I am fifteen the first time my mother pays for me to see the octopus. Inside those yellowing tents with their black-stitched tears we are not supposed to see, my mother pushes coins toward the mustachioed attendant who looks at her breasts and then at mine. Smiling, he tears off two tickets and points in a vague direction through the crowd. “You’ll be in time to see the escape. If you hurry, you’ll be able to watch it eat. An entire rat today,” he says, but my mother does not lift her eyes to his, and she pushes me forward so that my skirts tangle against my boots, and I stumble. The attendant laughs, and I know his eyes are on my bottom. I straighten, and Mother and I find our way to the center tent where there is a detailed illustration of an octopus in a large, glass container with a filigreed copper top that resembles a cake dome I once saw in a bakery when I was a girl.
We settle ourselves into our seats, and Mother goes very still, her hands folded on her lap and resembling marble or porcelain or any other thing through which blood does not flow, and when the assistants wheel the octopus’s dome onstage, Mother leans over and breathes into my ear, so low, so quiet, that I have to shake my head because I cannot hear her, and she repeats herself again, and then again, and over and over until it is impossible to not understand what it is she’s said.
“He is your father.”
Inside the dome, the octopus clings to the sides, pushes itself away from all of those eyes that would demand something of it, that would ask it to be something it was not, and I follow its dim grey and brown form as it circles through the water. It is not beautiful in its skin, but in its movement it is heart-achingly lovely. I am not beautiful and neither is Mother, but I do not move with grace in the way the octopus does. Over my tongue, I roll those two syllables—fa-ther—until they lack any meaning at all.
At school, there are girls who explain in breathless tones what it means to have a husband, how a baby squirms its way into your belly through him, and then out again in a bright mess of blood and pain, but there is a promise of comfort and companionship in a husband and a baby, and I wonder if the octopus promised these things to my mother. If in those tentacled arms, she imagined a future that was more than dishes and laundry and breathing up into the dark and counting backward from two hundred to keep her heart from falling out of her with a wet slop.
We watch as the octopus squeezes itself in and out of various small places as the crowd applauds politely. If the octopus sees my mother sitting there among all of those blank faces, it does not betray itself. It is tired, and there is a job to do. My mother has withdrawn her handkerchief. She crumples it in her fist, and her cheeks are flushed, but she does not cry.
There are questions I want to ask her, my lips burning with the terrible weight of them, but the attendants on stage are in the height of their performance, the octopus spread wide like a star as it covers the glass, and my mother has gone still as death, the color drained from her lips. I swallow down ten years of girlhood taunting of how I had no father, and that he hadn’t died in the war after all, but that it was likely my mother was a whore who had never learned how to sponge, and I was a smeared mistake.
If there had once been a father in my life, I had never known him, and Mother had never spoken a word of who the man was. When I asked, she turned her eyes away and said that it had been a long time ago, and the hurt inside of her was still sharp and to please not ask her again. I did not want to cause pain for my sweet, quiet mother—who sometimes forgot who she was and had to spend mornings in bed, a damp cloth over her eyes—and so eventually, I stopped asking.
Onstage, the octopus rolls one great, translucent eye toward the audience, the unnatural pupil seeming to rove from face to ...
