They are on the table right inside the front door, the Holy Family under their balsa wood and rough twine shelter, caught, still, all eyes on the baby and the baby's eyes on Heaven. Lisa's daughter reaches out to touch the baby's fat stomach. It has peach skin, wide blue eyes and hands folded in prayer. She hesitates, sensing her mother's warning before it comes, her own plump hand hovering over the scene, then she very gently puts one finger on the infant savior's belly and lets it rest there. Her gaze, when she looks up at her mom, is declarative. She gets everything there is to get. The figures are important, maybe even magic, but not ours, not for us to be exactly in awe of.
She is almost three, a baby herself, but she has sentences and ideas and enough small motor skill to make the letters of her name with a fat crayon. Soon, Lisa is sure, she will be reading. Just like you, her mother Alice says, whenever they come to visit. She is just like you.
Lisa knows that isn't true. Franny's brain is on fire in a way Lisa's never was. She takes in everything.
"Mom?" Lisa calls into the dim light of the apartment beyond the entry hall. "Alice?"
She hears shuffling. Her mother is getting out of bed. Lisa puts a hand on Franny's little shoulder. She is still wearing the wool coat she needed in Boston. The back of her neck is damp. It was a long flight and Lisa feels suddenly confused. Parenthood has done this to her, made her indecisive, sometimes blank. As if she has been asked a trick question. Who to help?
"Sweetheart," she says, trying to move Franny into the living room, "Come take your coat off and I'll go help Grandma."
Franny resists. She is touching the head of a donkey now. Very carefully, she tests the plaster straw under the baby.
It looks to Lisa disturbingly like a campfire set with the baby at its center. Why hadn't she ever noticed that before? "Francis, move. Those things are not for playing with."
Her daughter withdraws her hand and looks up.
It's just because she understands so much that she looks older, Lisa believes. She is just a toddler, still. Taking it in but not judging. It just feels like judging.
"Lisa," her mother calls. She is trying, Lisa knows, to sound gay. The vocal cords are strained, the words punctuated with gasps. "I'll be right there."
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Truly, I loved all your submissions this week. And I had a difficult time choosing between this one and the one you wrote in response to Excuses. What I love about this one - in addition to the truly excellent writing - is how you create so much tension, and tell us so much about these mother/daughter relationships in such a deceptively simple scene. I will never look at a manger scene the same way again.
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