Bedtime Story (4)

Nanny’s husband is dead, and her six children are growing. Every morning, she readjusts her one fake eye and walks to the textile factory where she works until her fingers shake. What my mama doesn’t tell me is that the revolution, even now in the ’60s, is arriving like the buzz on a kitchen timer: the poor are very poor, and the rich—well that’s how Nanny becomes Nanny. One day, the factory president offers Nanny a job that pays more. She cooks. She cleans. She moves into my mama’s childhood home and tells her stories about the imams before she kisses her goodnight. A child myself at this first telling, I probe underneath the story’s plastic wrap—only to jerk back when it recasts my mama as stranger. Every morning Nanny fixed breakfast, she says. Then she ate on the floor by the door. Like a dog. She ate from separate bowls and spoons. I probe, and what about the six children?  The truth is that my mama and her family never even saw the revolution coming. Poor Nanny, my mama says. She loved us more. Forty years and a continent apart from revolution, the character across from me kisses me goodnight.