Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

The Little Girl in the Lobby

U.S.A.

1948

Dena’s childhood had become a blur. She could barely remember it at all. When she had been four her mother suddenly left Elmwood Springs and after that they had just drifted from one cold city to another and from one set of lonesome rooms in apartment hotels to the next. They were sometimes red brick or gray but they were always furnished with the sparest of furniture. And even though the buildings had fancy names like the La Salle, the Royalton Arms, the Highland Towers, and the Park Lane, they were never what they once were. The chairs and rugs in the lobby were always a little too worn and the halls were always bare. Even the neighborhoods seemed to look dim, with little light, and not quite but just on the verge of going down. These sad apartment hotels were filled with lonely people, the young who had been disappointed in love, had someone and lost them, or never had anyone. The old people in these hotels sat alone in their rooms, leaving only to walk an ancient dog or to buy an occasional can of soup that could be heated on a hot plate. All were living out their lives in these rooms, eating out, sitting at tables for one. Most had developed the habit of reading, and so their only dinner companion was the book from the library, their only tablemates the characters they were reading about at the time. Usually, Dena was the one child in the building. But they never stayed long enough to really get to know anybody. She passed through people’s lives and never became more than that little girl who used to sit in the lobby and wait for her mother to come home. Most of her childhood had been spent in lobbies waiting for her mother or, sometimes, when she had learned to ride the streetcar, she would go downtown and wait for her mother in the ladies’ lounge of the department store where her mother happened to be working at the time. She would read or color; she didn’t mind. She felt better just being close to her mother and getting to ride home with her. Her mother was her entire world and she adored her. She loved the way she looked, her voice, the way she smelled. She was fascinated with everything her mother did. She loved to watch her put her makeup on, dress, fix her hair. When they went out she could not take her eyes off her; Dena was so proud to be with her. After work, when the weather was nice, they would walk for hours and window-shop and then they would always eat at some restaurant because her mother did not cook. And after dinner Dena used to sit and wonder what her mother was thinking about while her mother drank her coffee and smoked cigarette after cigarette. When they walked down the street her mother frequently walked very fast, and if you had seen the two of them you would have noticed the little girl, just a few steps behind the woman but trying her best to keep up with her.