by Angela Townsend
Arms Full
To the naked eye, my mother did not appear to be a bodybuilder. Fellow patrons of Thrall Library saw a dancer in Reeboks with a passing resemblance to Audrey Hepburn. She jangled in the kind of rock-candy earrings an anthropologist might wear.
But my mother was capable of carrying hardcovers across a great distance. Our cotton bags, funny with the faces of Shakespeare and Freud, complained at the seams. The books jostled like adolescents. My mother shouldered the load. Her paisley blouses did not tear when my heroine turned into the Hulk. She never tried to steer me towards softcovers. Thrall Library would let me take out fifteen books, and the choice was mine. The Summer Olympics was poorer for my mother’s absence from the weightlifting team.
We sang all the way home, my mother delegating disc jockey duties to her only child. Ladies at church asked if I longed for siblings, but I was not in want. I shimmied in a Subaru the color of strawberries, with a best friend who remembered all the words to “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and “How Great Thou Art.” Our favorite was the “Flashdance” soundtrack. Sometimes we would dance like “Maniacs” in the driveway when we got home.
But there were books to bring upstairs, and a congress of plush animals who had waited a week for new stories. They included several sets of twins. My father was incapable of purchasing a single unicorn or beady-eyed toad when there were only two left in the store. I arranged them in an open-air amphitheater, all ears for “Rainbow Fish” or “Love You Forever.”
Some books were too important to keep borrowing. My mother bought copies of “Love You Forever” for upstairs, downstairs, and my grandparents. “The Runaway Bunny” turned my mother and I into liquid linguini, weeping until I couldn’t tell where her arms ended and mine began. My grandfather was proud to provide “The Lorax.” My grandfather exceeded The Lorax in integrity. He had to promise me that he would never disappear like The Lorax did.
“Grover’s Big Book of Monsters” lived between “The Wind in the Willows” and “Watership Down.” “Tailchaser’s Song” was the first book my father bought me with no pictures at all. We drew the feral cat called Eatbugs on muslin, and my mother sewed him to life. He was not the first friend we could not purchase. My mother drew Mr. Tumnus the Faun with eyes like olives and stuffed him fat with quilt batting.
My father was not handy. If he attempted to change a fuse, the breakers spat fireballs. But I saw him carry a hundred dollhouse glasses of grape juice in a brass tray at church. They were real and heavy in concentric circles. My father was stronger than he looked. He learned to build bookcases so we would not run out of real estate. He built until we ran out of walls.
I never asked for a television in my bedroom. I did not know I should want one until sleepover friends asked where it was. I asked if they wanted to take turns reading “Little Heroes” out loud. My mother had saved up for the entire series. I reread them like a psalter. I cried every time Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. I made Emily Dickinson my imaginary friend and played with her in the backyard. My mother said she was really there. I had a dream about Gandhi and Cochise playing baseball in heaven. My favorite was Harriet Tubman, leaning through the cover with an outstretched hand. I wanted to squeeze her hand. Harriet did not have parents down the hall, or bookcases to the ceiling. She set everyone free anyway. I read her volume until the pages turned soft. I asked God to hug her for me.
I wanted to read the books downstairs. I lay on my back and memorized the titles. A solemn Bill Moyers had “A World of Ideas.” He looked tired, in glasses as huge as my father’s. Hans Küng had dots over his name and lots to say. My mother’s poets had names that rhymed with “spaghetti,” or claimed that “The Moon is Always Female.” Our very best friends, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, lived both upstairs and downstairs. I told my father I wished I could be as beautiful as an Elf, but I really wanted to be a Hobbit. He confirmed that we were all Hobbits in this house, although my mother had some Elven heritage.
When I was sick, my mother gathered art history books. We galloped through centuries on scavenger hunts for slaphappy faces and floppy bellies. My fever broke as we disintegrated into laughter. There were lookalikes of Sesame Street’s Ernie from Thessalonica to Uttar Pradesh. Once I fell asleep, my mother carried me upstairs, even though I was five foot two. I woke up in my loft bed with the custom brass barrier, to prevent a fall from great heights.
I did not see my parents the night they filled their arms with pecan sandies and grape concentrate. They banished all the simple carbohydrates while I slept. We had been conversational with Type I diabetes from “The Baby-Sitters Club.” My diagnosis demanded fluency. We parsed the glycemic index and fingered the atlas for the pancreas’s Isles of Langerhans. I practiced injections on the muslin Bilbo Baggins.
My father kept “The Joslin Diabetes Manual” on his nightstand. My mother referenced “The Dictionary of Bible Verses” until the “Mercy” section turned soft as cotton from her touch. When I asked why God gave me diabetes, she said “it was in our book.” It was something other than an answer, but its arms could bear the weight.
Author Angela Townsend graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. She is a three time Best of the Net nominee and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, CutBank, Pleiades, SmokeLong, and Terrain, among others. More of her work can be found on her website https://belovedmoonchild.wordpress.com.
Artist Patrice Sullivan lives and works in Phoenix, AZ. Sullivan received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, her MFA from University of Pennsylvania and taught painting for 25 years at Colorado State University. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally.
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