The first thing I can remember is music, in the form of my mother’s voice. No words, but her voice, singing to me. I never considered my mother’s voice to be particularly harmonious—it was, when she spoke, stately and elegant, but in a not altogether entirely perfect fashion. It reminded me of of a crystal wine-glass that had been sanded around the edges: clear, but sharp.
The tune she sang to me was one I heard often. It’s quite a simple song, nothing particularly challenging in terms of range or register. Of course, when I was young, I had no idea the words she was singing could be translated to notes on a page of music. To me, at that moment, they were something magical and inscrutable.
Another one of my earliest memories is being curled up on the floor against my mother’s hooves and asking her to sing for me. She would smile, put out her cigarette, and sing as sweetly as she could manage. I didn’t know what the words meant, but I sung along, doing the best I could to follow the rise and fall of my mother’s voice. I’m not sure if I ever saw her smile more than she did that day.
Due in part to my mother’s refusal to translate her words, I didn’t know, when I was young, that there was any meaning in that song—in a roundabout way, I’m still not sure there is. Music is black dots and lines on a page. Ponies speak of the significance of music—the capacity for depth and emotion, the moving nature of a melody or composition—but in the end, it’s all just notes. Something to be remembered and recited, over and over and over. I wonder sometimes if that’s the only reason I still remember that moment with my mother, long before I was old enough even to recall one day or the next. It seemed important at the time; important enough that I some how knew I would learn to play it from memory one day.
Life, unfortunately, is not a series of notes we can read out. It’s much more complicated than that, which might be why I have such a difficult time remembering more of it . Maybe the pieces I can remember might mean something, if I put them together.
When I was still very young, probably just a toddler, I remember taking notice of the families around that were different than ours: all colours and smiles and things to be laughed at. On one of many trips across Ponyville, I remember looking at another group of ponies, one of them my age, and two older. That was the other difference: our two, versus their three or four.
For both our lives together, we lived in Ponyville. My mother never said whether this was out of choice or obligation, though it’s not difficult to guess. The way she spoke about things—music, culture, literature—gave the impression that she wished she had been lived under better circumstance. Maybe she had, at one time or another.
In any case, what I remember most of very young years are the streets of Ponyville. There was a great deal more mystery in the streets when I was young: dark and dingy alleys that I’m not sure ever really existed dark and dingy that my mother would drag me through, sometimes pausing in search for something that might have been discarded there. I remember a lot of hooves, mostly because I was at their eye level when my mother led me around.
When I noticed the family in front of us, my mother paused and looked back down at me. She would always smoke when we were out, and even though the cause for my sudden pause might have been a simple urgency like needing to use the washroom, she stopped and glared at me through her glasses. Her glasses looked like her: elegant, ornately framed, and with a grey finish all around the sides, the perfect match to her mane I always remember being a lighter shade of greys. And, just like her, they weren’t quite in the state they had been made. One of the sides extending around her ear was frequently subject to breaking—which, in times between repair, meant she was forced to hold them up with her hoof, like opera spectacles. I think sometimes she waited to have them fixed for that very reason.
“Yes, what is it?” Her voice was always urgent at that age. Over time I think it mellowed in a way, when we had a proper home instead of the bustle of the streets.
“Mommy,” I said. Over time that word would leave my vocabulary, but at that age, it was still allowed. “Who are those ponies?’
It’s remarkable that I was as articulate at that age as I was—most likely a byproduct of my mother’s mumbling into my ear beneath the crowd. Telling me things about them and putting the seed of vocabulary into my mind, to later sprout into proper words and perception.
My mother looked up at the family in question: a stallion, mare, and child that I can’t recall the colour of. As much as I might be able to recall this particular memory, it wasn’t anything about the group that stood out, other than that there were three of them.
“I’ve no idea. Is there something about them you’ve found necessary to hold us up for?”
I think it’s a wonder that my mother didn’t simplify her speech when talking to me—but that most likely plays into the way my vocabulary developed.
“Why’s there three of them?”
I can’t tell if my mother’s face soured then, or if it was simply as bitter as she always kept it. In my mind, I think the corner of her mouth turned more into a sneer than usual.
