Visiting William
Ann Klotz
William, the Hippo
Word Count 1350
We cannot know how quickly mothering will pass. Many years past parenting young children, moments swim back, distinct in the blur of decades. Preparing chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese, filling out nursery school applications, arranging playdates and birthday parties, managing a big job as a mom, I did not reflect much on how ephemeral those years of early motherhood were. Taking a breath felt as impossible as visiting the bathroom alone. I was sure I would remember everything. But children grow quickly and parents age. I am closer now to being a grandmother than to the age I was when I first became a mother.
1998. It is late April. We push the stroller down East 82nd Street. Me, my husband, Seth, and our little girls, Miranda and Cordelia. A single or double MacLaren? I can’t remember—in that chapter of our lives, we walked this route often as our daughters grew. In this memory, it is a spring twilight. We are headed to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, open late on Friday evenings, and in the dusk, the trees are a froth of pale green lace above us. Window boxes on the side streets are freshly planted with impatiens, petunias. Tiny brownstone gardens plots are as lovingly tended as we tend our children—to have a garden in New York City! Children zoom past us on Razor Scooters. Dogs strain against leashes, sniffing spring. This neighborhood is ours, familiar. We smile at people whose names we do not know but who are part of the landscape of our lives.
As we stroll west, our girls trot along, excited to get to The Temple of Dendur, their favorite indoor playroom. Up the museum steps, the girls fly. We have read You Can’t Take a Balloon into the Metropolitan Museum over and over, so they smile at the guards, whom they know to be kind to children. In the enormous lobby, the gracious soaring space of another era, we stop to admire the huge vases of flowers-- flowering quince and coral blossoms nestled into emerald greens, filling their niches. The scent of eucalyptus floats from the arrangements. I love that these arrangements—castle-sized-are endowed, changed each week—a luxury for all to enjoy.
The girls scamper towards the Egyptian wing. We greet the elegant row of seated god-cats. Next, our daughters wave to the small carved crocodile near the steps, then skip up the short flight and leap across the expanse of floor—so much bigger than any room in our apartment. Sashay, sashay, twirl. The polished stone floor calls out for pirouettes. Modern little girls in bright Hanna Anderson dresses and leggings dance in this ancient space. I imagine the cats after hours, remarking on the children’s antics.
“Mama, do you have a penny for me?” Cordelia asks.
“Me, too,” demands Miranda. I scrounge in my purse, proffering two pennies.
“What will you wish for,?”
“It’s secret,” Miranda reminds me. “If we say, it might not come true.”
Gravely, Miranda tosses in her penny, watching it splash down to the bottom of the pool. Then, Cordelia drops hers straight down, sighing with deep satisfaction.
I still wonder what they wished for.
Eventually, they are ready to go to say hello to William, the tiny blue faience hippo, whom we love. He is off the beaten track; it seems I can never find him without help, no matter how often we visit. Bright blue and much smaller than we ever think he will be, he rests in a case, a black lotus blossom engraved on his tiny back. Captain Riley’s family named him in the early part of the 20th century. I can’t remember how I came to know about his existence, but he was always a destination on these expeditions. Both my girls, now grown, have William ornaments for the Christmas tree. Just the other day I discovered a dried-out William eraser and rubbed my finger across its tired rubber before tossing it into the wastebasket. We had a picture book about him. William was as much a fixture of our daughters’ New York childhood as the doormen in our building.
Our last stop those Friday evenings is always a visit to Degas’ Little Dancer. Chin tilted high, hands clasped behind her back, chest lifted, she welcomes us.
“Hello, Marie,” Miranda greets her.
“I wish I could touch her,” breathes Cordelia, reaching out her hand.
“You can’t touch her,” Miranda scolds. “It’s against the rules.”
“I know,” Cordelia nods, solemn. “I just wish I could.”
We love Marie’s scale, smaller than a real girl but bigger than a doll. Fourteen—the age she was when Degas sculpted her--seems very old as we marvel at our own little girls. We circle Marie, admiring the tulle of her skirt, the buttons on her bronze bodice, the satin ribbon tied at the bottom of her pigtail. Our girls pose, right foot extended and turned out, chests lifted.
“Like this,” Miranda preens. “Right, Daddy?”
Her little sister imitates her older sister’s pose.
Seth and I smile at them, unable to imagine them at fourteen. One Halloween, we made Miranda a Degas dancer costume for Halloween—aqua tulle and soft pink slippers with satin ribbons twined up her white tights, a black velvet choker at her neck. Ultimately, Miranda will be a modern dancer, a choreographer, the author of a thesis in which she compares ballet to a contemporary version of a freak show. I wonder if the roots of that thesis lay in those Friday evening outings.
Tired now, we head home, denying the request that we stop in the Egyptian playground because it is growing dark. But the plea for ice cream is too hard to resist--the white ice cream truck—another sign of spring—beckons at the corner of 84th and Fifth Avenue. Both girls want vanilla twists with a hard-shell chocolate dip. Vanilla ice cream drips down Cordelia’s chin. The two girls walk ahead of us nibbling the chocolate layer, licking the swirls.
We push the empty stroller, admiring the works of art we have created, little girls who are, remarkably ours, who make us a family. Pygmalion, breathing life into Galatea because he loved her so, has nothing on us--the parents of these cherished, long-awaited children. The spring air smells of possibility and joy and the scent of our little girls’ shampoo.
Cordelia reaches up her arms to her father, ignoring my offer of the stroller. Seth hoists her onto his hip, her head already drowsy against his shoulder. Miranda folds herself into the stroller, too big, really, to be pushed, but it’s late now. The windows of the apartments we pass are warm and welcoming. The girls are sleepy.
Years later, after we have left New York and have had another child—a boy called Atticus---we return to The Met to introduce William to Atticus, but the gallery is under construction. We cannot visit. Our boy is disappointed. We had built up William to mythic proportions, telling stories of his sisters’ frequent visits. He is consoled with a plush William backpack from the gift shop instead. The moment passes; by our next visit, he is too old to be enchanted by the tiny hippo.
What is it about William that compels me, still, to wind down halls, loop back on where I’d been, to ask the occasionally taciturn guard for directions every time I visit the Met, decades after our children were small? Am I looking for a version of my younger self, so full of love and wonder? In The Met, the past feels accessible—not just the exhibit’s pasts, but my own, too. It’s as if a younger version of the mother I was is hiding in a corridor, waiting to surprise me. If I find her, I will recall more memories, resting under layers of dust and time, waiting to be excavated. Motherhood is so brief, so ephemeral. William, commercial commodity of the Metropolitan Museum, reminds me how quickly moments are eclipsed. He is a touchstone of our girls’ New York childhoods, a reminder to recollect that which passes by too fast to grasp, except in memory.
Ann is a writer living in Shaker Heights, OH, but a New Yorker at heart. My work has appeared on the Brevity Blog, in Yankee Magazine, Literary Mama, Hippocampus, and in other journals. One advantage of my non-Manhattan life is the climbing rosebush outside my kitchen window.