Lindsay Purves

Concept Analysis

Comfort

When you think of comfort, you think of a dark place. You think of a place that wraps you in its arms. A place where no one can touch you.

You’re six months pregnant when you stop wearing your grandmother’s necklace. You feel dirty wearing it because the necklace means something nice. It was a nice moment when she gave it to you. “Passed it on,” she said. The chain is delicate and gold; there is a single chocolate pearl that hangs from a gold setting. It stands out more from your white jewelry box on your nightstand than it does on your skin.

You walk through the halls at school without the necklace while the other girls whisper. It’s not like you’re anything special. There’d been pregnant girls younger than you. Just no one expected it of you. You are quiet, good at art. You are only fifteen.

Love

Tyrone walks you to school every day. He waits for you at the curb by the mailbox. Your mother used to yell and bang a spoon on a pot if he came any closer. She didn’t realize she was just driving you away. That you would rather be with him than hide away from the world with her.

Tyrone hardly acknowledges your growing belly. He just asked what was wrong one day. “I’m pregnant,” you said. His face fell, and he looked at you sideways. You said you weren’t sure he was the father. He ignores that. You figure he’ll find out soon enough about the thing that happened to you.

Tyrone diligently walks you to school every day. He sits with you at lunch. He holds your hand in the hallway. He acts like none of this is happening, like you’re still his girlfriend. You sit alone with him in the corner of the cafeteria for lunch and he talks to you about his job at Krystal Burger. He talks about being able to buy a better car. You just listen and eat your fries. Your mind is blank and white.

Biology

You were already three months pregnant when you went to the doctor. You didn’t know what was wrong when you were sick all the time. When it’s time to get a sonogram you marvel at the picture on the screen, the thing moving around, the thing that is inside of you, touching the insides of your stomach, her heart beating quickly.

You find out it’s a girl, so the line of mothers and daughters will continue. You have no conception of what happened inside your body for this baby to be formed. Sometimes you wonder what it was that made you pregnant. Tyrone had been your first. It had happened in the back of his mother’s car after the 4th of July. You’d repeated the act several times after, but you didn’t really enjoy it. You felt it was something that was supposed to happen, not something to be enjoyed.

You guessed it could have been Tyrone’s, but somehow you knew it happened during The Storm. You and Tyrone’d used a condom. You figured that condom was fail-proof which was why Tyrone was so perplexed. You didn’t discuss the condom’s failure with him, just went on, more quiet than usual, trying to imagine what it would be like to give birth, to take care of someone. You are used to it since you have five siblings, but this would be all yours.

Motherhood

You think of how to tell your mother. You imagine the fury that she will unleash. The rage that she will release upon you.

On the evening after you talked to the doctor, your mother is boiling spaghetti in the kitchen. You stand in the doorway, toes on the peeling linoleum and twist and retwist your hair. “What is it girl?” Your mother asks from the stove. “You’re making me nervous.”

You blurt it out, and she doesn’t seem surprised. She just stops stirring the sauce. She’s crying when she turns to you, but you feel like she knew all along. She tells you to go to your room and that she’ll call you for supper. You can hear her banging things in the kitchen. Every so often it gets real quiet. You put your ear to the door of your room and then things start banging again. You hug a pillow and sit in silence, dreading dinner.

Your mother will later cry when you find out it’s a girl. She won’t want this to happen to you because it happened to her. She had you when she was in high school.

At dinner your mother doesn’t talk to you. She laughs with your brothers and sisters as they tell her about their days. You find yourself smiling at their stories, the carefree way they talk about people and ideas and what they want to do. Your smiling stops when your mother throws you sharp glances.

That night, in your pink diary, you write about what it means to be a mother. The doctor told you that the baby’s development starts as soon as she is conceived. You’re afraid of what you’ve already done to her.

The first thing you write on your list of good mother qualities:

1. Forget The Storm.

2. Don’t trust men.

3. Don’t lie.

You thought this looked more like a list to be a better person. It had nothing to do with the baby. It only reflected the fears about your own self that now was becoming so complicated and dark.

You add to the list:

4. Work hard to buy diapers and food.

That seemed more like something a mother would do.

Art

You’ve been going to your art teacher’s house after school, but you stopped after The Storm. You wiped brushes with turpentine and organized them by size. You’ve learned the different lengths and widths of the expensive-looking brushes, handles in shiny wood and the yellow-whiteness of the hairs. You like the way they become one the first time you get them wet.

