Tonight at dinner, Lily, who has been doing her darndest to convince me that she is in no way, shape or form ready to go to kindergarten and instead should be shipped off to military school, appeared at the table swathed in a blanket, cradling her stuffed frog, which was wearing a diaper and some kind of a hat. "I am not Lily," she announced. "I am a queen." My parents and grandmother, who had just arrived from Massachusetts, were amused, and Annika looked solemn, as though thinking, "Well, duh. Tell me something I don't know." I rolled my eyes.
"And who's the frog?"
"It's not a frog. It just looks like one. It is my daughter. The princess." She suddenly started laughing so hard she couldn't speak for a few seconds. "And did you see? She's wearing a diaper!" Ha, ha, I thought. Good one.
"Your child doesn't look like you at all," I said, knowing on some level that this was the wrong thing to say, and Lily's face immediately darkened.
"That is not funny, Mama," she said, "and if you--" The look on my face, for once, stopped the sentence in its tracks. "Not funny," she whispered instead to the frog, who, I must say, looked like an ass in his diaper. I carried some dishes into the kitchen. When I returned and sat down, Lily waved her hand in the air, chin held high. "Silence!" she said. "The queen must speak." My mother gave me her version of my previous look, a much more effective version--it seems to lose effectiveness as it is passed down through the generations--and I held my tongue.
"I told you I am the queen. Well, you," and then she pointed squarely at me, "are my servants. Servant?" Again, the finger across the table, directly in line with my forehead. I rolled my eyes again. "You must agree. You are my servant. And that baby over there?" With this she pointed at Annika. "She is my other baby. And that means you are her servant, too."
Suddenly, I felt exhausted. And I wasn't entirely sure she was wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment