Somewhere, a mother who has dyed her long, wavy hair dark in order to cover up the rebellious red she has always hated, and perhaps now a little gray, too, stands in a pharmacy with her face downcast, staring at her sandals. She is probably buying more dye. Most likely her bangs are still curled up high on her forehead and frozen into place with half a can of Aqua-Net, as they have been since the late 80s. Her toes are probably painted. Her fingernails too. There are crow’s feet around her eyes and mouth now. She is only 41, but years of unhappiness and anger have etched her face. Her skin is a pale gray like watered-down ashes, and her freckles have multiplied into flourishing generations, some of which have the appearance of age spots when viewed in a photograph.
In the same photograph, it is clear that she is not accustomed to smiling. She used to laugh wide like a cat yawning when it was called for, displaying eye teeth with mean little points, molars and incisors and tongue and all. Now it appears that her mouth has tired of this motion. She grins in imitation of a halfhearted snarl now, lifting a corner of her top lip to display only one of the pointy teeth in front. She has been letting them yellow, her teeth. Once such a stickler about brushing them. Though if she still drinks tea in copious amounts the way she has for years, the way her daughter does now, sitting and gazing at the photograph on the laptop screen with a Snapple in her hand and a peculiar blend of apathy, incredulity, and bone-deep sadness swirling through her body from top to bottom like water trapped in a canyon, that could be a reason. Always the Lipton and the Sweet n’ Low packets tucked in her purse. Always the red or black tubes of Chapstick too, the red-tinted cherry or the pinkish regular moving over her lips in the same circular motion so many dozens of times in a day, leaving their scents behind, leaving the daughter to avoid them in adulthood and let her lips chap mercilessly each winter before consenting to Blistex and its similar smell.
More photographs, of the daughter now. In the daughter’s apartment exist no photographs of the mother; these were torn to bits last year in a fit of pique, all of them, and then burned and buried. But the mother can still be seen so clearly in her child. The same wavy hair, lighter then on both of them, and the daughter’s bangs curled up and sprayed into place just like the mother’s. This evidence of their sameness the daughter hides away in forgotten cracks and boxes, unwilling to lose this hard-won photographic timeline of her past-- which came in a packet from a great-aunt in Indiana after a long time spent pleading for something, some roots – but also unwilling to reflect on the child made over to correct the sins of her parent. She focuses instead on younger pictures of herself, at three and four years old. Shining blonde hair, not brown, in a riot of real curls instead of tamer waves. A face without glasses in the same style of her mother’s glasses. Of these, she has framed a few. They could be any child, any small girl smiling. They are from the time before the pain and the remaking of body and soul, so they are not so much painful reminders as curiosities. She looks at them, touches them, thinking, Could that have been me? Really me?
The daughter tries to un-become the mother. First is the hair, cut and cut and cut again, shorter and shorter, then grown out and shorn into yet another new style, a new form of expression. To see the daughter with the same haircut twice is unusual. She steps into the salon and remembers the curled bangs and asks for none; whatever you do, there cannot be bangs. She wants the natural red the mother has tried to hide for so long, looking for it in the right light because sometimes it will peek out, a copper blaze when she tosses her head, gone in a second.
In the same photograph, it is clear that she is not accustomed to smiling. She used to laugh wide like a cat yawning when it was called for, displaying eye teeth with mean little points, molars and incisors and tongue and all. Now it appears that her mouth has tired of this motion. She grins in imitation of a halfhearted snarl now, lifting a corner of her top lip to display only one of the pointy teeth in front. She has been letting them yellow, her teeth. Once such a stickler about brushing them. Though if she still drinks tea in copious amounts the way she has for years, the way her daughter does now, sitting and gazing at the photograph on the laptop screen with a Snapple in her hand and a peculiar blend of apathy, incredulity, and bone-deep sadness swirling through her body from top to bottom like water trapped in a canyon, that could be a reason. Always the Lipton and the Sweet n’ Low packets tucked in her purse. Always the red or black tubes of Chapstick too, the red-tinted cherry or the pinkish regular moving over her lips in the same circular motion so many dozens of times in a day, leaving their scents behind, leaving the daughter to avoid them in adulthood and let her lips chap mercilessly each winter before consenting to Blistex and its similar smell.
