My mom was Elmo. With kids biting at my ankles, matting my fur with their spit, and their blaring screams filling the room when I enter—my second taste of fame—I think of my mother often. Just as the sun was lifting through my window, bright red fur would flit past the crack in my door, leaving me alone in our small apartment. Still, I saw my mother always. She was singing on the television, teaching me my ABC with a celebrity guest. I told my classmates that she’d met Destiny's Child, reciting ‘A New Way to Walk’ for weeks. Mom said Kelly was the nicest. Even late into the night before she dragged miry paws, soaked in subway grate air and the brown liquid dripping from the 42nd street McDonalds into our faded floral carpets, I could see her. Her giant paw curled over the doorknob, rising out of the darkness of the apartment hallway and I would wonder how I was seeing double. Which one was my real mom? I hoped it was the one on TV.

When I took a job at Chuck E. Cheese, I told her it was an internship and because she didn’t know that college internships hardly ever pay, she believed me. I didn’t want her to learn that some scholarships don’t cover textbooks and that I wanted for things I didn’t need: concert tickets, designer shoes, and the feeling of tapping a card without hesitation. I always hesitate. It was easy money but so was bartending and tutoring. A job as a Chuck E. Cheese mascot felt fated, a chance to prove, once and for all, that I was my mothers daughter. I’d bleed polyfoam and stuffing; my children would come out all hair. I’d never seen the resemblance before, my nose widening into hers, her smile creasing into mine. Growing up, no one saw it either, not my neighbors or my teachers and especially not my best friend, Faye.

Faye, seeing no red skin, no bulging orange nose, doubted my famed origins. She also saw my mom always. She’d memorized the face of the woman whose hand she gripped crossing the street, who shoved dusty goldfish in her mouth and wiped it afterward. Faye was right, Mom wasn’t always Elmo. Most of the time she was someone else’s mother, pushing around someone else’s child. And since the Adkins had hired her the summer before second grade, she was Faye’s mother. Faye was, like many of the Upper West Side kids in my elementary class, the daughter of an actress or a designer or NSYNC’s publicist before they disbanded. Kids who saw their parents twice a month and their brown babysitters everyday. Sometimes mommy would slip from her lips instead of Des because Dessima died in her mouth and Mom’s head would whip quickly toward her. 

Faye wanted proof. She’d only seen Mom at her feet, picking up cheerios before they could slot between her toes and embed in carpet. When Mom was near Faye, she shrank. After school with our backpacks loaded onto her shoulder, she looked the size of the real Elmo.

I’d never seen her in this skin. At home, she towered over the other Caribbean mothers crowding the stoop, her laughter directing the flow of conversation. A soft firm laugh invited the young mothers to complain about husbands who slurped up all the curry, leaving them only fish bones. A hard loud laugh alerted that the neighborhood gossip had arrived. 

In her regalia, everyone wanted to meet my mom. They crowded her in the street for pictures. Expensive Italians with watches that swallowed their wrists, big-bellied Midwesterners who moved in uncoordinated swarms, and clingy babies who ripped at her fur, all lined up to curl into her soft, sweaty body. When she got home and slunk down to just skin, there was no Elmo left for me. It was the worst part of my day, watching her tear her head from her body, tufts of blood colored fur floating to the carpet. She’d split her body down its seam to reveal delicate rolls and curves, dry cracks of skin, and darkened eyes embedded in her head not on top. Then, mom was just mom. No autographs, no pictures, no Destiny’s Child.

At Faye’s house, she was someone else entirely. There was no stiff cadence to her voice. In fact, there she mainly spoke to me with her eyes, narrow when I was doing something wrong, wide when I was doing something right. She housed Faye on her lap, rubbed dirt and pebbles off her knees after the playground, and squeezed her juice box slowly to get every last drop. Like in her other skin, Mom sang to Faye, a soft accented melody different from her higher pitch on television. They had their own dialect, one we never had, a whine that was met with a call. But Faye’s skin wasn’t felt and sock. She could hear our language but she wouldn’t grow into it. 

When Faye’s mom came home after week long trips, she’d reached past Mom’s body to grab Faye from her lap as if she was a blip in space. In the two years I’d frequented their house, I’d never seen Monica’s eyes. I didn’t know if they leaned more hazel like Faye’s or green like her older brother’s. I knew Monica’s long side, her skeletal back, the black boots with gold heels departing for a work event, but not her eyes. 

“How was she?” Monica asked the air, her eyes fixed on the neighbor’s open window. Though Mom was part of the family, the way flowers are before the wilt on the counter, everyone talked around her not at her. Absorbed in Faye’s world, sometimes I skipped over her too, littering cheerios onto tables and tracking colored pencil across the walls when her back was turned. Des will get it, Faye’d say. Outside of our tiny two-bedroom, I wouldn’t have to clear my plate, rinse dishes before they went in the dishwasher, and keep my shoes off the clean floors. 

