Kate Moses - Cakewalk: A Memoir

ALSO BY Kate Moses

Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath

WITH Camille Peri

Mothers Who Think:
Tales of Real-Life Parenthood

Because I Said So:
33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men,
Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves

Give a little time for the child within you
Dont be afraid to be young and free.
Undo the locks and throw away the keys
and take off your shoes
and socks, and run, you.

Run through the meadow and scare up the milking cows
Run down the beach kicking clouds of sand.
Walk a windy weather day, feel your face blow away
Stop and listen, love you.

Be like a circus clown, put away your circus frown;
Ride on a roller coaster upside down
Waltzing Mathilda, Carrie loves a kinkajoo,
Joey catch a kangaroo, hug you.

Dandelion, milkweed, silky on a sunny sky,
Reach out and hitch a ride and float on by;
Balloons down below blooming colors of the rainbow,
red, blue and yellow-green I love you.

Bicycles, tricycles, ice cream, candy
Lolly pops, popsicles, licorice sticks.
Solomon Grundy, Raggedy Andy
Tweedledum and Tweedledee, home free.

Cowboys and Indians, puppy dogs and sand pails,
Beach balls and baseballs and basketballs, too.
I love forget-me-nots, fluffernutter sugar pops
Ill hug you and kiss you and love you.

LOVE YOU BY THE FREE DESIGN, 1969

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I HELD MY ARMS UP HIGH, HONEY-COLORED HAIR TUMBLING TO my waist, eyes squinched shut against the scratchy fall of new fabric, and my mother pulled the dress shed made for me all the way down over my head. I was not quite four, and Id been invited over to play for the first time by a child who lived across the street.

It was 1965 in Palo Alto, California, a sleepy middle-class suburb of shiny modern Eichler homes and leaf-shaded cul-de-sacs like the one wed just moved to, full of young hopeful families like ours. My dad was a brand-new lawyer working hard to prove himself at his first job; my mother, whod dropped out of college to get married, was a housewife raising three children under the age of five. People told her she looked just like a young Elizabeth Taylor, she looked just like Jackie Kennedy, and she did, but even prettier. She had wanted to be an artist, her relentless creativity redirected into sewing curtains and clothes for our family, gardening, teaching herself to reupholster hand-me-down furniture, concocting elaborate birthday parties and messy art projects for my brothers and me. That day she was still unpacking boxes and, I suspect, as relieved to have one of us out of the house for an hour or two as she was anxious to make a good impression on our new neighbors.

She brushed my long hair and tied it with a bow to one side, princess-style, then crouched in front of me, curving her elegant hands on either side of my ribs, rocking me playfully and smoothing my dress, which matched the one shed made for herselfmother-and-daughter dresses in red-and-black paisley, rickrack sewn along the hems. And before me, her face: eager, lovely, her wide green eyes coy and glittering, as if she knew some secret shed share eventually, and if I was the lucky one, only with me. Her black hair was so soft and fine it felt like babys hair, softer and far darker than mine or my brothers. Her smile was both excited and encouraging.

Ready, Cis? she asked.

I was named after my mother, but nobody in my family ever called me Kathleen, not once; it is still a name I hardly recognize as my own. I was called Cissy, the sister, though my mother had other roles for me, other nicknames. Youre my Little Mommy, she declared when I brought a damp cloth for her head; shed been crying on our sofa in graduate student housing, pregnant with the baby who became my younger brother, the third baby in three years. You take good care of me, she said, accepting a bite of the cookie I held to her mouth, youre my best friend. I was her best friendId been chosen, I was important. Were the only girls. We have to stick together.

Little Mommy, best friend, the only girl, the sister. Now I was the family ambassador. My mother took my hand and trotted me across our Palo Alto street, swinging my arm under the movie blue sky, the omniscient cameras wide-angle lens capturing the picture-perfect scene of our idyllic neighborhood, our charming family, the beautiful talented young mother and her compliant tidy daughter, the little mommy taking good care.

The neighbor girls name is a blank to me, and I cant recall what we played. What I remember is the two of us lured to her kitchen by the intoxicating odor of caramelized sugar, and finding that her mother had vanished. What remained was a ceramic baking dish on the countertop breathing out hot, honeyed scent. There was a ring of burnt brown paper holding up a mound of what looked like burnished swirls of cloud. And that glorious smell! We leaned in from either side of the counter, perched on barstools on our bare knees, our noses almost touching the crisp edge of the paper.

We knew it would be wrong to eat whatever excelsior thing this was. But we leaned in farther, our toes flexed on the seats of the canting barstools, our elbows on the countertop of that spotless avocado-green kitchen, at first promising each other that we would only have a taste. A cloud of hesitation passed across the little girls face. And this is where the story starts to become mine.

Just one taste, I assured her. Each.

I remember turning toward the sound of the little girls mother pausing in the doorway to her kitchen, the sharp sound of her gasp: a laundry basket under her arm, her eyes as wide as mine must have been. The neighbor girls hand and my own were wrist-deep in the dish, wiping out the last moist flecks with our fingertips. We had eaten the entire succulent, mellifluous thing with our hands, and wed licked the paper clean, too.

What was that? I was thinking as I burst out the neighbor girls front door and skittered across her lawn, her mother still on the phone shrieking to my mother, my sticky hair flying behind me and my stiff new dress flapping, my mother erupting out of our house across the street and running toward me, a look of abject mortification on her heart-shaped face.

I knew I had been very bad. I knew I was going to be punished, maybe even spanked. But I didnt care. Whatever it was, whatever that voluptuous thing was, it had been worth it.