Oh the promises we make to babies. We hold those small bodies to our chests, we kiss their big sweet heads, and we murmur that we will care for them and never never never let them be hurt. Impossible promises to warm smooth round heads.

I kissed and I promised in Yiddish, five times. Four of you live still, but to all of you I broke the promises that parents make and cannot keep. And now you, soon you, will kiss and promise to your own. In English.

I thought I would be here to meet her. Always I envisioned myself a matriarch, rewarded for all the work with a surround of graduated descendants.

Not to be. You’ll birth my last best granddaughter in five more months, and I won’t be here to meet her. I die soon, my darling, but if I didn’t have this tube in me, if I could speak, I’d probably make you another promise …

I’m too young for this. Within I am articulate. Without accent. In English. I look at you. Squeeze your hand. Feebly. The body that has worked so hard and well these sixty years is failing. I’m sorry. I meant to be helpful. I meant to be here.

I was thirty-five when you came. I thought I was done with babies, but you began and your grandmother stopped me from stopping you.

Look at you so beautiful. Your brothers are handsome, your sister can be attractive, but you are a miracle. I envision you old, two decades older than I ever will see, and I know you will always be lovely.

When you were a baby your beauty disturbed me. You were the only one born in a hospital, and for your first two years, until you began to resemble my mother, I sometimes wondered if they gave me the wrong infant. That weird experience. Half-sleep. Grayness. People wandering in and out. The robed man peering between my legs. It was better to have the babies at home. In the hospital I was treated like a body only: manipulated, worked upon, disregarded. Afterwards, though, it was good to be there. I rested then, and they brought you to me. So beautiful …

Shit. Fuck. See? I did learn the English from you and your siblings. Mostly from you. By then I had some time. I know the Anglo-Saxon. I shoveled shit. I got fucked. At sixty I have the form of a crone ninety years old, thanks to all that honest work, the successive pregnancies, the rough abortions. I repel myself but even so, I’d live longer if I could.

I’d like more time to try to get it right. There has to be more than what I’ve known.

Answers. Give me answers. Let me go to God after this, for answers. Let the baby you’re carrying, my last best granddaughter, be powerful enough to choose her men, her time. And let her have a daughter even more powerful.

I love my sons like I never loved their father (rude horny man), so much that I understand their frailty … all men’s frailty. Let my daughter’s daughter daughter rule her world.

Maggie and Aggie are sixty-something housemates. They are each now single and neither very gay, but they live together like old spouses. They co-parent Diggy the dog. Hot-Diggity is the retriever’s full name, but they started calling him Diggity when he was a romping puppy, and that elided to Dig or Diggy in short time.

Neither gay but gray. They are aging urban white women in the year 2010, so they live in gray areas. Maggie is straight, really, but many women assume she’s a dyke. Aggie is more gay that straight, if truth be told, but not sexual enough for it to matter anyway. They’re long-time best friends, and each dreams occasionally about the possibility of a relationship with someone she’s not yet met, but most of the world assumes they’re a couple, and women couples are known for seldom-sex anyway, so maybe there isn’t much difference between a complacent heterosexual marriage and the Maggie&Aggie menage.

They look mismatched. Maggie is tall, small-breasted and broad-hipped, originally brunette, with unusual olive green eyes (like her maternal grandmother’s, for whom she is named and who died while she was in utero). She tends to walk fast and use her long stride; alone she will cover a mile in sixteen minutes. Agatha is just an inch over five feet, buxom, and naturally sedentary. She has watery blue eyes and hair that was once bewitchingly blonde and curly. She walks for companionship, not exercise, and Maggie always has to shorten her stride or pause frequently while Aggie catches up. Diggy of course runs ahead or lags behind, leash environment permitting. Diggy doesn’t hunt or herd or even dig. He lives to retrieve any and every thing thrown, and appears to understand his mistresses.

What Margaret and Agatha have, what binds them more strongly than love&marriage, is an active respect for each other and a shorthand method of communication. They needn’t complete sentences. Their conversation is on a different plane than their talk with other people. They seldom misunderstand each other.

They’re like found identical twins. Separated at birth (Maggie to the San Francisco Bay Area and Aggie to upstate New York), surgically altered to appear unalike. It isn’t that one feels pain if the other burns herself: nothing that simple. Rather, it’s that if one burns herself, she only has to articulate a few words about how interesting the pain is, before the other fully comprehends. Everyone else they know would just say “ouch,” or would take their sentences as elaborate complaints, but Maggie&Aggie find their own discomforts undesirable yet interesting.