My mom was very beautiful, everyone said so.
They said she looked like that movie star I can never remember the name of.
She was smart too but beauty for women is better than brains they say, because most men can see better than they can think.
I looked like her when I was young and even though boys are not supposed to be beautiful – it does nothing for you but make you a target – I secretly liked the idea that I might be, even if only as an echo. Now of course, I look like someone’s uncle you maybe met before at some party but are too polite to say you don’t remember. Or not. Any resemblance to my mom now is purely coincidental.
But this photo brings it all back.
It is odd to admit, but I really only saw her as beautiful in her photos and only after she was gone. In life, my life, she was just my mom and I could not see her any other way. Not as a young woman, for example, to whom others might be attracted. Not as a beauty to whom a guy might write an ode or have a go. Not as a woman looking at herself in the mirror and trying to see what others saw.
Her face was just the face of my mom, no one else. Yet I knew her face very well.
Not through beauty but another kind of prism…the dire need to know what she felt about me. I needed to know that in order to know how to feel about myself, so I became an expert in it. I learned to read her expressions like a scholar. I became a master of the subtle shift in her eyes that meant disapproval, the curl in the brow that meant disappointment, the watery eye that meant hurt, the tightness in the lip that meant worry.
She must have known her looks mattered but I doubt that she knew her look mattered so much to me.
There was a lot to read in her face because she was a woman who felt. She had been through things, things I could only imagine or never could. Her first husband had died in a freak accident and she was left to worry about my sister on her own. She lost her second husband, my father, too soon too. Life had bruised her as it does everyone sooner or later but this had made her terribly sensitive, raw to hurt. Or maybe she was always that way, as I was.
She did not talk about how she felt much but instead she wore it on her face. That face with the right proportions, the good color, the luscious skin. Yet posing in photos with her perfected smile, no one would guess how supple it was, how delicate. How fragile. How full of.
At her kitchen table that time, after I had moved out and started my own life, I said something about being on my own and not having to care about what she thought about me anymore. I meant it as a gesture of triumph but she took it as a slap. She turned away and suddenly her skin seemed to sag and her temple rippled and her mouth went thin. She was staring out the window and using that to hide her face. I knew I had hurt her and that hurt me and round and round it went – but silently as a whirlwind in a cave – until the light ebbed and the shadows took over and time moved on and it was too late to take anything back.
Now I want to reach into that photo and say to her that she is beautiful because I never said it when I might have because I had other things on my mind. I want to say that I am sorry if there was an ache in her face that I caused because I was simply trying to grow up. In other words, I want her face to be hers and not mine to study. I want to forgive her for things she had no reason to regret. I want. And in that wanting I realize that these photos are not just clues to a treasure, if one exists. They are inklings from a past that cannot be addressed or relived or maybe even absorbed.
This one is a picture of my mom.
A reminder of how much more I understand when it is far beyond the telling.
No comments:
Post a Comment