Your art teacher talks with her back to you. Sometimes you are entranced by the orange or black lines she sweeps across a canvas. She swings her red hair around her shoulders in single movements, turning her head quickly to make sure you are listening. Her face is small and fine though the rest of her body is stretched long and graceful. You think of how pretty you’d be if you had that body instead of the short thin one you are stuck with. “See how blending these colors makes this lovely orange?” she says holding out a wooden palette where she has been mixing heaps of yellow and red paint. “You’re going to have to practice this if you’ll ever be an artist, Tanisha. Make sure to draw and paint for at least an hour every night when you leave here.”

The art teacher says she picked you for this job, this apprenticeship as she called it, because you show promising talent. At school, the teacher leans over your easel, her long red hair spilling over her shoulders. She makes thoughtful “hmms” at your work. You line the walls of your room with paintings at home. When your work hangs in the art room next to your classmates’, you can tell something is different. You think it’s in the colors. You’ve always loved colors.

You’re skeptical about the job at first because you’ve never heard of it and no money is involved. The red-haired teacher is relatively new, though. She’s not from the neighborhood. She comes in from a nice neighborhood in town because your school needs help. She says she does it every year.

She invites you to her house three times a week to clean her brushes while she teaches you things about art. At first, you love these visits. The studio where she works is a small shed in the back of the garden. It is a wooden room all around and the weak September light makes everything white and clean.

When the art teacher thinks you are cleaning brushes, you are really looking around the room. The room is full of stuff; you think there will never be time to look at it all. You pick up wooden boxes that have secret openings, plaster masks that line the windowsills, cacti in clay pots, mason jars full of buttons and pins. Sometimes the teacher tells you to pull down a huge art book from the bookshelf. She tells you what page to turn to. She talks about paintings from memory.

You don’t tell your mother because you know she will not approve. You tell her you are staying after school for a special SAT class.

Violence

After a while, the art teacher becomes too busy to take you home in the evenings. She asks her son to do it. You are afraid of her son. He is also red-headed, big and freckly. You don’t understand a lot of the things he says. It’s like he speaks a different language. Slowly you become more comfortable with him.

He wears jeans, flip-flops, and fancy scarves, aviator sunglasses and a pea coat even though it is August. He has an old Volvo. It is dark green and the seats tan leather. It is in good condition, but people in your neighborhood would laugh at a person for having this car. He seems to think it is cool.

You come to enjoy these drives. You talk about music, about things you wouldn’t normally talk to people at school about: art and books. You don’t read much but he tells you about books he reads. He tells you about art showings in town. He often invites you but you always make an excuse.

Sometimes when he drops you off, you wonder why he talks to you; why he doesn’t protest driving to your neighborhood where you’re sure news of nightly shootings reach his oak-lined streets. You examine yourself in the mirror, peering into your face, looking for something you’ve missed, looking for some answer there. You are not objective enough at fifteen to see that you are pretty.

One night, it is storming. You worry about driving in it. The streets don’t drain so well in some places. Both of you strain, looking through the windshield into the darkness. You don’t think it’s strange when he pulls onto a dark road in your neighborhood. You think he just wants to get out of the rain. But once the car is stopped, he pulls you to him. He forces himself on you but you don’t tell him to stop. You just look out the rain-wet window up into the trees, shiny from the lights of cars passing by. You cling to his back with your long fake blue nails. Finally you relax but vaguely wonder what the drivers of the passing cars think, what they imagine the green Volvo is there for.

It feels nice what the art teacher’s son is doing, but it was never a question. Something feels wrong inside your chest. You try to squirm away, but the art teacher’s son grips your wrist. He doesn’t want you to get away. The side of your face is wet where he’s been rubbing his mouth methodically, in tune with the movements of his hips. The back of your head hits the protruding lock on the door.

The next day you will have a bruise on your wrist. You will wear cheap plastic blue bangles to cover it up.

You won’t sleep much that night because there will be a fight at the house next door. Two men will be shouting at one another. A woman will tell them to calm down, “Let’s figure this out.” You will shiver in bed, under your blue comforter. You will imagine one of the men taking out a gun, the bullet finding its way into the walls of your house. Finding your sisters, your mother, you. But you just hear them scuffle, there’s a loud thump which makes you jump, but things quiet after that.

