Swallow the Ocean by Laura Flynn Page A

chin comfortably on the top of my head, and I could do the same to Amy. But this summer, Sara had shot up. I was only to her shoulder now. The baby fat on my limbs and belly matched Amy, not Sara. Worse, Sara was growing breasts under there. Already it was getting harder to lure her into our games. She thought she was too old to play dolls with us. I had to make the game particularly intriguing to keep her.
    “The lady at the orphanage is very mean. We have to run away and go west,” I said. Sara and I were in thrall to the prairie. We were racing each other through the Little House on the Prairie books. A trip to the bookstore on Clement Street was one of the few outings my mother would still sanction.
    I seized on the idea of getting real provisions for the journey west and interrupted the game to run to the kitchen. In the hall I heard the radio, Charley Pride singing “Kiss an Angel Good Morning,” and behind that the hum of the sewing machine. I found myself singing along. And love her like the devil when you get back home . My mother kept the radio on and tuned to the country music station pretty much all the time.
    Dishes from last night’s dinner were piled around the sink in the kitchen. Boxes of Wheat Chex and Special K, milk cartons, finished but not thrown away, cluttered the counters. The garbage can overflowed. In the corner tiny flies hovered over the fruit bowl. A piece of bread, toasted but forgotten, waited in the hollow of the smooth silver toaster.
    I got a chair and pulled the boxes down off the shelf. Flour, sugar, and salt don’t rot. I poured out rations in plastic bags and took them back to our bedroom.
    We picked out the two strongest-looking specimens from Sara’s model horse collection. We bundled up all the extra doll clothes, piled in the sacks of salt and sugar, then packed the Little Women in. They stood up ramrod straight in the back of Amy’s circus wagon.
    Sara walked the horses forward. I pushed the wagon. Amy scooted along on her knees in front of us, clearing a path in the hallway. Without my father, there was nothing to impede the messiness of the house. My sisters and I didn’t clean. My mother had always done the housework. We knew she didn’t want things disturbed. The rules were complicated and ever changing, but don’t throw anything away stayed firm.
    We decided to make camp on the shore of the Mississippi River. We had to cross before spring—before the ice broke. The game stalled there because Sara and I could not agree on which state the Mississippi was in. I was a stickler for authenticity and historical detail, so I went to the dining room to ask my mother.
    My mother sat at the end of the dining room table, her head bent over the sewing machine. She wore a white terrycloth bathrobe with a zipper up the front. She’d grown larger during the past year. Her hair curled in around her neck, but not stylishly as it once had; now it was just overgrown. The first gray hairs clustered at her part. I don’t know what happened to the round John Lennon glasses—or the sensibility that chose them—but now she wore glasses with gray plastic rims, the kind that swoop down, telescoping not only her eyes but the skin under her eyes, which had grown coarse and bagged. She’d stopped taking care of herself, but it was more than that. Those few years wrought rapid changes on my mother’s body. Almost overnight she transformed from a striking young woman to the shapeless, ageless person she would remain for the next twenty-five years.
    The room was dim, the shades were drawn, but the little light on the sewing machine illuminated a circle of fabric directly in front of her. My mother’s foot moved steadily up and down on the pedal of the sewing machine. The needle raced, then slowed as she let up on the pedal. She placed her right hand on the wheel to lift the needle, shifted the fabric, brought the needle down again, pressed the pedal, and then set the needle trotting back over