She stewed over the question for a while, which was an oddity. Usually any answer was on the tip of her tongue before I finished the question. The two of us stood for a while wherever it was we were, letting all the ponies around pass like a busy stream around two grey rocks.
“Well,” she said finally, “why shouldn’t there be?”
“But there’s only two of us,” I said. “They have one more. Who’s that?”
My mother looked up from me to the family again. I did the same, watching them. Again, while I can’t remember the colours, I have some of the particulars. The stallion had a mustache I remember, bushy, and a black hat with a buckle. The mother’s hair was up in a bun, maybe violet. And the child had a small stuffed animal with her, which she was moving through the air like it was flying. Her parents stood next to each other, just behind her, and smiled.
“That’s the girl’s father,” my mother said, as though the word might suddenly make sense. For everything she’d ingrained in me with her unfiltered vocabulary, that was a word I didn’t know.
“Father?” I asked, rolling the unfamiliar word around in my mouth, perplexed by it. Though young, I could intuit the meaning of the syllables—two ponies and someone my age, one a word I knew, the other this new word. I had a mother. This girl had someone else. A father.
“Why don’t we have a father?” I asked.
Then, for certain, my mother’s face turned like spoiled wine. She dropped her cigarette to the ground, I remember, and stamped on it with her hoof.
“There’s no need for questions like that,” she said. An oddly sparing chastisement in the face of her sudden unpleasant reaction.
“But why?” I asked.
“It’s simply unnecessary,” she said. “We’ve no need of a stallion. The two of us are simply enough. Understand?” She kneeled down low to me then, staring me straight in the eye, adding weight to her words with the force of her piercing blue, like sky-coloured tea-cups.
I wanted to ask more, but I think at that moment I knew better. So, I simply nodded, and she nodded back and stood. We walked forward with only a glance back from me at the family, still standing in perfect reflection, solid as we were in that river of ponies walking by, with nothing else in the world but their bodies and the look in their eyes as their daughter played and laughed like she hadn’t a care in the world.
That’s all I remember of that day.
While I can’t recall how we came into our first house, I remember the house quite distinctly. It was, in a way that many things were, so much like my mother, though I guess that this is simply a judgement passed in a reflection of a lifetime spent sharing it with her. Ponies often say that about me, or did, when they were the sort that knew her; ‘You’re so much like your mother,’ they would say, when I was growing up, meeting them on the way home from school or on days off. I would smile and nod and say thank you, and my mother, if she was present, would nod her head approvingly and go on about how of course, I was just like her at her age, destined for great things. She had been in the opera, of course, but gave it all up when she immigrated. She had been in a conservatory far off overseas. Where? Oh, heavens, no need for details. That was then, and this was now, she’d say.
But that’s jumping ahead. The house was the important thing. It wasn’t as much like my mother as other things; contrary to the fine china we somehow kept unused amongst the scavenged dishes taken out for everyday meals or the army of decorations that littered every shelf inside, the house itself was quite drab. From the outside, it was unremarkable—dilapidated, even. The finish was a too-thick layer of brown paint which only served to make the entire wood structure look like it was set to fall apart at any moment, as it probably was. Somehow, despite a lack of any awareness on my part of what it was my mother did at that age or how she managed to scrape together the bits to afford it, we were able to move into this house, complete with two stories, and a special room where I would spend most of my childhood—most likely more of it than in my bedroom. It was empty when we first moved in.
“This is a real solid structure.” I remember the pony we spoke to the day we moved in. He was a far-off sort, not in the way we were far-off, or mother was, but in a ‘too local to be local’ sort of way. He practically dripped grease when he spoke, and though I couldn’t place it then, I believe now he spoke with an Manehatten accent. Something from the downtrodden streets of ponies who could sell you the city bridge without batting an eyelash. He had a hat, slightly too small for his head, and he shared a smoke with mother after we were done with the tour, leaning against the wall of the peeling brown paint and talking about this that and the other thing. While he talked a lot when called upon, he seemed to know when it was best to listen.
