UGLY BABY

by Pam Goldman



“Is the diamond more beautiful than the glass?” My mother questions the man in the bespoke suit as he bends to get a closer look. She likes this phrase. I hear her make use of it over and over as people bend to look at me. It usually happens in Central Park but I hear her say it in other places, too, wherever we stop long enough for people to bend and look. She deploys the phrase as a challenge. And I wonder, who is the diamond and who the glass? These nosey observers assume she is the diamond and I the glass. Anyone would, anyone but me because I know my mother. She is not an obvious woman, and I know what she thinks of me. When she asks a question like the one about the diamond and the glass, people should pay attention. They don’t. Or, they don’t pay attention to her words. They pay attention to her physical self. Men admire her face and her breasts. What the men don’t know: the breasts are for me.

The man in the bespoke suit walks away without speaking a word. Admirers do not listen to my mother. She proffers koans; her words hover then evaporate between her lovely self and the rest of the world. To me, the koans are not koans but lectures. When I have questions, I save them. When I am able to question, she will answer. I know she will because she has been talking to me since I was in utero and once she started, she never stopped.

She tells me things she never tells anyone else. I am privy to her most private thoughts. She says these are not necessarily secrets. “Deeper than secrets,” she tells me.

She warns me. “They will tell you that story about the ugly duckling. I’ve heard it all too many times. Ignore them.”

My beautiful mother was once an ugly duckling. “Life was easier then,” she tells me. “I’m warning you now” she says. “I don’t even know if you understand but just in case.” I do understand. I look forward to the day I can tell her. For now, she loads me with information. She’s lost her baby fat. “Just,” she says. My father would like her thinner yet. “Don’t care to be,” she says.

We leave the park, and she pushes me to the artisanal ice cream shop. It’s one of those places you have to be in the know to find but, being we’re in New York and being we live on the Upper East Side, like our neighbors, we are in the know. The shop is on a side street (she doesn’t mention the number so I don’t know which) and down a little staircase. She buys one scoop of chocolate ice cream. “Avoid those complicated frou-frou flavors,” she advises. “Don’t mess with success.” We stick with chocolate. She dips her finger in the ice cream and pushes it gently between my gums. I don’t eat solid food yet. She would never allow formula. I subsist on her breast and bits of chocolate ice cream. “Chocolate is an important lesson for women,” she tells me.

My stroller does not fit in the door so she leaves it on the sidewalk. My mother frets and constantly turns us toward the sidewalk to check, check, and check until we are safely outside and the stroller is once again in her hands.

Here’s what I know about the stroller. It cost more than the first car she bought, the only car she ever bought, and the purchase occurred long before she moved to New York City and married. No cars for her husband, also known as my father. He prefers the car service.

When she places her chocolate-coated finger in my mouth she says, “Shhhh. Never tell.” No worries, I couldn’t tell anyone anything right now and if I could, I would not. Ever.

She knows the expectations of well-groomed men like the one in the bespoke suit, after they see her face and her graceful body, after they see the expensive stroller, the sumptuous blankets, and the handmade baby clothes. “Beautiful,” my accoutrements tell the world and “lavish.” She bought them at a stylish shop on Madison Avenue. Today, we will abandon that one, she informs me. A friend told of a better shop, tucked away in Nolita. It is another place for people like us, people in the know. “We will investigate, my tiny darling,” she says. “Only the best for you.” She doesn’t want me to think the beautiful things are compensation for, or deflection from, my little homely self. “You are perfect,” she says. And I know I am perfect for her. She tells me everything and so I know she is sincere. At least when she says it to me.

Men bend to look at me. This is how it always happens. They paint on the guise of benign interest in me and disinterest in her to garner her attention. It happens even when she wears no makeup and dresses in sweats from Target. They might stammer and we never know if the inaccessibility of their words comes from her beauty or my unlovely scrawniness. If she wanted, she could make any one of them her next husband. To win her, he would accept a baby like me. He would become the type of man who believes in the ugly duckling. “Don’t worry, Baby,” she says, “we’ll stick with the guy we have.” She means my father. The men say her beauty is a rare thing. She’s heard it a million times. Beneath her conventional appearance, they insert their fantasies. They dream perhaps some day, with the right man, the man bending and fantasizing at that moment, for example, wildness will emerge. About men, she says, “fungible.” They are as generic to her as her beauty is precious to them. She knows their imaginations: public pride, private possession, cocktail party vindication of worth, bedding of their dreams.

I am skinny. Skinny is not admired in babies. In women, yes. Back in the day, not too long ago, when the agency and the magazines and the photographers considered her at the height of beauty, she, too, was skinny. She’s finished with all that. She likes her ice cream. She contemplates French fries.

I am squinty-eyed. She is wide-eyed. “How they torture us,” she exclaims. “Narrow body, wide eyes, the contradictions they impose.” Her laugh is rueful. “Perhaps you need glasses, little one. I’ll take you for an exam as soon as you are old enough. Maybe you will become my little blue stocking.”

About my mother, no one assigns anything blue but her eyes. “Corn-fed” and “natural” was how they described her beauty. In the day, not quite two years ago, they defaulted to clichés of “golden” and “honeyed.” They published stories about her “naturalness” meaning no plastic surgery.

