It’s time to go.My daughter grabs her clarinet case, and we pile into the car.
“And you’re wearingthat?”
she says, leaning over to view my stretchy pants and long, loose shirt, the cuffs rolled.
She scans me top to bottom, then eyes her father.
Apparently, he gets a turn, too; thank God I’m not the only one.
“With your long beard,” she says, “you look like a lumberjack.”
“I can pull over and shave,” he says.
“Right,” my daughter says and flops back in her seat.
“Just do me a favor, you guys,” she says.
“Whatever you want,” my husband responds.
“Pretend you’re not my parents,” she says.
“Pretend that we’ve never met.”
“Why not?”
“I remember being 12 and feeling exactly the same way.”
A bell sounds, and we head inside to the concert hall, which dims and hushes.
My husband and I are in the back of the crowded hall in seats that feel cramped.
These pictures are hidden in a pouch that is itself hidden in my desk.
And yet I won’t show her.
In the end, the photos are private, between my husband and me.
Revealing them would be wrong.
The woman who answers sounds young and thin and annoyingly upbeat.
“How many pounds do you want to lose?”
I hadn’t figured that far.
“A lot,” I say, thinking of my slender progeny.
We go through the menu together, and I make my selections.
I sit amid the boxes, the food scattered on the floor around me.
“I can’t eat this stuff,” I say.
“Sure you’ve got the option to,” my daughter says.
“It looks good!”
“If it looks so good, then why don’tyoueat it?”
I grumble, suddenly feeling very small and young in the worst way.
This happens sometimes, now that my daughter is on the cusp.
We’ll have an interaction, and I’ll lose my place as her parent, as the adult.
“I’mnot the fat one,” my daughter retorts.
I take the steps I need to take to bring my body back.I do it because of my daughter.
If I try hard enough, might I become one of them?
Part of me, though, is irked at my situation.
Somewhere in the world, my body might be feted.
My arguments don’t soothe me, though.
So I eat freeze-dried diet meals for two weeks, dutifully microwaving my preprepared feed.
The pickles have a tinny aftertaste.
Still, I persist, using tall glasses of water to wash everything down.
I step onto the scale every morning, the digital numbers blinking as they jockey for position.
I begin to get angry, ignoring my appetite and refusing to eat even a small square of chocolate.
The numbers won’t budge.
They flicker and jiggle and then settle down: 180, 180, 180.
I get the bad news naked, then go to my room and lie on my bed.
When I wake, there’s a feeling in me that something’s not quite right, but what?
The wood is the hue of honey, and the surface is scratched here and there.
Lately, my daughter has been complaining about her dresser.
“Why is all our furnitureantique?”
“I don’t want to be surrounded by stuff that’s old and breaks.”
I won’t buy her a new dresser, I decide, tracing the ridges in the wood.
I pull out a pair of 6X jeans from one drawer.
I lift her shirts and camisoles from another, each one smelling of clean.
In her top drawer, I find her underwear stuffed in crevices, her socks mismatched.
As I’m ferreting around in there, I suddenly feel a cool clasp, a padded mound.
When did she get a bra?
Why didn’t she tell me?
The bra my daughter has bought is soft and small.
I suddenly feel utterly inconsequential.
I feel like a pendant on a string, dangling.
My daughter doesn’t need me.
It was hard to enjoy any of it when my fibrous breasts were sending their threatening messages.
and swore I’d never regret it.
Besides, apart from my husband’s Polaroid pictures, I’d never much liked my mammary glands.
They were far too big for my then-petite frame, straining my back and shoulders.
Good riddance was more like it.
When I awoke after surgery, the first thing I did was run my hand over my bandaged flatness.
I felt no regret, even though the pain was pounding and red.
I eventually healed, and then I did, indeed, plunge into the pool of my life.
Ten years later, I am finally mourning my wrecked chest.
I am mourning that there is nothing I can do to bring my breasts back.
They are icons of some sort of war, and of my high-cost victory.
They arenoticons of love or nurturing or a woman’s beauty.
My chest is ugly, perhaps horrific, and no amount of dieting can change that.
My daughter comes back from school early today and swings by me on her way to her bedroom.
I tiptoe after her, feeling like a thief.
What am I doing?
Why am I stalking my own child?
Her door is closed.
I don’t knock.
Instead, I ease it open quietly, slowly, peering in on her unaware.
She’s chewing on a hank of hair and typing fast on her keyboard, her back to me.
Through her thin shirt, I can see the jut of her spine.
“When did you buy your bra?”
I finally ask her.
With her back to me, she answers without missing a beat.
“About a week ago.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?
I could have helped you out.”
“Papa went with me,” she says.
I say, aghast.
“Why would you want Papa to go with you and not me?”
“I figured, you know,” she says and then swivels so she’s facing me.
“You know,” she says again, gesturing toward my chest.
She was only 2 1/2 when I’d had my mastectomy.
“OK, Mom,” she says.
I stand there in her door frame.
I’m kinda busy."
He is torn up, his fur matted with blood, his body gone stiff.
It’s a Sunday, so everyone is at home, and we gather around the cat.
“Let’s all say something we loved about Laylo before we bury him,” my daughter suggests.
“I love the way he purred,” my son offers.
“I loved how he was a night warrior,” my husband says.
“I loved how acrobatic he was,” my daughter adds.
I stroke his coat, weeping.
We look at the cat, his cream-colored belly, his white socks.
We are joined by mourning, and I realize that my shame is gone.
So, too, is my daughter’s ever-critical eye, filled now with tears.
We carry the cat outside.
The breeze has a bite, and the hairs on my arms rise in response.
“Let me,” I say, suddenly sure and confident.
True, I am nearing 50.
True, my curves have turned to lard and my breasts are gone.
Could I have done more to stay slender?
You could say that I have failed my mandate, but that’s not the whole truth.
The lines around my eyes suggest everything I’ve seen, so much more than my daughter has.
I have loved and lost.
I put my arm around her.
She presses herself against me.
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