I was so patient with them, telling them the names of things, pointing out to them what was important, what mattered, what should matter. I thought of the way we would be when the babies were older, we would all be young and beautiful together, like sisters, only with me the most beautiful, the most loved. We would all have long hair that I would comb and braid. Our hair would be thick and golden. We would all be the same height, we would all have the hard, concave waists of dolls.

It was a bit like I, as a child, had thought it would be, when E was born. I taught her all the names of things. Everything about her was a gift from me, from my body. I had made her out of nothing. When she got older though I saw already that I was quickly being broken down for parts. I saw also that I was not the one who would choose my useful pieces. My hands, which were only months ago the hands that brought the world to her, which shaped it and allowed it to exist for her, were suddenly only good for sorting laundry, for scrubbing the hardened crust on a forgotten dish. Well and why should anything be any different. Mothers were mothers, whether we were lying down, torn apart, in a heap of scraps, or tall and standing and all in one piece. Either way, the hands that scrubbed the dishes were loving ones.

When I was pregnant with B, I slept all the time, and when I dreamed, I dreamed of girls standing on the edge of a lake, peeling off pieces of themselves like sweaters and sealing them up into neat little packages and setting them on the surface of the water and with a breath, whoosh, sending them away. Sometimes I could see even when I was awake, the surface of a lake covered with tidy floating boxes. Pregnancy does strange things, I was told by my doctor, to the body. He cautioned me that I must smile and behave cheerfully around E, that I must avoid being nervous, that I must avoid eating tuna, that I must avoid undercooked meat.

I braided my hair while I waited for E and B to wake up, even though I was too old to wear it in braids, as if I were a girl. Even though it made me look older still than I was, bringing out the shallow wrinkles at the corners of my eyes, the deepening lines around my mouth. The bruise on my cheek was yellowing, making my face look like a map for tiny boats to sail on, my eyes becoming the inlets or maybe the whirlpools, safe havens, or maybe something else.

Perhaps the braids made me look chic. Perhaps I would wear my hair like this to give the baby gift this weekend. I would of course have to wear foundation to cover the bruise. It was Friday morning, we would have to go tomorrow. M and I and B and E to the apartment on the other side of the lake. It was Friday which meant that M would surely have to come home tonight.