More photographs, of the daughter now. In the daughter’s apartment exist no photographs of the mother; these were torn to bits last year in a fit of pique, all of them, and then burned and buried. But the mother can still be seen so clearly in her child. The same wavy hair, lighter then on both of them, and the daughter’s bangs curled up and sprayed into place just like the mother’s. This evidence of their sameness the daughter hides away in forgotten cracks and boxes, unwilling to lose this hard-won photographic timeline of her past-- which came in a packet from a great-aunt in Indiana after a long time spent pleading for something, some roots – but also unwilling to reflect on the child made over to correct the sins of her parent. She focuses instead on younger pictures of herself, at three and four years old. Shining blonde hair, not brown, in a riot of real curls instead of tamer waves. A face without glasses in the same style of her mother’s glasses. Of these, she has framed a few. They could be any child, any small girl smiling. They are from the time before the pain and the remaking of body and soul, so they are not so much painful reminders as curiosities. She looks at them, touches them, thinking, Could that have been me? Really me?
The daughter tries to un-become the mother. First is the hair, cut and cut and cut again, shorter and shorter, then grown out and shorn into yet another new style, a new form of expression. To see the daughter with the same haircut twice is unusual. She steps into the salon and remembers the curled bangs and asks for none; whatever you do, there cannot be bangs. She wants the natural red the mother has tried to hide for so long, looking for it in the right light because sometimes it will peek out, a copper blaze when she tosses her head, gone in a second.
Then is the housekeeping. The mother always insisted that everything be perfect, in its place and polished and scrubbed and scoured and washed and re-washed and perfectly aligned and minus wrinkles, lumps, bulges or any sort of imperfection whatsoever. The daughter thrives in a certain amount of clutter, pictures and books and mail scattered over the furniture in no particular order, a pile of shoes in the middle of the floor, dirty dishes in the sink.
She deviates in other small ways, too: most of her freckles have chosen to take up residence on her arms instead of on her face, for instance. In character she prefers lavender to her mother’s vanilla, has no desire to bake anything worth eating because spending time in the kitchen is a bore, and hardly ever makes the bed up properly. She collects journals instead of shoes, though both go untouched: the mother’s stacks upon stacks of boxes in the closet because she loves to buy shoes but hates to wear them, and the daughter’s empty journals scattered hither and yon, because she has so many she can’t possibly fill them all, and yet she can’t resist a journal if she sees one. The daughter enjoys a glass of wine at times, or a Long Island or a Red Death or shots of Blue Maui; the mother considers it the epitome of sin to allow liquor to pass her lips.
Religiously speaking, mother and daughter are two different creatures from two separate planets. Where the mother claims piety and redemption and a deep, abiding faith that has come to her without effort, which she flouts in her speech and actions and on her very walls at work, disguising her boasting as an attempt to win souls for the Lord, the daughter is half-convinced she doesn’t have a soul to save. She wrestles her faith out of the ether; she is quiet and puzzled and shrinks from evangelism with distaste. Her faith, what there is of it, must believe in the good: the good of God, the good of people, the desire of God to love his children and nurture and protect them even in their wrongdoing. Her mother’s faith is based on a cosmic scale of good and evil and calls for an exactitude of sinlessness: Hell is always waiting; let every step you ever take be the right one, for if the scale tips in the wrong direction there will be the lake of fire. The mother holds herself aloft from this punishment, though: she, of course, believes she is perfect even while professing imperfection. It is everyone else who must worry. The daughter, meanwhile, worries less about Hell than she does about not being loved. That is what her quest of faith has her searching for: the answer to whether or not she can, with all her flaws and errors, still really and truly be loved.