“Good. Homework is done. Food is almost ready,” Mom replied. Even her voice was different there, that thick Grenadian accent diminishing as she stressed every syllable. 

Though her chair was propped between me and Faye, Mom didn’t eat with us. She caught falling food before the dog could eat it and cleared the plates when we were done. Dinner at the Adkins felt more formal than familial. Their conversations were brief, dotted with business or politics, and their chewing filled the room with the sound of wet gums. I liked the seething quiet of Faye's house. It was a reprieve from neighbors, cousins we called them, reaching over my plate with greasing fingers for more roti while I stared at the door waiting for Mom. 

We left her, as we always did, with the plates, our saucy fingers dragging across the tables as we fled to Faye’s large purple room. All of her American Girl dolls, her Build-A-Bears, her 5 foot giraffe from FAO Swartz were lined up to face her bed. Faye’s life came with a procession to follow at her feet and collapse when she kicked them over, grateful to even be chosen. When I told her about Mom’s alter ego, my own claim to fame, she didn’t believe me. Des is too fat to be Elmo. Des is too black to be Elmo. Des isn’t soft enough to be Elmo. Des doesn’t sound like Elmo. Faye refuted, checking for any peaks of red fur under my uniform and trying to confirm if my eyes were dark brown like I said they were or pure black. 

I’d seen my mom as Elmo of course. When she was in a hurry and she tried her best not to be, I got to walk hand-in-hand with Elmo on the street. The other kids stared in envy, peering over their strollers in desperation. I knew a celebrity, even better I was related to one. But I’d never seen her become him. It must happen when no one else is around.

I thought maybe if we crept down stairs, peering through the banister, we could see her skin rip and slide down her back, revealing her superior form. Faye’s cheek was pressed next to mine, her stringy hair threading between my lashes. Mom was facing away from us bringing dishes from the sink to the dishwasher. We lingered for ten minutes waiting for it to happen and just as Faye rose to return to her room we heard it, the ripping of flesh. We leaned in closer, waiting for fur to burst from her spine. She turned slightly and we finally saw her in full. Her teeth sucked flesh from chicken bones, her flat tongue lapping at the plates before she rinsed them and placed them into the dishwasher. 

“I told you,” Faye said, returning to her room. 

I stayed watching Mom through the banister. It was the smallest I’d seen her. Second only to that desperate chase for a dollar, five at most, passed the blaring horns of taxis over ice and accidentally into the Nuts 4 Nuts cart. Dripping with gooey dark sugar, littered with nuts, I stood over her, picking peanuts out of dense fur and popping them in my mouth. Those people make me take 10 million photos, dance like monkey for their stupid video and don’t even have a fucking dollar. Waste of my time. She kissed her teeth. I stared down at her head, the size and color of Mars, surprised she cursed.

I always thought that skin would make anyone feel like Godzilla, a destroyer of buildings. Climbing into Chucky, it was the tiniest I’d ever felt. Mangy and clumped, it looked more like a skinned animal than a costume on the dusty closet floor. The stain of those before me lingered in the smell of mildewed sweat, nail indents in his cheeks, and rough patches of white fur from bleach or cum. With my body now much closer to hers in size, I could feel where my hips would stretch it, where I’d have to pad it to keep it from pinching my left shoulder. Kids ripped at my ears and hung off my back as parents watched mindlessly from the booths. Is this what it felt like to have a litter of pups? Feeling the deep impression of their teeth in your thigh and being grateful that at least you don’t have to watch all of them grow up because kind children don’t always become kind adults, she’d told me. 

I learned this lesson early, hearing whispers of Mom’s thievery and her greedy mouth that could only come from one source. Faye watched me across the cafeteria table. I tried to keep with her slow pace, dabbing my mouth after every bite but still I finished before her. She left her grilled chicken half chewed, mixed her rice into her salad, and sprinkled half of her sugar cookie on top before sliding the tray over to me. 

“In case you’re still hungry,” she said. 

I thought about Mom’s big red hands enveloping mine and telling me to lead with kindness. I punched her in the face. 

The tremble of the floor absorbing the weight of her gargantuan body shook the plastic chairs of Mrs. Chamberlain’s classroom. My mom burst in, shaking the paper turkeys taped to the door, her head still on. I smiled as Faye’s good eye bulged out of her head, beholding Mom’s 40 foot figure. Mom took her head off and smacked the back of my head softly with her gloved hands.