Shopping at Target is another of her secrets. “We will never tell him.” Just like we will never tell him about the single scoops of chocolate ice cream. He wouldn’t care about the ice cream for me. Infant nutrition bores him. Especially for this infant, my unbeautiful self. But commonplace clothing and a commonplace body for his exclusive wife: apoplexy. My beautiful mother found in his desk a glossy advertisement for mother-daughter fox jackets modeled by a perfect woman and a perfect girl. He had folded and folded it to a small square, dreams stockpiled in the event his ugly duckling becomes a swan.

Him? His eyes, like the rest of his features are too close to the center of his face. He smiles a lot in an attempt to counteract his face’s scrunched shiftiness. About me, he bitterly told my mother, “I planned for our child to look like you.”

My father hates when my mother puts me to her breast in public. I have heard him call her “shameless.” She tells me, “He is peeved enough about sharing them with you, he riles at the rest of the world getting a peek.” She laughs at that. “A child,” she says and I don’t know if she means him or me.

We walk through Target and is it my imagination that people gasp at my stroller? In this city, everyone knows what everything costs. Perhaps they assume my mother will buy cheap clothing for me. She buys them for herself. “I like that I can walk in them,” she says.

“What is beauty?” she asks. “A message I don’t control emanates from me and people act a certain way I never intend to provoke.”

My mother tells the story of the ugly duckling and the story of the beautiful dog. Once she had a beautiful, shaggy dog with such an appealing mien that people stopped on the street to admire it. One day as she tied it outside of Zabar’s, a woman came up to her and said, “Don’t.” The woman looked her in the eyes. “Someone will steal her.” I need not worry about would-be miscreants. My mother is always at my side.

After people bend to peer at me in the stroller, they rise abashed at the incongruity between mother and child. The smart ones, usually women, figure out what to say. They talk to me. They say things like, “Well, hello darling.” They avoid cheap words.

Yet another of my mother’s rebellions is taxis. My father reviews the statements from the car service and says, “Why not?” He means my mother deserves the luxury of a limousine. To me, my mother says, “We like impromptu.” Now, she searches for a cab with a hold big enough for the stroller. The first one she hails always stops for us. What my mother doesn’t say: She likes cabbies.

It may be that the hallmark of New York’s most exclusive stores is their lack of accommodation for the city’s most exclusive strollers. The Nolita shop is located on the third floor of a narrow building. The elevator with its brass accordion gate is too narrow for the stroller. She leaves it in the lobby. My mother sighs for the stroller, not for the Target bag secreted in its spacious storage compartment. “I guess it’s safe. We did have to ring into the building.” She holds me tightly. “And you, too, are safe. Too young to thrust fingers into scissoring slats.”

The shop is long and narrow with windows on each end. Light dribbles in. One side of the shop is labeled “Imported” and the other “Locally Sourced.” The saleswoman is small with a blond cap of hair and a short black dress. “Don’t become her,” my mother whispers. I fear the woman has heard but what difference does it make? What could she do? She probably works on commission.

Turning her back on the imported clothing, my mother heads for the wall of the locally sourced and stops, entranced at a blue coverall. She holds it up to me. “Blue, usually so crass, but this is something different.” The coverall is composed of uneven triangles of blue and aqua fabric held together by invisible stitches. The blue and aqua are close enough to be almost the same color but different enough to lend a subtlety that rescues the garment from crassness. In the center of some of the triangles are eyelet cutouts in the shape of stars. Perfect yellow peeks from beneath the cutouts, perfect yellow stars in a soft blue sky.

“A unique piece,” the little saleswoman says. “Inspired by the Kiki Smith window at the Eldridge Street Synagogue.”

My mother’s shoulders straighten a smidge. A piece of the city she doesn’t know. “Kiki Smith? Eldridge Street Synagogue?”

“Just a few blocks off.” The young woman’s accent is vaguely British.

As we ride down the elevator my mother clutches the stylish little shopping bag and presses it against me. As always, when she sees the stroller, she exhales. “Still here,” she says. And then, “Well, the coverall didn’t cost as much as the stroller.” She laughs and chucks me under the chin so I laugh, too. The gray sky comes down as drizzle. She pulls the rain cover over the stroller. She hates this plastic barrier between us.

The cloakroom at the Eldridge Street Synagogue has space for our stroller, the friendly docent assures us.

“I have not been in a synagogue before,” my mother confides. “Is what I’m wearing appropriate?”

“Anything,” the older woman says. She is wearing a skirt of modest length.

As soon as we see Kiki’s window, my mother inhales deeply through her mouth. She holds me closer. The blue of the window is not crass. A huge rose window composed of blue segments and yellow stars dominates the eastern wall. The window’s stars consort with those painted on the walls and ceiling. “Locally sourced,” she says. The varicolored blues of the huge window cohere invisibly. My mother says the words, “locally sourced” and “connections” with wonder. Light drizzles in through fine transparent connectors. The space, though in pale light, is celestial.

We climb the stairs to what they call the women’s balcony. The best view, the docent advised my mother. We are face to face with the window. My mother holds me cheek to cheek. “Baby,” she murmurs. The stars are unconstellations, scattered more like human freckles than the organized heavenly bodies of the firmament. In the middle of the field of yellow five-pointed astronomical stars is one blue, six-pointed star, bigger and with more definition than the others. “Now,” my mother says, “You be the middle star.” She backs us from the window. She says, “The diamond or the glass?”

Pam Goldman’s work has appeared in Colorado Review and LEON Literary Review. She received an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is working on a memoir about her years as a legal services lawyer in the coalfields of Kentucky. She lives in Pittsburgh.