Sonya days

Literary Review, Wntr, 2005 by Jamie Schwartz

I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing as I turned out of the juice aisle towards frozen foods. I smacked into something. A three-year-old boy was sitting next to my cart, his lip quivering. He wore denim overalls, with no tee-shirt underneath. His tiny nipple poked out from behind the strap. "It's too cold for him to be wearing that," I thought. "His mother must be crazy." A tall woman was running towards me, her beige trench coat flapping behind her like a cape. I approached the boy, holding my hands out to help him back onto his feet, and dust the packing hay off his behind. "Oh no, are you okay honey?" I crooned. As I bent down, he crossed his arms in front of his face as if I was about to hit him.

"It's okay ... it's okay," the mother assured me as she swiped him off the floor. Her brown curls were wild. "You should watch where you're going." Her smile was crooked. As she rushed away, her elbow bumped my cart. I caught it just before it veered into a pyramid of crushed tomatoes.

When I rolled away, I was shaking. I wished that I could make friends easier. I'd had Sonya for a while already and I didn't know any other young mothers. When I was pregnant, women with shining faces and swollen abdomens, women that I'd never seen before would come up and touch my stomach. "How far along?" they'd ask, and then they'd tell me how far along and we'd discuss private matters: our doctors, our sonograms, our uteruses, in the middle of the department store or the parking lot or wherever we happened to be.

After I had Sonya, it wasn't the same. I'd walk her down the street in a covered carriage and people would smile politely and move out of the way as I passed, but nobody wanted to talk anymore. I had the feeling that I had fooled everyone while I was pregnant, but once they saw me with the baby in my arms, it was obvious that I didn't deserve her, that I wouldn't take good care of her. I knew the mothers of the other children in Sonya's class didn't like me. I imagined them standing in a semi-circle in my living room later that afternoon. Ginny Conway in a hideous pink polo-shirt and ill-fitting beige shorts, covering her mouth with two fingers as she whispered about how I hadn't even gotten a clown or a puppeteer. "No wonder Sonya is such a behavior problem. Did you hear Ms. Elliot found her under a table with Justin Thompson? Neither of them had pants on. Can you imagine?"

My stockboy was in frozen foods when I arrived. He was talking to a young girl. A blue cropped top showed off the lump of her belly button, which poked out as if the tube had just been tied. He pinned her to one of the freezers, leaning one hand on the glass, next to her head. She looked down at the thongs on her feet, smiling as he whispered in her ear. I could imagine what he was saying as he traced her collarbone with his finger. I felt nauseous. She couldn't have been older than fourteen. She even looked like Sonya, with blond hair that only curled at the ends. I was disgusted by kids, such morons.