My mother came over to where I sat on the couch, pushed the straight brown bangs off my forehead, ran a finger from my brow down to my chin, passed her thumb across my lips, which were an exact duplicate of her lips—but smoother, younger, sweeter. “Well,” she said, “you’re the girl next door now, I guess. Pretty romantic.”
I shook my bangs back. “We’ll see,” I said. “It’s just one date.”
“Fat girls have to be pragmatic,” I’d heard her say once about a cousin of my father’s, a fat girl who’d married a crippled man. She’d said it as though she were talking about that cousin, but I knew she was talking about me.
Still, it was my first date, and I was her only child, her younger self, all she had, had ever had, was ever going to have—her life, going on without her, going out with a boy she hadn’t met, to a dance she wouldn’t be at, next to a movie she hadn’t seen, and she might never see.
Already, she was starting to vanish.
I hadn’t even gone on that date yet.
I was still fat.
I was still a virgin.
But my mother could already see what would happen next:
She pictured my twin bed with its starched sheets empty. She pictured me in a bridal gown. She pictured me in a supermarket pulling a child of my own by its fat arm past the fruits and vegetables. She pictured me in a white coffin wearing a lace dress, my face like a wax mask, and a delicate spray of baby’s breath in my clenched fist.
But something wild was going on in that coffin. She looked closer. I was growing shoots and leaves and blossoms. Moss. Bugs. Worms. She leaned over my corpse to kiss my lips, but they were warm instead of cold, and then she realized the dead girl wasn’t me at all. Who was that? Who was that dead girl squirming with life?
And then she realized—
That was her.
Our bodies had been switched. Mine for hers.
Perhaps she gasped when she saw that.
A FEW DAYS LATER, PHIL AND HIS MOTHER MOVED IN, AND my mother was the first person who went over to say hello.
“Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said. “I’m Eve Connors. Next door.”
A woman slipped her thin hand out the storm door, and the hand passed sleepily through the chill mist without direction. My mother had to catch it in midair. She pressed it into her own hand and felt it give—small-boned, with thin, cool skin. “I’m Gina Hillman.” Then, “Come in.”
There was a bit of humidity in the cold, a current of warmth running under it, and that current smelled like thawed water, old leaves, atomized ocean—as if a huge fan, pointed in our direction, had been turned on off the coast of Florida, and, by the time the wind kicked it up and billowed it to us here in our northeastern pool-table pocket of Ohio, it had accumulated the odors of the other states: the fish hatcheries, the sheep farms’ eely wool, the stripped mountains and muddy football fields of Kentucky, the light blue haze of ditto fumes left over from the sixties that still hovered over hundreds of elementary schools between us—that chafed smell of paper, factory waste, the rheumy, old-lady smell of lace, dank and sweet, a fine drizzle of it in our faces. The telephone poles stood out stiff and black against the haze-white sky, like crucifixes minus Christs.
“I’m happy to meet you,” Mrs. Hillman said, ushering my mother in.
My mother had never been in Mrs. Lefkowsky’s house. It was oppressive. The ceiling was beige, and claustrophobically low. The carpet was worn away in patches, as if someone had stood in the same few spots, night after night for years, pawing at the ground like a horse for hours before moving on to another spot.
It was a shabby replica of our own house.
And the new neighbors had bad furniture, too, as bad as Mrs. Lefkowsky could possibly have had—scarlet curtains, vinyl lounge chairs, a coffee table as long as a coffin, with anchors adorning each end. There was even an afghan on the overstaffed sofa with an embroidered replica of the Liberty Bell.
My God, my mother might have thought, looking at that bell. It resembled an enormous breast, and the crack along the side of it was violent, sexual, sewn up sloppily with thick black thread. There was nothing on the walls, only old nails where Mrs. Lefkowsky must have had something hanging—her own Seascape, perhaps—until her greedy daughter and son-in-law carted it off.
There was no aesthetic here, no plan, no organizing principle at all. My mother must have been open-mouthed, looking around that house—my mother, who took such pains with our own house, her own aesthetic of polite denial, conservative grace. My mother, who was always so careful not to overdo anything, must have learned a lesson, in that moment, about what happens when you undo everything.
The decorator here, my mother thought, seemed to be denying the very idea of decoration.
The decorator here, my mother realized, must be blind.
“Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said again into Mrs. Hillman’s blank eyes, one of which traveled over my mother’s face like a little, milky moon.
Mrs. Hillman gestured in the direction of the Liberty Bell as if my mother should sit near it, and when she sat, the sofa cushions surged around her like a warm plaid bath. Then Mrs. Hillman felt her way to the sofa herself, and eased back. Upstairs, someone could be heard—presumably Phil Hillman—singing in the shower. The sound of a young man’s song—naked, muffled by falling water.
“Welcome, welcome,” my mother said yet again—feeling absurd, struck dumb with discomfort.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Hillman said and nodded. Her face was pointed in my mother’s direction. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
“No,” she said too quickly and looked at her hands. They were white. Though she’d only come from the house next door, she should have worn gloves, she thought. Or she shouldn’t have come. “I hear you have a son,” my mother offered, “the age of my daughter.”
“Yes.” Mrs. Hillman nodded blindly. “I hear they’re going on a date.”
They laughed.
Two mothers: One of whom, my mother thought—seized with a panic that felt like the fast snap of an elastic band on the delicate skin of a wrist—may never have glimpsed the face of her own child.
Mind you, my mother was never prejudiced against the handicapped. She did not think of them as possessed, or dangerous, or supernatural. She was not the kind of person who would look away from someone in a wheelchair. Instead, she’d look straight into his eyes and say hello, as if to let him know she was not superstitious, or ignorant. She did not think of herself as superior. She knew perfectly well it was only a matter of a few seconds in a station wagon on slick ice that kept her out of a chair just like it.
But, like everyone else, my mother carried a million fears with her wherever she went—phobias, trepidations, anxieties—most of them groundless, she supposed. Fables and old wives’ tales.
Still, she carried them with her, as if in a tin—a pretty tin, the kind grandmothers keep beads and buttons in, a tin fall of fish, stars, and trinkets.
And the blind were in it—along with bearded women, cancer, amputees—tapping their way across the intersection with their white canes, coming at her.
Ever notice how, if a blind man is headed in your direction, whichever way you try to escape, he will be headed that way?
Once, she’d had a blind teacher in elementary school. Mr. Ferguson. Music. The children in that class would pass notes to one another, make faces, put their heads down on their desks and sleep.