American Thighs Read Online Free PDF

cannot—and really have no desire to—comprehend that any MOM may have, in fact, had an Actual Life before I and my contemporaries arrived on the scene. I cannot call up any vision of them, say, dancing with abandon, trying out the latest fashion, laughing over cocktails with girlfriends—and just forget about ANYTHING with BOYfriends.
    No, in my fourteen-year-old mind’s eye, the MOM have always done what my own personal MOM unit is doing right now—standing at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes from the supper they just cooked for and served to me. The MOM have always been here, serving me—in an endless cycle of cooking, cleaning, toting, and fetching—all centered, in my mind deservedly, around me. They did not exist before Me—because there was no Reason for them to do so. I Am—and therefore, So Are They. It is, and ever will be, ALL about ME.
    Suddenly, the MOM at the kitchen sink speaks, no doubt in response to some insufferable teenage remark I have made in her direction. What she says will echo in my mind for decades to come. And with the passing of each consecutive decade, I will be reminded of what a complete and total asshole I was as a teenager and I will also become less and less confident that I have improved much in that time.
    What the MOM says is this: “I don’t really FEEL any different inside today—than I did when I was YOUR age.” If she had picked up a pair of giant cymbals and crashed them together with my pinhead in between them, I don’t think I could have been any more stupefied than I was by those words.
    I turned slowly in my chair and looked at her back, saw that she was stooping slightly as she washed the dishes because at five feet eleven inches, the countertop was too low for her. I saw her gray hair—that had never in my memory been any other color. I saw her old lady clothes, covering her old lady body, her old lady feet splayed out in her old lady shoes. She was, after all,OVER forty, and therefore, in my mind, as good as dead—and yet she had just said out loud to me that SHE still felt exactly the same TODAY as she did when she was MY AGE.
    My first thought, of course, was that she meant she had always FELT the way she LOOKED to me. I visualized her going to her high school pep rallies in her “old lady comfort” (that is what she called ’em) shoes and her old lady dresses with her old lady gray hair maybe pulled back in a pathetic attempt at a perky ponytail. I could just see her standing there, perhaps with some clothes for the dry cleaners under one arm, a pile of discarded newspapers under the other, looking preoccupied—not cheering for the team but rather, perhaps, wondering if she’d remembered to take anything out of the freezer to cook for supper—and impatiently waiting for all these people to clear out so she could get her vacuuming done, and didn’t anybody EVER think to wipe their feet—what, were they born in a barn? And did they have to be so LOUD? Don’t be making all that racket in here—go out in the yard if you want to act like wild animals—and DON’T SLAM THE DOOR! And don’t be jumping around like that, you’re gonna put somebody’s eye out—don’t come crying to ME when you break your neck! Go back and change clothes, miss priss, you’re gonna freeze your japonica * in that skirt.Don’t leave all this mess for ME to clean up—I KNOW y’all don’t leave this kinda mess at DARLENE’S house—I am NOT your MAID!
    Of course, in my imagination, all her contemporaries (the Mere Ordinary Mortals/mothers of my friends)—THEY all appeared to be young and vital, like so many puppies cavorting happily in the sunshine. My own mother is the only one in my mind who was born Old. From the vantage point afforded me by my staggering teenage conceit, I simply could not conceive of HER EVER having been young.
    And yet