Our Squid Mother

Our little sister made the discovery that summer. It wasn’t surprising that she would be the first to find out—the only one of us who still climbed into our mother’s lap like Ma was a piece of furniture instead of a woman, who still had enough baby in her to absentmindedly pinch the loose skin of our mother’s neck or fondle the soft folds of her belly, the same way she rolled the hem of her threadbare blankie between her thumb and index finger as she fell asleep.

“What’s that, Mama?” she’d chirped, perched hen-like on our mother’s legs, while Ma sat at the kitchen table, shelling Lincoln peas with two hands and talking to her sister, our Aunt Mary, on the phone propped between her ear and her shoulder, its coiled cord stretched out long across the kitchen.

“Stop it, Eleanor,” Ma’d hissed, tossing a pea pod aside to cover the transmitter of the old rotary with her palm and gently nudging our sister onto the floor. “Just wait until you’re an old woman one day.”

Our mother wasn’t an old woman—I’m not sure she was even forty yet—though she seemed ancient to us then. I understand now that, in a way, she must have seemed so to herself, too. There were seven of us in all—Bridget, the oldest, at fourteen, and Eleanor, at five, the baby. The rest of us, all boys, were squashed up somewhere in the middle. So close in age, one rowdier than the next, we were indistinguishable from one another back then—to our mother and, therefore, to ourselves.

“Am I Brian?” Michael asked Ma once as she stood at the stove, gripping the handle of a saucepot with one hand and stirring nearly broken gravy furiously with the other.

“Ask Brian,” she’d said without looking up, as though that settled it.

It must have been difficult for our mother back then; hard in a way she probably didn’t even understand herself. It was a different time. Our father—a fine man, though certainly plainer than our mother; a man who found thrill in tuna salad sandwiches and Connect Four and didn’t follow the Eagles even though he’d lived just outside Philly his entire life—traveled for business frequently and was away from home for weeks at a time, returning only for holidays and the occasional long weekend before packing up his cracking leather valise and leaving again. Even when he was home, I don’t know that he and Ma ever really had—well, we might have called it “connubial relations” back then. Sure, you don’t wind up with seven children between the ages of fourteen and five by playing Connect Four every night, but after Eleanor…I don’t know. Something changed in the air between them. And there were just so many of us. Seven of us and only one her.

The point is, as far as any of us could tell, there wasn’t occasion for him to notice how our mother began to change that summer. That left only Eleanor, who still clung to Ma like a buoy in open water—as though her life depended on it—to keep us apprised of the evolution our mother seemed to be undergoing.

The “nubbies,” Eleanor called them. Five tiny fingertips, growing just beneath our mother’s right armpit.

At first, we didn’t believe her. After all, she was only five. What could she possibly know about the complexities of the aging female body? What did any of us know about anything? But it was our mother’s reaction to Eleanor’s poking and prodding that convinced us maybe our kid sister really was on to something—the fiery glint in Ma’s eyes as she narrowed them at our sister, the slight upturn of her mouth into a smirk. It was a face that held a secret, hinting that maybe, a long time ago, Ma had been something other than our mother. That perhaps she still could be.

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“It held my hand.” Eleanor’s breath was hot on my neck. She’d snuck beneath my covers, rested her head on my shoulder, and whispered in my ear. Shortly after discovering the nubbies, Eleanor began having nightmares, more often than not waking up in one of our beds or another. The only person who wouldn’t share with her anymore was Bridget, and that was only because she’d started her period the spring before and decided practically overnight that she was more important than all of us. We boys slept like the dead anyway, exhausted as we were from wreaking havoc all day. We didn’t mind.

“Another nightmare?” I asked, tucking my arm around her small frame, breathing in her milky Eleanor smell.

“No,” she whispered, wide eyes turned towards the ceiling. “During cuddles. It held my hand.”

“It held your hand.”

I felt Eleanor nodding. “It was just like Mama’s other hands.”

It was growing then, this extra limb hidden beneath our mother’s clothes. It could do things like hold our baby sister’s hand.

I don’t recall why none of us ever mentioned anything to our father. He called on the telephone often enough, certainly not every night, but rarely did two evenings pass without the old rotary trilling through the house just after dinnertime, all of us tripping over one another as we raced to be the first to answer it, to call out breathlessly to our mother, “Daddy’s on for you!” And she would put down whatever she was doing to speak to him for a few minutes, reminding him to eat well and letting him know the highlights of our days without ever mentioning herself—her emerging limb or anything else—at all.

Maybe, on some level, we understood that whatever was happening was different than anything that had ever happened to us before—more secret than the sanitary belt Bridget pushed to the very back of the bathroom cabinet between her cycles, or that Joe sometimes still wet the bed even though he was nearly eleven, or whatever the doctor had murmured to our father after Eleanor was born that led to him living out of his valise more often than not. This thing belonged to our mother, and our mother, whether she liked it or not, belonged to us. So, we kept it for her.

The strange thing—stranger than the second right arm growing just beneath our mother’s first—is that Ma, by and large, acted as though nothing was out of the ordinary. On occasion, we’d see her massaging the new limb beneath her clothes, much in the same way she’d massage the backs of our legs whenever one of us had a charley horse or growing pains. Sometimes, we’d see her old right arm reach for something, and the new one start to follow. But it seemed she’d learned to maneuver them separately after a while.

It wasn’t until our mother’s new arm had grown the length of the old one that the next set of fingertips appeared, rising from beneath the flesh that covered her left ribs. School had been out nearly a month, and in that time, we’d all gotten used to our three-armed mother—everyone except Bridget, who seemed perpetually ashamed not only of Ma but the rest of us, too. I guess we just thought, once you had three arms, what real worry was a fourth?

Plus, we saw how it worked to our benefit—our mother growing all these extra hands and arms that worked just like her original hands and arms and could do things for us. Before long, two arms had become four had become six, each growing a bit quicker than the last. She cut extra arm holes down the seams of all her house dresses and could cook a four-course meal while simultaneously passing out two glasses of milk. She could bandage a cut while holding a bag of frozen peas against a forehead while mending a pair of pants torn through both knees. She could brush our hair—all seven of us at the same time (not that Bridget would let her)—and still have one hand left over to pull the curlers from her own, each hand as steady and sure as the original two had been.

Of course, whenever we left the house or company stopped by, she tucked the extra arms beneath her clothes, bulky sweaters and heavy coats that made it look like she’d only put on an excess of weight, that the strangest thing about her was that she was dressed for a snowstorm in the middle of summer. If we ever heard folks around town commenting on our mother’s eccentricity, it was mostly to blame our father, who had gone to work out west for the entirety of that long, hot summer and gave no indication of returning home anytime soon.

We took to calling her “Squid Mother” affectionately. “Where’s our Squid Mother?” we’d shout upon arriving home for dinner, piling over one another on our way through the back door, slamming the screen, pressing our scraped-up, grass-stained bodies into her many-limbed embrace. She’d kiss each of us on the forehead, then spoon mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans and meatloaf and iceberg salad and Jello onto our plates all at once while pouring lemonade from the pitcher with a remaining hand. It took her no time to clear the table when we’d finished, and a quarter of the hour it used to take her to wash each dish and put them away.

All that extra time she’d saved, she began spending with us in the evenings. Sitting on the piano bench, she’d play Für Elise and Schumann’s Kinderszenen with two hands while challenging us to checkers, chess, and slapjack with the others. On occasion, she’d even treat herself to a cigarette, sliding a Lucky Strike into a thin, red cigarette holder she’d started keeping on top of the piano, bringing it to her mouth with her original left hand. We didn’t know our mother had been the kind of person who owned a cigarette holder like that—a cigarette holder that looked like it belonged to someone who had worn short skirts and nylons with seams running up the back, who styled her hair short beneath a black fedora and danced until the sun came up.

It sounds strange, I know. But she seemed happy that summer, our mother did. Happier than I’d ever seen her in all my thirteen years of life.

 

 

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I suppose we were stupid to think it would last—the ease and joy we’d witnessed in our mother over that long, odd summer. Someone outside our family circle was bound to find out at some point, and what might happen after that was anyone’s guess. Or our Squid Mother would get sick and have to go to the doctor, or she’d find herself in a situation where she was forced to remove her too-large coat, and that would be that. Looking back now, I wonder why none of us—not even Ma—seemed to consider what might happen when our father eventually returned home. He was the furthest thing from our minds. It was as though he’d never existed.

At least, until it wasn’t.

Only Bridget and Eleanor really know what happened when Father did come back one evening, on one of the last days of that summer, just before dinner. We boys were out, as we always were back then, tumbling about in someone else’s backyard in a pickup football game or sliding around in the dirt at the baseball diamond. All we know is, as we went barreling headfirst towards home, salivating at the thought of dinner, Brian stopped short at the front step, leaving each of us to crash into the brother ahead of him.

“Ow! Bri—”

“Look.”

There, on the front step, our father’s old valise lay on its side, its contents spilled across the concrete and into the grass—yellow legal pads, chewed-cap pens, a lighter but no cigarettes, a small blue toiletry case, a pair of marbled glass cufflinks, a thin black hair comb slicked with Brylcreem. That’s when we noticed the deep grooves of two tire treads running parallel to one another across the lawn. We looked at each other for a long moment, our hearts pounding in our chests, before quietly stepping over our father’s things and filing silently into the house.

In the kitchen, our mother was stirring four pots on the stove, slicing tomato and onion for a salad. Bridget looked up from setting the table, her eyes barely meeting mine, before she blinked hard and looked away again. Nobody said a word. We wolfed our dinners quietly. Afterwards, we cleared our own plates. Bridget and Eleanor washed the dishes while Ma dried them.

Whatever happened, they never told. Our mother will be dead eleven years next May, and still, neither one of them has ever said a word.

 

 

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That year, the first year of our Squid Mother, a letter arrived just after Christmas, addressed to our mother, in our father’s unmistakable blocky handwriting. A few days later, we watched our mother spread eight sheets of legal paper across the kitchen table, remove the caps from eight pens, sit, and write eight letters, all at the same time. She addressed and stamped eight envelopes and licked eight seals.

When she was done, she opened the front door and, wearing only her house dress, walked down to the curb and slid eight letters into the mailbox, one after the other. The seven of us stood side-by-side, watching as she paused at the end of the drive for a long moment. Eventually, a door opened across the street. We saw our mother wave to our neighbor, Miss Linda. First, with a right arm. Then a left. Then, another right. Finally, she turned and began walking back up the driveway. Back to the house, back to us, her eight arms swaying slightly in the chill.

E. Ce Miller is a writer from the American Midwest living in South Korea, where she’s working on a collection of short fiction and a speculative memoir. Her words have appeared in Bustle, Hollywood Weekly, Liars’ League, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at ecemiller.com.