Her Mother's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

I learned to read the silences and pauses, learned what the omissions in conversation meant—sex or shame, money or scandal. But I still have trouble with the words. The only word I could place on my mother, surely, without question, is one I have never heard anyone use: in her heart, at her core, my mother is furious.

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    S TILL, SHE WAS LIKE me too, hanging back in the shadows, timid and alien, knowing herself unwelcome in the adults’ room, knowing herself ignorant of it. She wore high shoes too, even higher than mine, but they were in fashion then, and she had the same long spaghetti curls she later visited on me. She would make me sit on the step stool while she heated the curling iron in the gas flame, the same flame she used to singe a chicken, which created a smell similar to that of the singed newspaper she used to twist the iron in before applying it to my limp hair. She would comb off a section of hair, twist it in the evil-smelling iron, then flip it loose, and continue around my head until I was judged “done.” Like the chicken, all its feathers having curled into wisps at the touch of fire, ready to be cooked.
    â€œDid your mommy curl your hair like this?”
    â€œOh, no, Anastasia.” She said this in what I privately called her “mad” voice, a tone mingling tiredness and disgust. But then she added mournfully, “My mother never combed my hair.”
    But it was there, in the picture, I insisted: Mommy at seven, my age exactly, with the same spaghetti curls. And I ran upstairs to get it, to show her. Her shoulders slumped, she grimaced. She was disgusted with me. “Oh, I don’t know, Anastasia, maybe the maid curled it.”
    â€œI don’t remember, Anastasia!” She is getting irritated now, as she rolls up the crimped newspaper and stuffs it in the garbage, lays the curling iron on the gas stove to cool, and pours herself another cup of coffee from the dull aluminum drip pot. She sinks into a chair at the kitchen table and lights a cigarette. Clutching the photograph, I leave the room, run to the front room we call the “porch” and squat on the floor. High black shoes with buttons. They come almost all the way up to her hem. And the shy eyes, the shy smile, the look of being not-quite-there. This is my mommy. With her is her brother, Eddie, who is nine. He is there, self-possessed, dark, a round mature face. I recognize him, my uncle Eddie whom I love. He is wearing a white suit with knickers and a shirt with a rounded collar. I never saw a white suit like the one in this photograph except when Louis Ferraro died. He had appendicitis, and the teacher made all of us go to his house to pay respect, she said. He was lying in a box in a white suit, with flowers all around him. He was just as fat and tan as ever, but he was dead. His mother and grandmother and all his aunts had black dresses covering their huge bodies, all sitting around the coffin crying. They hardly even looked up, they hardly even answered the teacher. I couldn’t understand that: he was only a child, after all. If I had died and was in a box and the teacher came to our house, I knew my mother would be polite and pleasant to the teacher. I thought they were pretending. They couldn’t have cared that much about just a child.
    When I asked my mother about his white suit, she said it was a Communion suit. Communion suit. That was new. I had heard of union suits, but not Communion suits. I wondered if Eddie’s suit was a Communion suit too, and I wanted to ask Mommy, but I knew it would be better if I didn’t. I sat on the porch floor, knees together, ankles out, considering. This was a decision I had often to make, but I had no way to predict consequences. I urgently wanted to know if Eddie’s suit was a Communion suit too. Finally, I decided to risk it, and jumped up and returned to the kitchen. Mommy was still sitting at the kitchen table, smoking. She was