She wanted me, as her female child, to be a sylph. A girl like a powder puff. Soulless, weightless, inhabiting the oxygen instead of the earth.
But I was awkward and overweight, with pin-straight hair—so much body on me I could never have lived in air.
And those nights of pink-cushion curlers worn to bed went on forever. I’d dream of Hansel and his older sister, Gretel, in a very dark forest dropping phosphorescent stones and bread crumbs behind them, hoping.
Those nights, knowing I’d wake without curls to my mother’s disappointment, I couldn’t roll over in bed because the curlers, tight as they were, would yank at my scalp. In my dreams I’d grab, panicked, for the fists of the witch who’d gotten hold of my hair, before I woke, remembering who and where I was and the curlers on my head.
Then, in the morning, she might even seem pleased. “Well, it’s not curly, but it’s fuller.”
And briefly, she’d be right. The hair stood away from my head as if it were offended, but as the day wore on, it would settle down, and my mother would gaze across the dinner table with an annoyed expression on her face. She’d look at my father, and then at me again as we ate her turkey, like her silence, in thin, white slices.
“Pass the butter,” my father would say.
With the butter in her hand, my mother would say, “Please?” holding it just out of his reach.
“Please?” he’d repeat. Without balls. Without imagination. A film of spit on his lower lip.
She could barely stand to eat in his presence.
I could tell by the look on her face that she wanted to throw her knife across the table and watch it vibrate in the wall. She might have been imagining the sound it would make, boing, as it wobbled there above my father’s head.
By the time I asked for the butter, too, she would be seething.
“You don’t need butter,” she’d say, “you’ve got about twenty pounds of it on your hips.”
“Evie,” my father would say, looking down, counting the peas on his plate.
The first few times we’d tried to curl my hair, it had been her idea. But one night, maybe I was in fourth grade, the eve of picture day at school, when even the kindergarten girls of Garden Heights would be wearing pearls, pink sweaters, a little smudge of frosted lipstick, a swipe of powder on their noses and their mother’s department store blush, I asked her to curl it for me, and my mother shrugged, looked at me as if she were sucking on something sour, and asked, “Why?” She said, “Your hair won’t curl.”
Bless my mother, I think some days, lying on her side of the bed, the bed she shared for twenty years with my father, looking at the ceiling, trying to imagine it from her perspective:
She was so wicked. Such a classic case of resentment and ambivalence bumping and brushing up against all that maternal instinct. The love and hate in her was as vast as space—all meteors, no atmosphere.
There she’d be, idling in the station wagon outside my elementary school, wearing a black turtleneck sweater and small gold hoops in her ears—beautiful and simmering. I’d come skipping out of the orange double doors with my book bag and braids looking like a daughter you might have in an ad, happy to see you, having learned the names of the continents that day. The bloated lung of Africa, the broken arm of Europe in a cast. Now, I could point those out. But, looking at me, my mother would seem to have forgotten who I was, why I was bounding into her car with some atrocity of crayon and construction paper in my hand with “for momy” written on it. She’d seem annoyed by my drooping kneesocks. Or a dry mustache of milk on my upper lip. As we drove home, she’d ask me about my day, but when I started to tell her about art or gym, she’d hush me, turn up the radio, while the announcer told her something she would rather hear, something about casualties and accidents and prisoners of war.
Still, there my mother would be—predictable, reliable—every afternoon, waiting for me. And in the morning, when she dropped me off, she’d hug me tight, kiss my hair three or four times, my cheek, the top of my head. “See you after school,” she’d say, and look at me with sweetness like a sad song played on the radio so many times you couldn’t hear the sadness anymore.
And every Christmas she’d bake fifty dozen of the most elaborate cookies you’d ever seen. Bells and doves and stars. Cookies shaped carefully into wreaths and candy canes, dough dyed green and red, with bows, with miniature poinsettias, the petals of which she’d clipped with little manicure scissors. Finnish chestnut fingers dipped in melted chocolate. Pfefferneusse. Cut-out cookies. Santas with glittering blue eyes, rosy cheeks, coconut beards. Christmas trees crowned with blonde and microscopic angels playing golden trumpets.
She had to use a magnifying glass to decorate their faces.
She had to use a skinny paintbrush dipped in colored egg white to shellac the trees with melted sugar so they glistened as if a fresh snow had just fallen on their branches.
Five dozen per batch.
Fifty dozen before she was done.
By June of every year, she’d have already made the dough, already have ten pounds of it wrapped in wax paper waiting in the freezer in the basement.
We’d gone through two freezers storing that. Years and years ago, the Ice-Master hummed itself to death in the basement. Then the Frigidaire. Now, the Coldspot.
We leave that Coldspot and its contents undisturbed. The dough in there belongs to my mother, and now the freezer is just a shelf collecting our lint and junk. A sock that’s come out of the dryer, crackling with static, having mysteriously lost its mate. Bundles of old newspapers. My father has begun to move those from the basement floor, where they’ve been gathering for a decade, to the top of the freezer.
But for years my mother baked cookies out of that frozen dough, and those cookies made her the envy of the other mothers and their children. Plate after paper plate of her perfect perfection on display.
Still, she’d scowl at me as I ate those cookies.
“Jesus,” she’d say as I bit into the sweet dust of an angel’s wing, “you’re getting fatter by the hour, Kat.”
So, this was my mother. So?
We all had crappy childhoods. So?
And, of course, she never slapped me. We lived in a suburb without violence. My father didn’t drink. He didn’t even smoke. We had peace and money beyond the wildest dreams of 99 percent of the world—as much food as we could eat, as much Pepsi as we could drink. In the winter, we just turned the dial as high as we wanted and there was heat. We simply pressed a handle to flush our waste away. And water—as cold as we wanted, or as hot. What exactly did I want? How much more plenty could I have gotten?
Still, I used to lie in bed at night and imagine a huge, silent bomb detonating over our house, filling the air with a clean, poisonous gas that would get in my eyes and blind me, smell like bleach, kill us in our sleep.
My hair, I’d think in the morning as I passed the mirror in the hallway and caught a glimpse of my own light reflected in it, the refraction of a daughter she didn’t want me to be, a daughter she had and had not wanted to have.
Where is she? I think now, passing that mirror, looking for myself.
Every night I pass that mirror on the way to my bedroom in the half dark of the hallway, and it looks like a cleft in the wall, a crack filled with dreams, tingling, star infested, a door to another dimension.
Where is she? I ask it, looking at me. And why did she leave?