Something big was going on. I could tell. I was no more than seven years old, but when my grandmother showed up at our door with her hat all askew, I knew.
They never discussed real things with me, but fed me instead a diet of fairy tales. I appreciated even then that they were trying to protect me from the anxieties of life, but it's amazing how much truth can be unearthed by pretending to not be listening. They didn't know I knew, but I did; my mother was going to have a baby. I had known for quite some time now.
"Why did Daddy look scared?" I asked my grandmother after my father, wearing a worried face that chilled my heart, had rushed off with my mother to Mercy Hospital. "Mommy isn't going to die, is she?"
"Nonsense, dear," my grandmother said. "She's just going into the hospital for a good checkup. Now you get ready for bed. School tomorrow, you know.
"Okay," I said, playing their game, "good-night, Grammy." Baby for sure by morning, I thought. I hoped it would turn out to be a brother.
Mother always wanted a son. "For your father's sake," she used to tell me, but I knew it was for her own sake, which was okay, except that it made me feel I was letting her down for being a girl. As for my father, I think he liked it fine having a daughter. He often said that all he cared about was that I be happy and healthy, grow up good, and make all A's in school. I hoped he was kidding about the all A's.
Later, as I lay just between awake and asleep, I thought of this little brother of mine. They would name him Jim after my father. This I knew for certain, because I had heard my mother time and again say to my grandmother that she wanted a boy to carry on my father's name. I know now she meant the family name, but at seven, I couldn't have been expected to reason out everything, no matter how much eavesdropping I did.
"You listen here, Jimmy," I whispered to him in the privacy of my warm bed, "don't you think you can come into this house and take over, even if you are a boy, you hear?" That was something that had to be made clear even before he took his first breath. "You can go ahead and be Mommy's son and carry on the name and all that stuff as much as you want, but I'm still Daddy's favorite -- you got that?"
The next morning my grandmother wakened me with an extra loving kiss, and breaking with tradition, spared me any fairy tales...well, almost any. "Your mommy is fine and will be coming home real soon," she said, her arms around me tight, "but she is very sad, so you must be an especially good little girl for her. You see, Jesus sent her a baby boy during the night, and then took the dear little fellow right back up to heaven again. Do you understand what I am telling you, darling?"
Oh I understood, all right. I thought of Jimmy and how mean I had been. There were two things instead of just one to feel guilty about now, and young as I was, I knew it was only the beginning. If it wasn't one thing, it would probably always be another, to the very end of my days, and I would never, ever be free.