The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [49]
There is a woman I want to tell you about.
Right after I tell you about my mother. Which is where everything gets born.
My mother was born with one leg six inches shorter than the other. In my life it meant something completely different than it did in hers.
In my life as a child it meant that the pearled gleam of her scar appeared exactly at eye level. So white. So beautiful. I wanted to touch it. Mouth it. When she got out of the bath I hugged her leg and closed my eyes and saw it and saw it and saw it. I saw the crossed white tracks, the too-white non-skin on her misshapen leg, the dark wire of her pubic hair. It made me dizzy enough to see stars.
And that’s not all. My mother wore her hair wound in a never-ending spiral at the back of her head. When she let it down, it reached her calves. It smelled like fir trees.
Every desire that flickered alive in me as a child came from those two images.
My mother said that as a girl, she let her hair grow long enough to cover her body, her deformed leg, her scars. So that there would be something about her that was beautiful to cover a crippled girl.
When I was 13 my mother became an award-winning real estate agent. More and more she left the house. More and more alcohol entered. The bathroom closet full of vodka jugs. She cut her hair off in that 1970s real estate agent on the go way. The long trail of her hair sat curled in a box like a cat in her bedroom closet. Sometimes I would sit in the dark of her closet and smell it and cry.
Harder
“NOW ASK ME FOR WHAT YOU WANT.”
Maybe it was because I only saw her three times a year. She lived in New York City, I lived in Eugene, Oregon. Maybe it was her stature - so high up in the academic echelons that it was like being awarded a very important prize to be with her. It could be it was that she liked my brutal and unruly stories. Or that I had no place in her daily life. Maybe it was her scar, her hair, my pathologies. But mostly I think it was what she taught me about pain.
When I was 26 a big time academic came to give a talk at the University of Oregon. I’ll tell you right now, I wasn’t prepared for it. I was being all grad student faux smarty butt. I was all Sontag and Benjamin and Deleuze and Foucault. I was talking the talk of Barbara Kruger and Roland Barthes and … who the fuck gives a shit. Point being: I was not prepared to psychosexually regress fast enough and hard enough to make me leave a puddle in my seat.
In the auditorium, when she walked out onto the stage, even though I was sitting fairly far from her, I could see that her silver and black hair traveled down the entire length of her back in a braided rope, past her ass. The skin on her face and hands was the color of Albuquerque. When she turned to face our jackastic applause, I saw something. Beginning just underneath the infant thin skin of her left eye was a tiny white gleaming. I had to strain to focus. I had to sit up and lean forward on the edge of my seat.
When they dimmed the lights, only a podium lamp illuminated her face from below. I saw then a web of thin white scars that curved around her cheekbone, cupped her jaw, and continued down her neck into the plunge of her shirt.
I went instantaneously deaf. I mean I didn’t hear one word of her famous hour long photographer talk. It was like being underwater. Occasionally I was able to wrestle my eyes away from her to look at the stream of photos behind her, but not often. My breathing began to go wrong in my lungs. Sweat formed in lines underneath my tits and between my legs. My face got hot. My scalp felt as if it was leaving my head. My mouth filled with spit. I wished everyone in the room dead.
By the time her talk was over and I’d made my way down and through the idiotic academic sycophantic throngs, by the time I penetrated the clone army and reached my hand out to shake hers, to introduce myself, to look at what my body was begging for, I already knew.
She was the same age as my mother.
A few hands before mine I noticed that she wiped her hand