Companion Pieces

 

EVERYONE’S GOING TO LOVE HER

The woman on the cover needed to be seen.  And with so many people searching for reflections in rooms made of stone, it was not difficult to arrange for her to be captured in a frown-blue gown.  People, one good eye was all it took, that and a willingness to drop the blue…

But over the years time warps the watch face, and knowing no news becomes habit.  It became impossible to go far into the chemically treated pale hair to the dangling roots and the determined starts, to push aside a spine bound by threats, to go under the prominent ribs, subvert the promise of contextual design and press beyond hip bones set in a practiced gesture of discreet distortion.  In other words, it was hard to find an authentic reproduction of original woman.

When the dark times came, she counted backward and spoke to the sky.  She told herself what she thought… and she never blinked.  Each time the light flashed, she imagined herself cradled in a net with its fibers connected to the nets of her sisters far-reaching, all weaving, each determined to catch for her self a whispered, sacred name.

By looking through the lens, she discovered the truth.  And she turned off the light…

 

CAN I GET A WITNESS?

I remember the soft woman smell of a brown chiffon dress with its closely spaced white polka dots and that my mother wore it on the day she came to see me after staying gone over a month in Arizona.  But I don’t remember why my grandmother refused to make me a polka dot dress like Mamma’s…

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One of my earliest memories is of a board book illustrating opposites.  Big puppy.  Small puppy.  My brother was two years older than me and liked trying to teach me the secrets of the stiff pages.  Up.  Down.  I depended on him a lot in those days; our household was always in a state of turmoil.  Happy.  Sad.  And Mamma was usually glad to turn me over to him.  She always thought of me as being an overly sensitive child.  Good.  Bad.  And she was afraid I spent too much time worrying about things I couldn’t change. 

The first clear image I formed of myself was that of the small, blond, waif who glared back at me from the plastic covered pages of the family album.  I remember one time in particular studying that flat depiction of my face centered in a well-staged family portrait and wondering who had tinted my eyes blue, and why I didn’t remember wearing that pink dress or posing for that picture… or why I was such a serious looking child.  It was the first time I experienced the discrepancy between the way I saw myself and the way I felt inside.  Not long after that I realized that my self-image was further complicated by the way other people saw me.

By the time I was in sixth grade I had developed definite ideas of how I wanted to be perceived. On school picture day I wanted to wear my bangs loose instead of clipped back and even though I’d been warned by Mamma to keep them neatly pinned, I let them loose to swoop seductively across my brow.  Captured on film in the full flush of my defiance, the result was quite satisfying.  My mother took one look at the resulting pose and didn’t say a word.  I never saw those pictures again.

My mother was a stunning woman, the kind of woman you would expect to see on the cover of a magazine.   I used to dream of being as pretty as she was.  But I was also disturbed by the way her beauty came and went with her moods.  When she was happy, she dressed the part in every way.  She wore beautiful clothes, had the latest, most glamorous hairstyle, and adorned her beaming face with cosmetics.  When she was sad, she looked like a Mamma impersonator.  She shuffled around the house in an ironically orange caftan that floated uncertainly about her body as though reluctant to make contact with her washed out skin.  Her wide blue eyes refused to sparkle and the outer edges of her disappointed lids drooped under the weight of unshakeable sadness.  Mamma was sad a lot.

As the years of my childhood progressed, I watched her as she tried to mask her sorrow.  The photo albums in our den were filled with Easter pictures set on our impossibly green, sloping front lawn, carefully crafted photos of Mamma dressed in a costly pastel suit with matching hat and gloves and handbag and shoes.  And she looked as lovely as a cover girl.  In some of the pictures she was really smiling.  The kind of smile that’s almost always followed by a little laugh.  I could tell because her teeth were showing. 

Not everyone knew it but Mamma hated her teeth.  They were delicate like a child’s teeth and though they were perfectly straight, they had tiny spaces in between.  She was self-conscious about them and always tried to hide the small gaps as though they were potential vulnerabilities allowing minute whispers of her self to escape, opening herself up to invasion.  I always liked it when I saw Mamma’s teeth; it meant she was really happy, so happy she didn’t bother to hide behind a shuttered-mouth.   But in most of the photos Mamma’s eyes were unable to hide for even the fraction of a second it took to snap the annual Polaroid the determined shadows of her emotional desperation.  She was stretched too thin to protect herself, and as the years went by she stopped trying until the camera was put away in the hall closet, eventually becoming an obsolete model for which film could no longer be purchased.