That date has been ceded to the territory of the past. New Year’s Eve, 1999: Not the impossibility it had seemed. They don’t last forever, right? How long before Mom would need a replacement? Fifteen years, he said, meeting my eyes. Last summer, at the consultation before my mother’s double mastectomy, I questioned the surgeon about the silicone implants. We don’t talk about why she’s going through her things. I’d given the coupons the expiration date of New Year’s Eve, 1999, the most impossible distance conceivable, a day I knew would never come to pass. A coupon book, crayoned for her birthday, 1979-free foot massage, free breakfast in bed. We flip through together: a menu from the Mother’s Day dinner I cooked her when I was ten. My girlhood artwork, some of it forty years old. You can imagine what this world would make of me.Įvery time my mother visits now, she brings a stack of yellowed papers from her attic. Of course she’d want to pet me.ĭiet of nothing but sweetness, expectation of nothing but affection. “I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry! I thought for a minute you were my daughter!” I gazed at her, surprised only at her embarrassment. Then it was my turn, and as I addressed the clerk, the woman behind snatched her fingers back as if they’d been scorched. I waited, obedient, patient, to pay, and the woman continued chatting and stroking, rhythmically, unhurriedly, my hair an instrument she strummed to lyrics about summer traffic, worse than last year, eh? And did you hear Mary’s eldest is moving home? Waiting in line, I felt a hand settle onto my head: the woman behind me, conversing with the clerk. Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip and candy cigarettes that gave a puff of chalky sugar. I was six, would have been happy eating nothing but Pixy Stix and Pop Rocks and Bottle Caps. The kind of place that sold a bit of everything, beef jerky and buttons and shoe polish and fly paper. I’d walked the pineneedle path to the store, the kind of place lichened with shingles, bell on the screen door, bowl of water for the store dog. We were vacationing on a small lake in Canada. Now, I’m hooked the first time they call my human name. Also, I’d begun to hear the voices from the surface so distinctly. I suppose, over the years, my body grew too used to being hauled into the oxygenated air, my lungs grew less capacious. I’d place the book belly-down and rise, though I could see (we both could see) dinner was still a good way off. Yes, Mom? I’d ask, lifting the globes of my eyes. Sometimes, in the deep, I’d hear an echo for a long time before I recognized what I’d been hearing: my name. She must have looked to the horizon and seen her own dear daughter gone from her, even the long dark locks, eel-graceful, succumbing. She must have stood on the shore and wrung her hands, the retreating waves eroding the sand beneath her feet grain by grain by grain. She must have felt bereft to watch me sink beneath the surface. No one cared to, except my mother, an affectionate woman who smarted at her lack of companionship. When I was a girl with a book in my hand I could go to a place so deep no one could follow.
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