Natasha's Tenth Birthday Party (1994)

Natasha's tenth birthday party is on a Saturday afternoon. She invites ten of her best school friends to the party with an invitation she made herself, a string of paper dolls colored and decorated especially for each of her guests. She wears a new dress, a red one with yellow and blue morning glories printed on it. It is a little long and boxy on her to leave room for growing, because I know she will continue to do so for a while longer. She wears a silver spangled party tiara on top of her long, curly brown hair. She tells me she wants to be the queen of her own party.

Cars pull up in front of our house and girls pile out. Natasha squeals and hugs each of her guests as they come in the front door. When everyone has arrived, she and her friends make up games like "Hit Elvis with a Beanbag." Blindfolded, they take turns swiping at the piñata, shaped like a huge star, with a twirler's baton. It seems, after half an hour of battering, to be comically indestructible. Finally a well-aimed blow explodes it and candy necklaces, candy cigarettes in little boxes, Sweet Tarts and shreds of Mexican newspaper go flying everywhere. So does bamboo shrapnel from the piñata's internal armature and all the girls suffer scratches from flying debris. They line up by the bathroom sink, and, kneeling, I sponge cold water onto the little scrapes on their arms and legs. I am afraid their mothers will be angry at me because their children were injured at my daughter's party.

They queue up in the living room to play "Pin the Tail on the Donkey." These ten young girls seem to have special witchy powers, as I know my own daughter does. Even blindfolded and spun around and around to disorient them, they are like a gathering of psychics. By the end of the game, when everyone has had her turn, all two dozen tails are pinned on top of each other in the immediate vicinity of the donkey's behind. Then all the girls troop to the kitchen to sing the birthday song and eat bakery birthday cake with indelible hot pink icing and chocolate ice cream.

It is finally time to open presents. Natasha's father and I give her a silver ring set with her birthstone, the amethyst. She puts it on her ring finger and I notice with a shock the beauty of her long, lady-like hands, her dainty wrists with the little round bones now developing. If I close my eyes I still see her fat, dimpled baby hands, her peachy baby cheeks, her adorable round head, bald except for a curly duck tail in back. Her face seems so beautiful to me as she unwraps her presents, surrounded by the faces of her friends. I can see foretellings of her mature beauty, her cheekbones coming out, her high, pure forehead, her shadowed eyes. And I can see, when she's surrounded by her friends, what they like about her. She's irreverent and funny. They ask her to stick her butt out and shake it in an obscene way when she hugs them to thank them for the gifts -- obviously, she's made this gesture before. She's my serious, sensitive class clown, my Charlie Chaplin girl.

After the presents are all unwrapped, during the final hour of the party, one of Natasha's little friends gets on her nerves. Natasha dramatically announces that she has a headache, turns on her heel, goes into her bedroom and slams the door behind her. In a few minutes, when I go to try to convince her to come back out, I see her two best friends sitting on the edge of her bed where she lies sprawled out, face-down. She's been crying. The two of them are amazingly sympathetic. One of them places her hand on Natasha's shoulder comfortingly and says, "I know exactly how you feel. This happened to me when I was nine."Natasha dries her eyes then and comes out of her room and all the party girls go to the school yard to play.

I am starting to get very tired and I have a headache myself, probably from not eating lunch while preparing for the party. I attempt to clean up the sticky cake and ice cream plates. After a while I look out the front door and see that all eleven of the girls have climbed into the upper branches of a single tall tree, that they are lounging in its forks like panthers. I run out to the street and ask the girls to come down, afraid that someone will fall and break her neck at my daughter's birthday party. Of course, my daughter, the birthday girl, is the highest one, up three stories in fragile March twigs that cannot possibly be strong enough to support her weight. The skirt of her birthday dress billows in the wind.

But the girls surprise me and mind me. They come down. I decide it is time to give them their sacks of party favors and helium balloons on ribbons to keep them out of trouble. They stick the balloons under their clothes and run around the front yard yelling, "I'm pregnant! I'm pregnant!" Natasha's father comes out on the porch, shoots them a weather eye and says under his breath, "Your fathers aren't going to be very happy about that." Then they begin to declaim the stories of their own births, their own histories their mothers have told them, and each of them reenacts her own birth, accompanied by lots of screaming, straining and Lamaze huffing-and-puffing.

I pray that no one's parents drive up at this moment. Natasha tells me she already has the reputation at school for having the weirdest mother, but I am afraid this birthing performance might not sit well with the parents of Natasha's friends. Each of the girls finally gives birth to her individual helium balloon and then they run around the yard cradling bright balloons in their arms, showing their babies off to each other. One of the girls, deliberately, I am certain, works the loop of ribbon that keeps her balloon attached to her wrist down over her knuckles. She stands alone and motionless in the front yard, as if frozen in time, transfixed, her face upturned in anticipation. She allows her baby to slip away from her and float of into the blue, endless sky. When the other girls realize what she has done, they let out piercing shrieks of alarm.