Work Text:
I think of her dearly, my mother, though I avoid the name lest she appears.
I think of her rigid stare, off the corner of her eyes, an unwavering attention that never touched me but surrounded me completely; a ruler against my spine keeping me up straight until it became hard to breath. She needn’t be present, ever, the house stood guard as I ran up and down the stairs, peering out the windows before I flit by, like a ghost avoiding capture.
Of course, it was my own home. I was to be expected, surely. However, in some other ways, I wasn’t meant to be seen unless I was wanted, a séance for my apparition where I was meant to dance— an occasional visit on the corner of the dinner table, eating ravenously until a brief glance told me I was veering overboard, gluttonous though I was hungrier than ever. I settled for picking off the wallpaper where it stuck out, a sore thumb like me. I wasn’t to speak unless spoken to, which wasn’t ever enough, or on any topic I actually cared to have opinions on.
I was requested, of course, to watch her get dressed to this or that event, pulling ribbons taut around her widening waist while I looked waifish behind her reflection in the mirror, pallid and stepping into the sunlight right as she was forced off backstage. I learned to recognize many things off a simple glance, back then, disdain and anger first and later came a jealousy of sorts. An envy, solid as a wall separating us. A door shut on my face. Not this, not now, never my daughter. Her hand tight on my wrist, my veins green and purple against my skin’s topography, this map of soft ridges; her voice taut with disgrace, my head hurting. Her picking rocks and sticks off my head with a softer touch to my long orange hair than my skin ever earned, the hand print red in my leg where no one would see.
*
Girlhood was a series of crying afternoons and her chiding, her angry replays of speeches given by my grandmother just as unoriginally. The angry prayer we recite is old as time, but still we beat other women with it. A self-flagellation of some othered kind.
It’s no wonder I took to my father's world so easily. A glove fit like silk slipping between my fingers, nails scratching the fabric open. I was only a teenager when I realized that snakes shed skin and poison, bite their tail and die. That if my mother was a purgatory of my grandmother’s creation (fine china breaking of hysteria, televisions exploding to a shriek) — I was my own set of fears put together. I could wreak hell.
So, in that time, we moved against one another like chess pieces, winning ground and losing strength, my angry father an indifferent observer. Eyes that do not care to see cannot testify and our crimes went by unpunished. He turned the other way unless he meant to kick me or push the knife on her back and blame the other for the pain we each bore. She left me hurt alone and I twisted the blade on her back when I noticed it sticking out despite her stoicism, violence for the sake of violence is the language of the hurt and in cycles that go beyond the test of time we've been hurt just as much as our ancestors cruelty could reach. Each link a purple bruise until we took to less apparent methods— then again, my mother was traditional in spite of my father's new world aspirations, his new money grit.
She would speak and I'd glance at him, he would smile, knowing. I was different, I was better— Dad, do you see what I see? I'll never be my mother, isn't that funny?
In our club for two, she was our jester and it made her cheeks turn crimson dark. If my mother couldn't love me, then hate would do just as well, i'd foster it and keep it, like a dog at the foot of my bed. In anger and desire alike, I was always my father's child.
*
The torrid heat of that english summer swept over us, a red veil and time smiled over us like the Gioconda: secretive and furtive, an attention half paid already slipping. My brothers having flocked off to private schools, no dog to let loose just to cage Roman instead. Here, we were lone spectres haunting each other. I wanted to capture it— this moment where it felt like she saw me— to keep it contained forever in some sort of bottle, never to be opened again but only to be preserved; mine, mine, mine.
I had nothing of Pandora's curiosity, no Cheshire to grin me fearful. In my capable hands, the moment would last forever.
That awful summer where in my lesser cruelties, she was mine.