LUCY IN THE SKY

My mother fears a) having been named for the devil or b) believing that she was. She angers when people joke about it, hates the idea that her own parent saw a sixth infant as the curse of a foreboding underworld. By 1967, a popular song offers up more celestial connotations, bringing some relief. As an adult, however, my mother will shift in her seat when movie and television studios begin playing increasingly fast and loose with her name, handing it out like packets of Bubble Yum to an array of fictional children and teenagers—the daughter of a president or a rogue cop, or the girl with unlikely musical hopes. My mother dreads an explosion of similar but actual births stretching across the continent. Does she want to remain unique, or does she fear the violence of the infants’ fates being bound to hers, some contagiousness of bad luck?