Dating : Otto

Otto was taken by his curiosity for the universe before him. As the nurse rested the little boy on his mother’s chest, he craned his neck to hear her cooing. His eyes were so big and swallowing that his mother, for a second, forgot herself and the pain that those shiny cinnamon orbs had not seen. He sneezed and farted and for a second, his lips opened, the agitated ripple of disturbed water. His mother and father tensed, thinking that the flatulence might have been so violent that it broke a crack in their glass newborn.

Otto began to smile and then hocked a few times, in what could have only been cough-laughing. His father, Asim, chuckled at his baby’s charming barbarism. The nurse smiled to herself as she flipped through the new mother’s chart.

“They do that sometimes. When they toot. I’m going to leave you two — you three — together.”

“Thank you,” said Asim.

Otto’s mother, absorbed, said nothing. She had known, in the months before, that she would not like her baby right away — she was too cerebral to relent to emotional connection. What he had done to her body, the faithless promises of love and fulfillment he made with each kick, how could she love him? Part of her had hoped that the pain of birthing would have broken her down into pieces of herself, so jagged and disconnected that all she knew was primal emotion.

Perhaps the pain had just not been great enough, she wondered now. Tired, yet measured as ever, she sat, noticing how short his breath was relative to her own. His head is the shape of a traffic light, ovular and oblong. He looks more like an alien than my child, she thought. I’d be offended if someone said he looks like me. The absence of connection and the preponderance of her own judgment gave way to familiar fortified guilt.

“He’s so beautiful, isn’t he?” asked her husband. “His face… his dark brown eyes can see every light in the universe.” Otto’s mother winced at her husband’s attempt at romanticism. Normally, she found it charismatic.

~

When Asim was thirteen, for the first time he had come to her house — his friend Mo’s — for a post-Ramadan break-fast. Around the table sat Mo, his mother and father, Mo’s younger twin sisters, Adeena and Amira, and of course, Asim. At one point in the meal, Adeena backhanded a glass of grape juice onto Asim’s obviously-new white t-shirt. Everyone at the table gasped as Asim jumped up. He exclaimed:

“I am so lucky!” He looked down. “It missed my pants!” He lifted his head, flashing a smile whiter than even bleach knew.

Mo’s family looked at him with their heads bent in every direction besides upright. Foolish boy, thought Mo’s mother. Idiot, seethed Mo’s father. Amira was confused by the mixed emotions — Asim’s gleefulness and her parents’ dismissal. Adeena was tortured by her own embarrassment and by the handsomeness of this new boy’s smile.

“Ya lahwy, Adeena. Get him a shirt from Mohammad’s drawers.”

~

Adeena sighed, looking at her baby who she prayed had been genetically gifted her husband’s demeanor. Her husband, she knew, would see everything Otto promised him. She thought, I guess I’ll wait.

And wait she did until the day she died, without the depth of connection for her child that she believed eluded her.