She watched her
mother with wide eyes.
Mother paced back and forth talking into the
telephone. She wound its
cord around her fingers, around her hand, unwinding it and doing it again and again. Such a
spectacular toy! The
bouncy,
curly wire was certainly a plaything, but it belonged to her
mother. Whenever she tried to reach for it, her mother made a
disapproving sound; when her mother did that she would
crumple her
face and
cry, not
understanding why this
wonderful toy was only for her
mother.
She sat on the floor and banged her plastic blocks together. These toys were colorful, and their corners were pleasing to put inside her mouth, but still she wasn't as interested in them as she was in the phone cord. She wanted to put that in her mouth and get her tongue tangled up in it; she wanted to press it down between her lips and spit it back out, then start all over. She wanted to wind it around her whole body the way her mother did with just her hands. She wanted to tell her mother that she wanted to play too, but her mother didn't understand her.
She was frustrated. She threw a block at her mother. It fell short of its mark and landed softly on the carpet. Mother didn't turn around, so she howled and threw another one. She kicked her feet at the pile of blocks and tried to scatter them. She wanted to go after the blocks she had thrown, but she was too annoyed to focus on making her way over there. She began to howl again.
She stopped crying when she saw she had her mother's attention. Mother put the phone down and started to come toward her. Seeing that she'd left the desired plaything so far out of reach on the counter, she began to cry even as Mother approached.
She was soothed and patted and talked to, but nothing helped because her mother didn't have the telephone. She didn't want to be hugged or touched, she just wanted to play with the phone and she could not.
Mother left her there and went back to the phone. Bewildered by the sudden abandonment, she stopped crying and watched her mother. She had picked up the telephone and begun to talk to it, touching its elusive cord as she spoke. This was too much to take. She began to make angry sounds with her mouth, wishing that just once her mother would listen to what she was saying.
Her mother turned and looked at her in surprise. Seeing that she had gotten what she wanted, she continued to make the sound, banging her fists for emphasis. Her mother gibbered excitedly into the phone for a moment, then rushed to pick her up. She was cooed at and hugged, bewilderingly, and then the unthinkable happened: her mother set her on the counter and held the phone out to her.
Instantly she grabbed the phone cord and stuffed it into her mouth. Her mother made a sharp noise and snatched it from her, then pushed the uninteresting part of the toy at her face again. She didn't care about the hard part. She wanted to play with the springy part. When she grabbed for it again, her mother made another angry-sounding noise and held the phone away from her.
"Say 'Mama' for Grandma, like you did before," her mother demanded, holding the phone too far away to reach. She was fed up with this and began to yell again, making angry sounds to respond to her mother's unwillingness to cooperate.
"Good girl!" her mother cried, putting the phone close again. She clutched the phone cord and tangled her fingers in it, making sounds with her voice since that was what her mother apparently required as a prerequisite to playing with the best toys.
--© 1999-2001