There are glimmers. Throughout the day. In the night, in the nodding-off moments that could be sleep, could be elsewhere, could be another life once lived or the one still to come. Fleeting. Blinks. Blink once: you are six. Twice: you are sixty. Glimmers. Of ease. How easy it all is, you say. How could I not have seen this before?

There is your father. He is all smiles, only smiles. The disapproval is gone. Was it ever really there, you ask now. When he was your age, the age you will formally be in just three more days, you were seventeen. You see his struggle, his anguish, his confusion. Where once you, his little princess, paraded your new pink party dress in front of him and he delighted in it, now your Bali bikini, with the 32C underwire bra, makes him turn away, uncomfortable, annoyed. You got it then without having words, sophistication. You see it now, understand the meaning, the psychology. You have never borne children and watched them grow away from you. Watched helpless, knowing you can’t save them. It is a hell realm. It must be.

Glimmers. Your mother still a mystery, still not easy to see, but you feel her sometimes. Still, you do see her, on your hands: the skin changes, the darkened pigmentation spots. You have her feet now, her bunions. She made hers worse with her stylish pointy shoes, but even with your broad German Trippens, your feet have become hers. Ditto your belly. It is all such a surprise. A shock.

Except when it’s not. When it’s not, it makes perfect sense. You are getting older. You are old! Skin no longer moist and supple. Crevices above your top lip. If you wore lipstick as dark as hers, it would creep up those crevices to draw spidery lines. Rounder face. Softer. There is your mother’s face in the mirror. Your father’s face is leaving you.

At her 62, you were 23, already gone from home, never to live there again. Making new homes, friends, creating life for yourself. Her ally gone.

Blink. You are in the kitchen in Oceanside, New York. Dinner will be ready soon. There is a small white plastic radio on the counter, plugged in, antenna pulled up. “You Light Up My Life,” that schmaltzy song they always play on AM radio, comes on. She sings along with Debby Boone…You light up my life. Never could carry a tune. She sings the chorus anyway. Looks right at you, chokes up. You do, too. Still do, if you tell the story and try to sing the chorus yourself. You couldn’t say why, then, no more than you could explain your understanding of your father’s discomfort, but you knew.

The memory never leaves you. Blinking, you see it all. The turquoise vinyl chairs and their chrome frames, the black and white flecked Formica table. The green-lawned, quarter-acre backyard through the picture window behind the kitchen table in the breakfast nook, where you, your sister and your parents ate dinner every night your father was home, when he wasn’t on the road, working.

Are you there, then? Is she? Is she always there? Are they? Where are we, really, anyway? How many lives lived all at once?

 

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May 7, 2015

Prompt: The Wailin’ Jennys, Swing Low, Sail High