything?” She grabbed a banana. “What a dumb thing to say. I’m leaving for the evening.”
“Don’t go. Not yet.”
“Why not? You always think you can tell me what to do.”
The sun flickered through the Venetian blinds. I heard a raven cawing from the top of a pine tree. It sounded like my mother. She was laughing.