EXCERPT, WHEN ELLIE WAS LITTLE: OUR LIFE IN HOLIDAYS, PUBLISHED 2011 BY NORA GLASS
Father’s Day
When Ellie was little, Paul bought her a chemistry set. I thought she was too young. She was only nine, after all, and some of the chemicals were labeled corrosive or acidic. One was even toxic. I pictured her adult hands pocked with scars from a childhood chemistry accident. But Paul had a chemistry set when he was young, and he had clear memories of the way cells had looked under the glass. He’d loved the power of it—suddenly, he said, you were God, and everything on the slide was a world you’d invented and you controlled.
Of course, I told him he was wrong. If I knew one thing, I knew I controlled almost nothing. That was the year of things that crapped out—my old Civic blew its head gasket on the way home from Costco, the washer threw a hissy fit and flooded the kitchen, the refrigerator started smoking like a Vegas stripper, and the furnace wouldn’t heat the house above subglacial temperatures. Paul, in the meantime, had a newish wife, a tract house with the tags still attached, and a cell phone that magically never rang when I called. (Sorry, must have been out of range again.)
For Father’s Day, Paul sent Ellie the chemistry set.
She’d opened the package and then stared at it. I thought maybe she was scared of it, as I was. But it was my job to ignore that, to push the fear into the pocket I’d made in the lining of my soul, right between my ribs and lungs. “Oh, isn’t that fun,” I said, but I knew I had to do better than that. “Your dad loved his old set. He blew things up with it.” He hadn’t needed a chemistry set to blow apart our family.
Ellie had looked confused. “But I thought I was supposed to get Daddy something for Father’s Day. Not the other way around.”
We’d been planning on making the drive out to Modesto to see him that Sunday. That was my gift to him, as the father of my child: to deliver to him the daughter he couldn’t quite find the time to see on a monthly basis. But then he’d sent the gift (Friday overnighted, express Saturday delivery) with a note that said, “To My Best Ellie, Happy Father’s Day from Your Pop.” I got a text that said, Sorry, Bettina made plans with her folks, kiss Ellie for me.
“This is cool,” said my daughter. She took the box to the shed, a small room attached to the garage that smelled perpetually of putty. It had been Paul’s workshop, where he kept his wood tools and saws and routers. I didn’t go there often. But Ellie loved that little space. “Don’t come in, Mama. No, come in an hour. I’m going to experiment until then.”
Sixty minutes later, I found Ellie sitting on the little blue chair in front of the microscope, a bloody tissue pressed against her finger. Her smile was radiant. “Mama!” she said. “Give me some of your blood. I’m going to see if we’re related.”
I didn’t ask a single question. I just used the same safety pin she must have stolen from my sewing box to stab myself. She pressed my thumb to the glass slide. We spent the next hour watching our blood cells squirm and wriggle, comparing the shapes we found to the other slide.
Eventually the cells slowed. “They’re dying,” Ellie confided.
I shrugged. “It happens.”
Ellie nodded gravely. “I wish I had some of Dad’s blood.” She looked at me hopefully. “Do you have some?”
“Not on me, no.” I was only a little disappointed.
“Oh.” She looked devastated. “Then I could have seen that we’re related.”
“Trust me, kiddo. You are. Besides, how can you tell, just from looking at the way our cells move?”
She pointed at the eyepiece. “I can see parts of the blood that dance the same, but that’s normal. You’re my mom. With a dad I bet it’s different. I just wish I could test it, that’s all.”
I was both tickled and dismayed. I was Mom. I was unnoticeable, an extension of her body, a part of her brain. I was normal. I was just me. Paul was practically a mythical creature, someone who blew through Tiburon on his way to occasional meetings in the city, dropping off gift certificates and promises that almost—but never quite—got fulfilled. But Paul’s was the blood she wanted to watch more than plain old mine.
She wore out that chemistry set. I had to buy refills of litmus papers, glass slides, and filter funnels. She stopped using it only after a seven-year-old neighbor boy broke in while we were at the grocery store and dumped all the chemicals into one aluminum bowl to see what would happen. Nothing did, really, and the only damage was to the concrete floor (a permanent blue stain) and to Ellie: the magic of the set from her father was gone. She didn’t play with it again.
Once, though, before that happened, when she was in fifth grade, I couldn’t find her for bed. I thought the shed would be too cold for her to be in that night, but there she was, head down on the chemistry table. She’d been reading Little Women (her first time) and she’d fallen asleep, the book splayed open next to her. Quietly, I craned my neck to see what page she was on. Mr. March had just come home from the war, surprising everyone. Amy had cried all over his shoes, Beth had walked, and Mr. Brooks had accidentally kissed Meg. It was the perfect place, the happiest part of the book. I wanted to take it from her, so she wouldn’t keep reading. So that would never change.
I was still so angry. I didn’t want Paul—he’d broken my heart when he left, and I’d spent all the time I wanted to spend crying over him. But Ellie was stuck with him, and because of her, I was stuck with him, too. For the rest of my life, I’d have to include him in graduation photos, and his name would be on her wedding announcement, and I’d always have to remember the day he told me he’d met someone else.
I didn’t want her to be reading Little Women, pining over Mr. March.
I didn’t want her playing with the chemistry set, longing to test Paul’s blood.
But the next time he showed up to take her to ice cream (an hour—an hour with his daughter!), I made him smear some blood on a slide for her and I didn’t offer to open his vein for him.
And when she finished Little Women, she—like I had—reopened it and started it all over again. “Won’t you be sad about Beth a second time, chipmunk?” I asked.
She flipped another page, barely looking up at me. “It’s worth it.”
Pain was worth it. My heart hurt as I looked at her—her ears shaped like his, her mouth a copy of mine—a perfect mix of her father and myself.
Ellie was right. As usual. It was, and is, completely worth it.