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Baby Blue
by Gavin
McCall
But as she stood over her
daughter, her fat-faced, ever-sleeping daughter, Mina believed that there
was nothing she could do to harm her. She wasn’t worried about herself,
but she did fret over how the rest of the world would treat Sadie. She wondered how Sadie would view
the world and where she would place herself in it, a half-Japanese,
half-haole child of an ex-feminist and an ex-hippie army brat. Mina stood in the small,
freshly-painted room, watching her daughter shift in her sleep, reaching
out first with one chubby hand and retracting it, then extending the
other. She stood in the room
lit by the soft, yellow glow of the early morning sun watching her baby
shift in her sleep and she wondered if she had ever been looked down on
like this twenty-six years ago.
Mina wondered how many summer mornings her mother had wasted as she
was wasting this one, before running out to clean hotel rooms for the rich
haoles in Waikiki.
Perhaps that was the reason mom
hadn’t wanted to meet Ryan’s family, Mina thought – maybe she thought
they’d remind her too much of her former employers and all the tourists
whose hotel rooms she’d disinfected for thirty years. Maybe she worried that she wouldn’t
fit in, standing in a corner in a dusty dress, smiling politely as she
always did. Of course Ryan
had explained to his parents that Mina’s mother was too frail to fly out
to California or attend the party they’d thrown in town for her work
friends. But Mina knew they
had to wonder how bad her health could be to make a mother not attend the
wedding of her youngest daughter.
Of course, mom had never told her
she wouldn’t come to the wedding, wouldn’t come to California or to the
party. She hadn’t even
responded when Mina told her she was marrying Ryan. It’s like she’d assumed from the
moment she learned that Mina’s new boyfriend was from California that her
youngest daughter was lost.
That they had taken Mina
from her, finally finished the job the Bryants had started when they set
Dad up with the job in Waikiki, taking them so far from the rest of the
family and all its traditions.
Sadie yawned silently, her mouth
squishing the rest of her already-compacted facial features. Mina leaned over the crib,
studying her daughter’s restless, sleeping form, trying to decide whether
or not she looked like the two pictures she found of herself at that age.
In the first she was lying in
her crib, in some kind of kimono, probably for girl’s day. The second picture, the one Mina
had spent so long looking at that its every detail was now ingrained in
her memory, was from a little later – at least three years old. She was on the beach, probably in
Those had been all Mina could find
when looking for pictures of herself and her sisters for the wedding slide
show – her mother sitting quietly, too quietly, at the kitchen table. And even though most of her
earliest memories of her father involved him chasing her around with the
camera, somehow the only remaining pictures from her childhood were the
two she’d always thought made her look the most
Japanese.
Maybe that was why Mom had kept
them, Mina thought, running her hand along the yellow plastic banister of
the crib. Mom always seemed
to resist anything remotely non-traditional about Mina’s childhood. She hadn’t wanted her to learn to
swim, but insisted on Japanese school every afternoon. She never let Mina go play dolls
at her Filipino girl-friend’s house, and she wouldn’t let her talk to the
haole boys leaning on their bicycles outside the grocery
store.
Sadie shifted, letting out a
mewling whine, and Mina reached down to pick her up, resting her head
against her shoulder. She
looked down as Sadie groped mildly at her mother’s long, wavy hair. She definitely had her mother’s
hair, Mina decided, black but wavy, not at all like the straight Japanese
hair of the rest of her family.
Then Sadie opened her eyes.
She had blue eyes now – they’d
been a light gray only a month ago, when the doctor had told her it was
normal for babies to be born with different eye colors from their
parents. She’d probably have
brown eyes by the time she was four months old, he’d said, since blue is
recessive, so Sadie wouldn’t have a chance to inherit Ryan’s
baby-blues. The Japanese
brown was the stronger trait, the doctor continued. Then he said that Mina might have
blue-eyed grandkids one day, though.
The blue kind of waits and hides in the genes, he’d
said.
It hadn’t been until last week,
when she’d met up with an old law-school friend that Mina had thought much
about her daughter’s eyes.
Despite what the doctor had said, when Sadie’s eyes started to turn
blue she’d just figured she was unusual, or lucky maybe, to have inherited
Ryan’s eyes.
“Mina, I didn’t know you were
hapa,” Chad had said as he bent over Sadie’s stroller outside one of the
downtown Starbucks.
“Hapa?” Mina asked. “I’m not.”
“But she’s got blue
eyes.”
“So?”
“So you’ve got to have some blue
in your family, girl.”
“Why?” Mina asked, getting even
more confused. “Sadie has
Ryan’s eyes.”
“What, you never took biology?”
Chad said. “Girl, blue eyes
is recessive; it needs to get two blue-eyed genes to
manifest.”
Mina hadn’t responded, merely
looked back at Chad blankly.
“You gotta have haole grandparents
or something.” He’d laughed
then. “Either that or they
switched babies on you.”
Mina hadn’t had a response for
Chad then, but the weeks since that conversation had given her an
answer. Haole grandparents,
Mina thought, bouncing Sadie slightly, softly, waiting to see if she
wanted to go back to sleep or not.
No, none of her grandparents had ever left Japan. She didn’t have to wonder about
that anymore, though – Mina had decided where Sadie’s blue eyes had come
from.
Standing in the freshly-painted
nursery looking down at her baby, Mina didn’t have to wonder anymore. She no longer had to wonder why
she didn’t look like her dad, why her mother had always hated her wavy
hair, her double eyelids and now her husband. Mina no longer had to wonder why
her father, a young, low-ranking member of the Hana planting crew had
suddenly been offered an easier, higher-paying job in Waikiki with a
recommendation from the plantation manager, Mr. Bryant. Mina no longer had to wonder why
they’d suddenly moved while Mom was pregnant with her, or why her mother
had always hated haoles, had always been hardest on her third daughter,
the only one she hadn’t planned for. No, Mina only had
two questions left to ask.
First – which of the Bryants was her real dad, and second – how, if
at all, she could possibly begin to heal the wound she’d caused her mother
so long ago by not being born her father’s daughter.
Sadie kicked in Mina’s arms,
impatient to be put down, and she put her back in the crib. Sadie lay silently, tonguing her
bottom lip and staring up at her mother, and Mina looked down at her.
Blue up to brown, brown back
to blue, and all the while, a grandmother’s hidden history floated
silently in the space between them.
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