"Patterns" by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

Patterns

I crouched in the bathtub with all my clothes on, peering through the blue plastic shower curtain that was printed with fish. The fish could swim when I moved the curtain, but I stayed very still and so did the fish. My mother was in the sewing room. All morning I had watched her through the glass panes of the French door to her bedroom. She was at her Singer, her slippered foot on the pedal as she fed shiny yellow fabric through the up and down needle. When I turned the cut glass doorknob, it wouldn’t budge. I knew she had locked me out again, but I still tried. 
“Mommy, Mommy,” I called, my nose up against the pane.
“You have your dolls,” she said. “You have your crayons. You can push around your corn popper and put faces on Mr. Potato Head.”
I was four. My big sisters, nine and twelve years old, were at school. I wanted my mother to want to play with me. All those photos in the album of her smiling while she pushed them on swings and walked hand-in-hand with them on the boardwalk. I wanted her to play with me even though I was the third daughter and she was tired of raising little kids already with a husband who was at his grocery seven days a week and when was it her time to do what she wanted like making dresses from Butterick patterns or better yet shopping at B. Altman’s without a whining kid?
This morning she had left ginger snaps out for me on the kitchen table. I brought the ginger snaps into the tub and sucked on them.
Maybe I’ll get bum knees like my grandma from crouching in the cold tub. My mother was never going to come looking for me. I was about to get out when the Singer stopped humming. Soon I heard my mother’s backless slippers slap into the living room, then the kitchen, then the bedroom where my sisters and I slept. She came into the bathroom, looked around, but never suspected that I was in the tub. I clamped my hand over my mouth and tried not to breathe.
She went back to the kitchen. “Rochelle, Rochelle,” she called, first in a regular calling voice, then shouting.
I stayed hunkered in the tub, my lips pressed together. I wanted her to know how it was for her to call my name like I called “Mommy, Mommy,” and not get an answer.
Then I heard the front door open and slam shut. I climbed out of the tub. I opened the front door and called out for her, but she didn’t answer. I looked out the window and saw her running up and down the street. It was June. The window was open. Through the screen, I heard her still shouting my name. I was in no hurry to call to her. I knew when she got back I’d get a spanking I wouldn’t forget. I stood there, thinking of what it meant for the cat to have your tongue and if she would believe that was why I hadn’t answered even though we didn’t have a cat.

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro has published essays in New York Times (Lives), Newsweek, and in many anthologies and magazines. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in such magazines as The Moment, MacGuffin, Entropy, Foliate Oak, Storgy, Permafrost, The Ohio Review. One of her poems was nominated by Spry Magazine for Best of the Net 2018 and another for a Pushcart by Schuylkill Valley Review. She teaches writing at UCLA Extension. Find her at: http://rochellejshapiro.com @rjshapiro

Headshot: Courtesy of Rochelle Jewell Shapiro

Photo Credit: Staff