The day before the American’s party, the kids and I hit the park.
Martin attacks the swings while Milly and some girl dash around collecting things to organize: leaves, tiny flowers, pebbles. It’s distinctly satisfying to see them play, like watching dogs hurtle across a beach.
In my book, Ántonia is growing up, wearing heels, trailing a pack of girls to the dancing tents that pop up outside town. Her English is excellent; she can read and write and talk to anyone about anything. She’s well known and well liked. But for all her years in America, she is becoming more bohemian, not less. She cooks her mother’s recipes, prefers the old music, doesn’t seriously consider American suitors. Even if she never again feels her native soil push up between her toes, her emotional return to her country is inevitable. People don’t separate from the motherland. Not really.
After an hour, Martin flops over my knees, communicating his total exhaustion. I’m good to go.
“Milly!” I call, lifting a hand to flag her down. She’s arranging a dozen leaves from largest to smallest. “Come on! Time to go!”
She doesn’t hear me, or doesn’t want to.
“Milly!”
Nothing.
“Amelia Tanner, let’s get a move on! Time to go!”
Milly’s new friend points over at me. “Amelia, your mum’s calling you.”
Milly’s head jerks up. I expect her to recoil at the girl’s egregious error, or burst into tears, but she does neither. She smiles and says, “Thanks,” and runs right for me, letting the fiction stand.
We can barely look at each other when she reaches us, but for effect, I put my hands on her shoulders. “You hungry? Your brother tells me he is STARVING.”
“Yeah, for sure.”
If she wants to let some girl think I’m her mother, I say, Go right ahead. Her motherlessness need not figure into every interaction, at least not ostensibly. And anyway, kids do this all the time, even kids whose mothers are alive. The first time I pretended someone else was my mother was on Halloween night in sixth grade.
Allison, Barb, and I were going as Snap, Crackle, and Pop in costumes made for us by Allison’s mom, who loved to sew. She didn’t use patterns or need directions. She made it up as she went along, a Rice Krispies box her only guide.
I was Snap, so I got the striped hat and the white kerchief tied roundly at my neck. Allison’s mom rubbed red lipstick in circles on our cheeks and pinned our hats into our hair. She tied and retied the sashes at our waists until we looked exactly like the cartoons in the commercials. Then she took our pictures—together, separately—until every flash on her cube was shot. She even made us matching candy bags with the leftover fabric. I held up the pillowcase my mom had given me, and we all laughed.
While she was showing us the outfit she made for Allison’s sister, the doorbell rang.
“Oh, girls, I bet that’s a trick-or-treater!”
“I’ll get it,” I volunteered.
When I got downstairs and opened the door, a deliveryman held out an overnight box. “Can you give this to your mom?”
I hesitated, only for a moment, and then accepted the package. “Sure.”
“Great costume.”
“Thanks!” I said, riding a wave of pride. “My mom made it—from scratch!”
I closed the door and headed back upstairs, relieved that Allison hadn’t overheard me owning her mom. I didn’t know what I would have said if she had. I wouldn’t have told the truth, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t have said I wanted to pretend I had a different mom, a zippy mom, the kind who worked all week on my Halloween costume, who set aside a whole day to help me become someone adorable and snappy, who used up all her expensive flashbulbs on me and my friends, instead of a relentless pragmatist who gave me a ratty pillowcase to hold my treats along with a warning about how long I would be grounded if I wasn’t in this house by nine P.M. and not one minute later.