A twisted Cookie

The air trembled as the subway train pulled up, my mother clinged to my hand crunching my fingers in her firm grasp.

“I could have been someone you know, aldi elaiefjdl iealfkeol,” my mother muttered. “I’d be a smart cookie then.”

She can speak two languages, English and one no one quite recognizes. When she was younger my mother would keep busy and paint in her free time; that was before the accident. Now she spends her days singing along loudly to borrowed opera records while stitching away at rose buds and tulips made of silk thread.

My mother remembers how to fix a T.V. for all the good it does her and she can sing her opera, but she can't remember which train to take to get downtown in the city she has lived in her whole life. Sometimes when she is more herself she lectures me about staying in school.

“Esperanza, you go to school,” she says, “and study hard.”

She blames the accident on her lack of education. My mother quit school to work as a seamstress in a factory. She had been there nearly a week when it happened, a sewing machine fell on her head, and she has never been the same since. It was at the factory that my mother had to give up her dream of being a famous opera singer.

“Esperanza,” my mother said softly relinquishing her grip on my aching fingers. “Do you want to know why I quit school?”

“No mother,” I thought to myself as I bit my tongue and waited for her to continue, “You have told me a million times already.”

“I didn’t have nice clothes!” My mother exclaimed, “If I had had nice clothes, I wouldn’t have quit, I was a smart cookie then.”

I fought hard to keep from smiling. My mother’s had always been the theater and fashion, never school. Even with 200 pairs of shoes, I knew my mother would never have been happy in school.

“But now, you have nice clothes and you will stay in school. Someday I’ll go to an opera and see my Esperanza up there on the stage. You’ll be somebody someday, you’re a smart cookie.”

And being a smart cookie, I keep my mouth shut.