In our town, you prayed for a boy when you first felt that kick in your belly. Mama said she cried the day I came out of her, she was so happy I’d been blessed as a son. Every birthday was a celebration for us, whole family coming around with sweet cakes and rye whiskey, friends and neighbors filling our back porch. My grandfather would bring his guitar, only played on special days since his hands were lost to arthritis. We’d stay up until the stars showed, everyone drinking, my uncles pouring out baby drinks for us young ones in tin cups, everyone laughing in the bonfire light, coyotes howling in the blacktop mountains behind the fence that separated our backyard from the edge of the tree line. Birthdays were a cause for joy, a reminder that sometimes God listened to your prayers, didn’t always make you suffer.
Birthdays for my cousin Lyla were a different affair. She was three and some years older than me. She’d babysit when my parents would go out dancing, as if those three years between us meant much more than the fact she was a head taller and always beat me at hide and seek. She had long strawberry hair our Granny would brush out in front of the TV for her. Lyla loved watching quiz shows, so sharp she’d always know the answers before they came up on screen. I half-believed her when she’d wave her hands in the air in front of her face and tell me she wasn’t smart, just psychic. Granny would always shush her and say we shouldn’t joke about such things, but she would wink at Lyla and smile. When I was really small and couldn’t sleep she’d sing to me, old songs about apple trees and drowned lovers, songs her mama sang to her. I could never remember the words. Some nights I’d lie awake in the dark and try singing to myself but the sounds got stuck in my chest, buried too deep to dig out.
Lyla was also the only one my parents would let take me swimming in the creek round the back of Grandfather’ farm where nobody could bother us. My uncles offered time and again but mama always refused, laughing and pouring another beer to pacify their pride, saying they were more likely to drown me than show me how to float. Lyla was the one that taught me to swim, hands ever-patient and holding my head above the water when I went under for too long.
“Swim, Wren. You got to swim!” she would say as she pulled me to the surface.
On her birthdays, the women would go over in the early morning, sitting around her and her mother, overlapping arms in their cotton print sundresses, offering what little comfort they could, sipping berry wine and praying occasionally, hands all tangled in the wooden rosaries they carved in the winters. Mama would be up the night before baking, sweetbreads and whiskey dough. My daddy always told me to stay out of the kitchen on baking days. Baking days were just for mama, when she’d get out all her grief and pour it into the food she made for her sister, each dish an apology, a comfort, an acknowledgment of loss. We men and boys would go over in the evening, sitting silent and smoking around Lyla’s old man and her stepbrothers, tobacco passing between uncles and cousins and all the things that went unsaid. On Lyla’s birthdays, everyone was drinking for a different reason, bittersweet.
In our town, birthdays were a reminder of another year gone. Another year closer to the day they would die. In our town you were only safe once you turned eighteen, down to the hour. In our town once there was blood between your legs, you only had so many summers left.