Creative NonFiction: Knead

By Christine O’Donnell

The summer before second grade, my family moved from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, where there was no sales tax and no memory of my dead brother. One night after our arrival, my 12-year-old sister Jeanne was asleep in the bunk bed above me while I lay awake and afraid in our new bedroom. The streetlight shone through the lace curtains, which moved erratically as the fan circulated hot air, casting shadows. I heard a mouse scurry in the gutter outside. Or was it inside the wall?

I got out of bed, opened the door a crack and heard the comforting sound of the television in my parent’s bedroom. Creeping out into the hallway, my bare feet sticking to the floor, I inched my way closer to the light coming from underneath their door. I put my hand on the doorknob and slowly opened it enough to see the grainy black and white image of Johnny Carson doing his monologue. My parents were sitting up in bed on top of the sheets, my dad in briefs and a t-shirt, my mother in her bra and underpants, both laughing at Johnny’s jokes. My father blew his nose into a handkerchief while my mother applied Vaseline to her chapped elbows. I tried to get comfortable sitting in the doorway, but I slipped and made a noise.

“Chrissy, what are you doing up?” My mother’s voice had the familiar ring of annoyance. “It’s too hot, I can’t sleep,” I whined. She turned to my father, “Buddy, put her back to bed,” but I pleaded, “Can I watch the show with you? Just for a minute?” My mother rolled her eyes. “Fine. But you need to stand right next to the bed and watch.” I stood up and leaned against her side of the bed. “Nope, no leaning.” She pleased herself by setting this boundary, but after a few minutes she let me rest my arm alongside her and eventually place my hand on her generous belly. 

My mother was a true beauty, when she was young. Glamorous in the late 40s and early 50s, poised with her form-fitting skirts and coiffed brown hair, she had soft pale skin, high round cheeks, and an unblemished complexion. She wore no makeup other than a signature red lip. At only five feet tall, she weighed barely a hundred pounds when she wed my father and could have passed for a Hollywood starlet. To say, “and then she lost one of her four children, had a baby one year later, and became obese” would be flippant but true. Consumption was a solace for her loss. Growing up, I don’t remember any mention of the boy who died before me. It would be five more years until I found a photo of my older siblings on Christmas morning, holding presents with a brother I never knew. I don’t remember noticing my mother’s weight gain because I can’t remember her body as anything other than the milky yielding mass I touched that night. 

Standing next to her bed, I kept my hand resting on her belly while it jiggled with her laughter. I looked across to watch my father tap his cigarette into the glass ashtray resting on his stomach, which rose and fell with his breath, his mouth half open, anticipating Johnny’s next one-liner. He let out a long, loose smoker’s cough that drowned out Johnny and my mother said, “Buddy, shush, I can’t hear him.” She looked at me then, shaking her head at my father’s unintentional interruption as if to say, “Can you believe this guy?” Seeing them like this, I knew I was getting away with something — coveted time alone with the two people I loved most. 

I began to doze. Absentmindedly, I took a handful of my mother’s flesh and began to squeeze it, knead it. First gently, the softness a salve, the repetition calming. As Johnny and his guests chattered on, she let me knead her with both hands. Her stomach had three rolls, like long loaves of bread. One, two, three, all in a row. Up and down, up and down, I would trace my hands along her mounds of fat. A Purina Puppy Chow commercial came on. All the while, knead, knead, knead, the image of my mother making fried dough on Sunday mornings, the powdered sugar and melted butter waiting at the table. I didn’t look up at her face for fear she’d make me stop. Even at seven, I felt that she preferred my siblings to me, and I wanted to suspend this moment infinitely. As the minutes passed, I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. I rested my head on her warm chest. Soon after, I felt my father scoop me up, like he would when I’d fall asleep on the backseat in the car, then carried me to my bed. I settled my body in the fetal position, my fingers clasped together under my chin, with the smell of my mother’s skin still on my hands.

Christine O’Donnell is an emerging nonfiction writer, currently working on a collection of personal essays. A native New Englander, Christine spent twenty formative years in California, and a decade in NYC before returning to the west coast. After a short career in theatre and a long career in corporate communications, she left both to focus on her writing. She is a recent MFA graduate of Bennington College’s Writing Seminars and has been published in the Cosmic Daffodil Journal. Christine has traveled to 27 countries, is a certified yoga teacher with over 30 years of practice, loves baked goods, and is an excellent mother, friend, sister, and wife.