But as different as the daughter is from the mother, there are many things the same. The drinking of so much tea. The fact that neither can stand to wear shoes and go without them whenever possible, their heels and insteps becoming hard casings of skin thick as leather. Their shared love of scented candles and masses of houseplants and certain singers. Their stubbornness, so often set match-for-match in a battle of unbendable wills. Their tempers, both curiously turned the same direction: the mother against the daughter; the daughter against herself, screaming old litanies of stupidity and worthlessness at herself when something goes awry – her mother’s voice in her mother’s words with her mother’s vehemence. This last thing is the worst. Worse than having her mother’s hard feet or her mother’s plump face or her mother’s blue eyes, or a shared preference for household decoration. Those other things she can claim now with a nod of reference to where they came from before making them her own, but this temper, this hopeful heart set upon by a mutated rage that leaves her hoarse and spent and sometimes scratched bloody, is a specter of terror. It is the thing that most makes her fear she will turn into her mother after all: young but old, alone in her own mind and always unhappy.
She deviates in other small ways, too: most of her freckles have chosen to take up residence on her arms instead of on her face, for instance. In character she prefers lavender to her mother’s vanilla, has no desire to bake anything worth eating because spending time in the kitchen is a bore, and hardly ever makes the bed up properly. She collects journals instead of shoes, though both go untouched: the mother’s stacks upon stacks of boxes in the closet because she loves to buy shoes but hates to wear them, and the daughter’s empty journals scattered hither and yon, because she has so many she can’t possibly fill them all, and yet she can’t resist a journal if she sees one. The daughter enjoys a glass of wine at times, or a Long Island or a Red Death or shots of Blue Maui; the mother considers it the epitome of sin to allow liquor to pass her lips.
Religiously speaking, mother and daughter are two different creatures from two separate planets. Where the mother claims piety and redemption and a deep, abiding faith that has come to her without effort, which she flouts in her speech and actions and on her very walls at work, disguising her boasting as an attempt to win souls for the Lord, the daughter is half-convinced she doesn’t have a soul to save. She wrestles her faith out of the ether; she is quiet and puzzled and shrinks from evangelism with distaste. Her faith, what there is of it, must believe in the good: the good of God, the good of people, the desire of God to love his children and nurture and protect them even in their wrongdoing. Her mother’s faith is based on a cosmic scale of good and evil and calls for an exactitude of sinlessness: Hell is always waiting; let every step you ever take be the right one, for if the scale tips in the wrong direction there will be the lake of fire. The mother holds herself aloft from this punishment, though: she, of course, believes she is perfect even while professing imperfection. It is everyone else who must worry. The daughter, meanwhile, worries less about Hell than she does about not being loved. That is what her quest of faith has her searching for: the answer to whether or not she can, with all her flaws and errors, still really and truly be loved.
But as different as the daughter is from the mother, there are many things the same. The drinking of so much tea. The fact that neither can stand to wear shoes and go without them whenever possible, their heels and insteps becoming hard casings of skin thick as leather. Their shared love of scented candles and masses of houseplants and certain singers. Their stubbornness, so often set match-for-match in a battle of unbendable wills. Their tempers, both curiously turned the same direction: the mother against the daughter; the daughter against herself, screaming old litanies of stupidity and worthlessness at herself when something goes awry – her mother’s voice in her mother’s words with her mother’s vehemence. This last thing is the worst. Worse than having her mother’s hard feet or her mother’s plump face or her mother’s blue eyes, or a shared preference for household decoration. Those other things she can claim now with a nod of reference to where they came from before making them her own, but this temper, this hopeful heart set upon by a mutated rage that leaves her hoarse and spent and sometimes scratched bloody, is a specter of terror. It is the thing that most makes her fear she will turn into her mother after all: young but old, alone in her own mind and always unhappy.
Somewhere, a mother stands in a pharmacy looking down at her sandals. Somewhere else, hundreds of miles away, her daughter, a woman so much different but so much the same, steadily works at unraveling the web of rage she has so far allowed to remain cast around her. She works on patience with herself, acceptance of herself. She wrestles her faith out of the ether and clutches it close, examining it for signs that the effort will be worth it after all: that she can be, that she will be, that perhaps she already is, really and truly and honestly loved.
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