Your heart races when you think of how you’d just lain there, watching the strange August rain on the window, casting shadows on your arms. It hadn’t been bad at first, but it hadn’t happened how it was supposed to. How it happened with Tyrone. It made you feel less a person.

You drift off at some point, dreaming you are being suffocated by wet leaves.

Home

Sometimes, before supper, you stand on your porch in the twilight rubbing your belly. It gets bigger all the time, and it’s almost Christmas. You have time yet. You track the colors in the trees. They change daily, slowly, from brilliant red and orange to brown. Soon they will cover the dead grass, and you and Tyrone’s steps will crunch the whole way to school.

Perhaps they’ll be covered in snow soon. They’re predicting a cold winter. From the trees you follow each of the five houses that surround yours. You circle to the left. The one next door, across from that, across from you, next to that, and next door to you. Each house looks much the same as yours. They are white and brown brick, one story with car ports and simple, two-step porches. The lawns vary in grass coverage and shrubbery. One has a shutter hanging by a corner, all have cracked concrete in the driveway.

You’ve only been in one of these. The one to the right is Ms. Hunt’s, the piano teacher. Your mother used to make you go there before your brothers and sisters came along. She was long dead.

Ms. Hunt’s old house had three chairs and a wooden bucket planter with dead flowers in it. Sometimes people who didn’t live in the house sat out there at night. You often heard their fights from bed. You wondered what happened in that house, what Ms. Hunt’s neat kitchen looked like now.

Reality

For Christmas, Tyrone gets a cell phone. You feel you are drifting farther apart. Christmas Eve, when he brought the book was the first time you’ve seen him since school let out. He says he’d been busy working, but he doesn’t look you in the face.

He gets you a used art book from the library sale for $1. You know because it is written in pencil on the inside of the book. It looks like one from the art teacher’s studio. You are touched because it is the only Christmas present you’ve gotten aside from a bag of candy from your mama. You watched silently from the couch as your siblings opened dump trucks and makeup bags. You didn’t act excited when they show you.

Laughter

After Christmas, your mama starts talking to you again. After supper sometimes she makes popcorn. She even laughs when you make jokes about the teenagers on the TV. She doesn’t look you in the eye, but she laughs. You’ve missed her laugh. It is catching, deep and happy. You don’t laugh yet, but you smile to yourself while she does, stuffing your mouth nervously with popcorn, silently pleased. She will love you again.

But then she doesn’t kiss you goodnight anymore. She just asks you to help her pull out the sofa bed where she sleeps so you and your brothers and sisters can have bedrooms. You have your own room since you are the oldest, but you suspect your mother would take it away from you now if it weren’t for needing a place for the baby.

You wonder if you should tell your mother the truth; if that would change anything. Your mother would laugh at that. You begin to think of ways you could tell your mother about the red-haired teacher’s son so that she would laugh, not just any laugh, but the deep down one.

“He was all legs and freckles, and he drooled on my face.”

“His breath stank like garlic and cheese.”

“He couldn’t look me in the face afterwards, like he was afraid of me.”

Love

In late January, you tell your mother the truth. You tell her what really happened. You tried to make light of it. You thought you better before the baby came out light skinned and red-headed. Your lines didn’t make her laugh like you thought. Her face just went stony, like when she picked up the turkey for Christmas from the holiday assistance people or when the lights went off because she didn’t pay the bill.

But this time her face doesn’t change as she moves on; it stays like that for days. You worry you’ve done the wrong thing. But after two days of her stony face, she catches you in a hug after school and won’t let you go for almost an hour. You rest your head on her shoulder as she cries. You watch the light change in the living room. You run your eyes over the framed black and whites of your grandmother, your brother and sisters’ plastic toys lining the walls, the sad, but well-kept furniture.

You count four sets of headlights turning into the driveway next door. You imagine the inside of their house, dirty and full of old food containers, maybe drugs, empty beer bottles. You imagine how it probably isn’t nearly as nice as Ms. Hunt’s house or anywhere close to your own. You let yourself sink into your mother and don’t try to comfort her or make you stop crying. You just raise your arms to embrace your mother’s wide, worn out body, and you squeeze her as tight as you can, hoping all the love you can muster pushes into her, it radiates from your belly, to let her know you will help her now, that you are with her.

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