The piping on the red snowsuit was yellow, and on the green snowsuit it was blue: fire-engine red, sunflower yellow, summer-grass green, deep-ocean blue, the palette of preschool, the colors in a set of finger paints. I loved everything about those mail-order snowsuits—the snap-off hoods, the ribbed cuffs—but I especially loved the piping, which ran, as thick as a pipe cleaner, across the yoke of each jacket and down each leg of the pants, like the stripes of a military uniform. Just what I’d have done if I’d sewn them myself. It made the boys look like soldiers from different regiments. The red-and-yellow brigade of the two-year-olds, the green-and-blue brigade of the four-year-olds. I still dream about them—the snowsuits, the little boys.
I sewed my first son his first snowsuit when I was pregnant with him, in the middle of a hard and terrible winter, the ramp-up to Y2K, the much anticipated end of the world. He wasn’t due till the very beginning of April; it would be spring by then, thawed, even blooming. Still, wouldn’t he be cold? He was coming out of me: didn’t he need something to go into? I bought a yard of Kermit-green fleece and a matching zipper, and I stitched for him that sort of star-shaped sack Maggie Simpson wears. (Most of my ideas about parenting came from Marge, fretting beneath her blue beehive.) The zipper ran from the left foot to the right shoulder. I sewed on little flaps for his tiny hands to be tucked into, like letters into envelopes. I tried the snowsuit out on a stuffed bear the brown of the bark of a sugar maple. We named the bear Elly, for Eleanor Roosevelt, and I carried her around the house in her new fleece suit, practicing.
The doctors had to unzip the baby out of me. I couldn’t push. Maybe I didn’t want to, I don’t know, I don’t remember. When I was trying to deliver him, my best friend, Jane, was on her deathbed, more than a hundred miles away. We were historians, counters of years, markers of time, so this spring, twenty years since that day, day of birth, day of death, I opened her computer, to honor the anniversary. We’d bought our first laptops together when we were in graduate school. It had taken her forever to pick out hers. No one hated change more. She dreaded disappointment like a disease. She was also superstitious: she hated jinxing anything with her own expectations. She spent eight months deciding on what kind of a phone to buy when her old one broke—not a smartphone, not a cell phone, mind you; this was a mere landline telephone—and when she got sick we were working on the three-year-long decision of whether or not she should get a dog. Her own decisions paralyzed her, but she was immediate and fierce with her advice to me, which never varied: my chapter drafts were always good, my haircuts always horrible.
Hoặc