As he commented on the building, myself and my mother inside the bottom floor of the house, he leaned sideways against one of the walls. I remember seeing his hoof shuffle quickly to cover a dent in the wall as he noticed it. I wanted to tug at my mother’s leg to point it out, but she moved away from me quickly as her eyes went over the rest of the house’s interior. She had only been inside for a moment before she walked into that room, like she was drawn to it. She put out her cigarette on her hoof, something I didn’t often see her do, and stood in the center of it. It was the one room with a glass door, I remember, while the rest were tarnished wood, or simply not there at all.
“Ah,” said the pony with the slick accent, “this is a nice little bonus as well. This room’d be perfect for all kinds a’ stuff. You could turn it into an office, a study, a guest bedroom—”
“A music room,” my mother interjected. She stepped closer to the far end of the room as she spoke and held her hoof up to it, running it over the marred splotches of white paint. Her voice sounded almost musical then, reaching a softer tenor than her pointed edge of articulation often neared.
“Well, for sure.” The realtor pony adjusted his hat and took a cigarette out of his coat. He put it to his lips but didn’t light it, perhaps assuming that he might do well to follow my mother’s lead. He stepped into the room behind her and watched her for a second as she appraised the room.
“You a musician?” he asked. My mother turned to him after a few seconds with a sort of haze still in her eyes, and me standing outside the room, watching both of them.
“Years ago I was in the opera. Nowhere near here, of course.” She walked around the room slowly, tracing her hoof along the wall. In her head, I imagine she was picturing the shelves of sheet-music that might go there, with room in the middle for the all-important centerpiece. She stopped suddenly and turned with a half-smile on her face. “My husband was a concert pianist. Very talented.”
“Issat so?” the realtor asked, rolling the cigarette in his mouth. “Anypony I woulda heard of?”
“I don’t believe so,” my mother said. “He passed some years ago, before he had a chance to become well-known over here.”
“My condolences.” Somehow, when he said it, the words sounded about as sincere as a street vendor’s hawking. But my mother seemed to appreciate it. She smiled but said nothing.
After a quick tour of the rest of the rooms, the paperwork was signed, and we had, for the first time, a house to call our own. There was scarce little furniture to go around—we hadn’t secured any bedding that I can recall, and so slept together on a pile of blankets in one of the empty bedrooms. But for most of that first day, as I ran about the house, laughing and playing games by myself, my mother stood in the music room, staring off into the distance, and humming occasionally to herself. That tune she always hummed. Smiling.
I never really knew what it was my mother did for finances. That’s an odd thing to say, looking back. Certainly, there was money around, in that we ate, though not entirely well. Meals most nights were some variety of flavorless mush, or vegetables that were always more brown than green, wilting before the steam hit them and tasting like day’s-old dirt in my mouth. Somehow, though, we always had enough to get by. I suppose owning the house rather than renting made a difference, though it also meant that the upkeep was ours alone to manage. All the holes in the walls, the plumbing that malfunctioned from time to time, spurting water out of a leaky drain, or more often than not simply refusing to let out a drop of hot water no matter how hard the handle was turned. When school started and I arrived at class with my thin brown coat and a lunchbox with a single, unsavory-looking apple, I felt odd, because the ponies there all seemed different. They were all shiny and new, while I, only in my first year, felt as old as the coat I was wearing.
Mother claimed from time to time that she had a great inheritance which she was given, and was simply metering it out so that I wouldn’t become spoiled and decadent. When I would ask her, before I learned better of it, to treat me to this or that, an ice cream or a toy I spotted on one our less-frequent excursions, she would cluck her tongue at me and narrow her eyes behind her glasses.
“There’s no need for things like that, Octavia,” she would say, pulling me promptly from the window of whatever treasure I had affixed myself upon. “Come now, we’re in a hurry.” And off we would go. I could never manage more of a protest than to ask, once.
Certainly my mother had some form of employment—she would meet ponies from time to time, mostly older, educated, prim-and-proper higher-class sorts whom she would say were business partners. In the depths of my reckoning, I can’t recall anything untoward in the exchanges I had with them: nothing that suggested anything more than was there. I would guess that my mother found some form of salary in private teaching, though she was careful never to let on to me who or what she might be teaching, if that was indeed what she was doing. The thing I remember particularly was that, no matter how it was the case, we managed to stay afloat somehow, and that though she may have worked in some way or another, she was always there when I left for school, and there still when I came home in the evening.