I trace an outline of my daughter’s hand on thin tissue paper. The paper is pink as cotton candy and her hand is limp. She is asleep. I’ve spent the last weekend tracing her limbs and torso while she sleeps, working my way up to her delicate head and wispy hair. I just want to catch an idea of that hair, a tendril here, a mass of frizz there. In her sleep her toes flex like a dancer en pointe. I follow the stretch of the arch of her foot, sweep up the ball to the tip of her big toe. Elizabeth stirs and tenses as the felt-tipped marker grazes her flesh, but I am stalwart and stay the course, capture the foot for posterity’s sake. Elizabeth is three years old, red-haired and long of limb. Her knees are like mine were when I was her age, stretched and knobby all at once, awkward joints connecting leg bones. I can already see how her hips will jut out at thirteen, will buffer themselves in fat and muscle. Buying pants will become almost impossible for her, will become a source of frustration, and she will start to wear slimming flat-front trousers with wide legs no matter the going fashion. Her skinny legs will protrude from an ample rump, those now-slight hips will grow to temporarily house the wide skulls of ten-and-a-half pound babies. She will slap the first man who remarks on her child-bearing hips and then she will marry him and bear two children in three years.They will exhaust themselves with fights over money and discipline. When she discovers that he's been sneaking out to Bible study meetings and is on the road to becoming born again, Elizabeth will leave him. I'll take the family in, my 26-year-old daughter and her two preschooler boys, will put aside my plans to redo the upstairs in preparation to sell the place. She'll be practically unemployable, her only experience being reproducing and windexing the glass off the windows, running a vacuum cleaner across the floor so thoroughly that you could eat off of it. It will be as though she were a teenager again, the petty little fights over who left what dish in the sink without washing it, her stealing my cigarettes and popping diet pills so she can stay up all night. I will wonder what happened to my golden years, my "me" time. She'll get an earful every night.Eventually she will go back to nursing school, will find a new place to live and get a job. One of the night-shift orderlies, an atheist, rational and compelling, will seduce her with stories from his service in the Persian Gulf. He'll move in after their third date and will start whipping that fatherless household into shape. The boys, teenagers by this time, will be desperate to escape the two of them, sick of the discussions of Ayn Rand and the tyranny of other people's gods. There are other things that will keep them away, the sounds that leak from the too-thin walls of the tract house, the atheist's cries in the middle of the night followed by the low dove-coos of their mother soothing him. They will visit me for dinner almost every night and I'll serve them roast beef and potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs, fish sticks and french fries. Sometimes one of the boys will sleep on the pull-out couch, his brother in a sleeping bag on the floor. But for now Elizabeth is a little girl with chubby feet and dimpled elbows. Her neck is thick, strong muscles leading to an unremarkable chin that dips out blandly from under her lower lip. Her dad and I are still debating about whose nose she will have. All children have cute button noses. It takes the hormones and stretching of adolescence to reveal the nose’s true nature.
