The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [75]
Rose was waiting with a towel when our mother stepped out of the shower. She genteelly averted her eyes, but the angry red incision, hatched with dark thread, persisted in her mind. The empty space where her breast had been looked odder than a missing limb, Rose thought. More like a face without features, the absent nipple a missing mouth. Our mother winced as she lifted her arm for the towel, and Rose handed it to her, let our mother pat herself dry and then drape it carefully across her chest, ignoring the water pooling on the floor. She still could not raise her arm enough to fold a towel around herself or to tie the scarves that she wore to cover her head. The fabric had a tendency to loosen into sloppiness until one of us was annoyed enough to rewrap it for her. Rose stepped behind our mother and turned off the tap in the tub, which was still dripping. Our mother reached out with her good arm and wiped away the steam on the mirror.
“Do you want help?” Rose asked.
“No thank you, honey,” our mother said. She was staring at her reflection.
“I’ll be in the bedroom. I’ll help you with your exercises and we can put on new bandages.”
“Goody.”
Rose slipped outside the door, pulling it shut behind her, and as she moved, she saw our mother let the towel slip down to reveal her cockeyed chest, and place a bare hand across the emptiness of her skin.
It must be so strange, Rose thought. We had never made much trade in our breasts, small as they were on all of us, but to lose one? Or both? And our mother’s breasts, the ones that had fed us, against which we had cried when we were young. Oh, it was selfish of us to think it, but we missed them as well.
Sitting on our parents’ bed, so high that an old-fashioned step sat at the foot to aid entry, Rose felt the comforter sink down below her as she pulled the lotion and gauze out of the bedside table. Once, when she was a teenager, she had walked into the kitchen to find our mother, her hands in soapy dishwater, our father behind her at the sink, his hands cupped over her breasts possessively. He kissed her neck, whispered something in her ear, and they laughed. Rose had retreated, embarrassed not so much by the scene but by the way her inopportune entrance had violated their privacy. Now she wondered when they made love again, would her father kiss the scar? Caress the empty space?
When it happened to her—it no longer seemed a maybe—would Jonathan?
“I feel so much better,” our mother announced, coming into the bedroom. She held the towel in front of herself again as she lay down on the bed, leaning on Rose, grimacing slightly as she shifted toward the center. “But I’m sick of these stupid scarves. I wish my hair would grow faster.”
“We could get you hats. Or you could just not wear them at all. It’ll be long enough soon that it would just look like you cut it that way,” Rose said. She pulled the towel down carefully, preserving what little modesty remained in our relationship by exposing only the wound—it was still a wound, wasn’t it? Not yet a scar.
“I think it’ll be a long time before it looks like anything intentional.”
“Do you miss it?” Rose stretched our mother’s arm gently, moving it in the patient way the physical therapist had shown us.
“I do. I still haven’t gotten used to it—every time I look in the mirror I think it’s a skeleton in the reflection, not me.” Our mother took a deep, shuddering breath, and Rose saw tears in the edges of her eyes. “Well, maybe it’s for the best,” she said finally. “It’s impractical for a woman my age to have that much hair. It’s like the Sphinx’s riddle, isn’t it? We start with short hair, grow it long, and then cut it all off again. Haven’t you noticed that?”
“Noticed what?” Cordy asked, coming into the room and bouncing onto the bed enthusiastically, causing Rose to shoot her a scolding look. Cordy ignored it, rolling onto her side and propping herself up on one arm.
Our mother turned to her and smiled as Rose continued to manipulate her arm. “That older women never have long hair.”
“I think you’re still too young for the once-a-week