Cut from "Airs Above the Ground"

            Lydia reached out for Judith’s hand and squeezed it. Judith looked at Lydia with surprised eyes and squeezed her back. For a moment, Lydia considered whether or not this was all that it would take: a parade of loving gestures. A smile here, a laugh there, and in a little while, her friends would think her happy, or happier at least. Lydia put her hand back into her lap.

            The children began singing their carol. Their were voices gossamer-thin and waning. Lydia worried that they might not make it through the song.

Away in a manger no crib for a bed, the little lord Jesus lay down his sweet head. At what age did a head cease being sweet? Or did it depend on size? Belltello had had the kindest face in the world, but his head was too big to be sweet. He'd had an enormous, gray head, soft and alert and smelling of hay. You could lose your heart staring into his big eyes.

            “There she is,” said Judith, nodding in the direction of her daughter who was somehow, remarkably, already on her way up to the table with her lantern. The first grade had come and gone while Lydia was stuck on Bell’s head.

            “She looks beautiful,” cooed Lydia, because it was true. Josie was a beautiful girl with a beautiful, happy mother. Lydia would have hated Judith if she didn’t love her to death.

            I never wanted to be a mother, thought Lydia, staring at her friend. At least she’d never suffer for this particular decision. She would have been terrible at it. Lydia did well with animals because they accepted love in actions. You kept them clean, fed and exercised, reassured them with a caress. This is all that they expected. This was enough. But children. Children with their need for nipples, nighlights, healthy snacks and birthday parties, footwear, hand-written-notes in lunchboxes, and they drank so much juice. They needed you materially, physically, intellectually—and as a woman, they came out of your body, so they needed you sexually, as well. Lydia owed a lot to women like Judith. It was because of women like Judith that she got to be herself.

            Up on stage, the piano player began plucking out the opening notes of “O Tannenbaum” for the second graders. It was a disquieting song, really. The opening notes were staccato and brisk, but the melody was top heavy, dragging. O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree, how loyal are your nee-dles. The little choralers squirmed under the ancient lyrics of their too-slow song. Lydia knew what it felt like to be those children, caught in the visceral clench of something you weren’t very good at, but were forced to do because it was charming and expected, because you had been asked. She’d been a rider before she’d been a painter, but she hadn’t been a good one. Her father had been a competitve rider, and his father before him. She’d never even been asked.

            One of the little girls in the front row kept twisting at her pinafore, crisscrossing her right leg across her left one, singing to the gymnasium floor instead of to the candles. Next to her, Judith’s girl was head-high with Christmas spirit. Lydia watched the embarassed one soothe herself with fidgets. Her heart sped. There’d been plenty of times that Lydia had wanted out of the ring, too.