“Why I had to come here for, huh?” Mom asked. Her thick brown eyes, not the felt ones I hoped to see, flickered from glaring down at me to Mrs. Chamberlain.

I wanted her to keep her head on for Faye to cower under those piercing puppet eyes. Instead, Mom shuffled beside me, head still off and most of her body hanging off the sides of the child-sized chair. All she said was sorry sorry the whole meeting, her head sagging, her fur too. She clasped her hands around Mrs. Chamberlain’s and pressed her forehead to the desk. Not once did she look down at Faye.

I got off with a warning but it was worth it because Faye told everyone that I was a descendant of Elmo. She also told them that the characters from Sesame Street can tear their skin right off to look just like us. 

“Why you hitting, Yvonne? You hit people now, huh? What if I hit you?. . . I do a lot to get you to that school, you will stay.” 

Her padded fingers landed like marshmallows on my skin but I winced so she wouldn’t hit harder. She carried her head under her left arm, cradling it upside down, making the kids behind us cry. It wasn’t our usual triumphant walk, hand in hand. Even partially dressed, I knew she was back to her tired self. No one stopped us for pictures, they hardly looked as we walked by. I wished she would shrink ten times smaller, small enough that I could hold her to my chest or drag her across concrete, home.  

She lost her job that day. With Faye now old enough to tear at the corner of goldfish packets with her teeth, it was inevitable. The thing about being a nanny is that everyone outgrows you. My mom mourned all her children, their watermarked class photos pasted on our fridge and in her wallet, but I was the one who remained. 

Mom didn’t tell me. Maybe she didn’t want me to know it was my fault that she earned the reputation of Guatemalan Maria, who stole a bag of mini muffins gone stale in the back of the Warren’s pantry and like her, she’d have to switch from Upper West Side kids to Carroll Garden kids. For those childless weeks in between jobs she mended, pricking her finger with a needle thick enough to get through cotton and foam. I watched on from the couch, handing her pins, scissors, and occasionally gauze. Though she didn’t house me between her knees like she did with Faye, she sang to me as she pulled thread through fabric. She let me crush the skin under my feet to squeeze the rest of the water out and part the hairs as she combed and blowdried. With the exception of a peanut calcified into a matte on the very top of her head, when we were done it looked like new. There she was in her glory, felt formed to fat. It sank around her, bulkier on the left shoulder where she padded it to stop it from rubbing.    

Finally I saw her skin separate from her. I saw how she folded it gently, criss crossing the arms over one another before rolling it into the corner of her closet. Her prestige took up only two feet of space. When she left for an interview in Brooklyn, I dragged Elmo feet first from her closet and laid him out in the small space between her bed and the wall. I propped him on my mom’s bed in prayer and dug my legs inside first, my arms following shortly after. He swallowed my small body, his weight pinning me to the floor but still I reached for the head and plunged myself into the darkness of his body, her body. There I sat for hours, trying and failing to stand so I could feel what she felt: the pull of the city, the celebrity, the feeling of puppet melting into man. All I felt was the heavy fabric and an itch from the polyester lining. That’s how she found me, scratching at my arms with a gloved hand before she tore off my head. 

“No, no. Get out. This not for you,” she screamed, her eyes wet with tears. She lifted my body out of Elmo, kicking at it like paper stuck to her shoe and wrapped her body around mine. It wasn’t a hug but a redressing, costuming her skin onto mine. A feeling I think I’d felt once before in the womb and would only feel again stepping into Chucky.

When I’m home, I sneak through Times Square to catch a glimpse of her. Usually I’d creep slowly behind Lady Liberty, the neon green sheets he used as a dress hiding my hips. With Chucky, which I stuffed into my bag before break, muting calls requesting his safe return, I don’t need to hide. I can watch her up close. There are other Elmos now, ignoring the unspoken rules of jurisdiction, but I always know which one is her. Despite the fatigue, there’s swing in her movements. I can see her smile through costume at the children running their hands through her leg hairs and her grimace at the men pinching at her hips. She wafts soursop shea butter but I can also smell the wet slog of sweat collecting at her feet. Posing for pictures beside her, the kids tugging at the hem of my shirt and at her shoulder seams, I breathe in her day. It’s sweat, it’s sticky fingers, it’s chaffing thighs, I feel it all.

Stealing small glances at her, she turns to me, staring into the sterile green eyes covering my brown ones. She watches me for a long time, not breaking her gaze even as kids pull at her crotch and jump for her shoulders. I don’t know if she can see me under the toy head, if she can tell that I’ve mimed her movements, so practiced one would think they’re genetic. I cup the bottom of my mask. I want her to see me, how well I fit into her skin, but just as I lift Chucky’s head for mine, she turns back to the child screaming at her toes.