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The house Mom and Gill live in today has more rooms than before: enough for each to have a bathroom of her own. Mom’s little girl backside now graces Gill’s bathroom, to the right of the toilet where I’m peeing. Maybe that’s what I sensed before, when they’d shared a bathroom — that it was Gill who’d put it there, that it was a visible sign of a lover’s claim on my mother’s flesh. Despite the photo’s innocence — or perhaps because of it — its unembarrassed appearance in the space of Gill’s expulsions and ablutions exposes an erotic charge I’d already felt, like there was something sexual in the viewing that I shouldn’t be seeing.
I stand up from the toilet and look anyway. Even though I’ve seen the photo before, this is the first time I really study it. I peer at the cherubic profile of a child who is my mother, but not yet my mother. She’s a toddler, but already has Mom’s tennis match face — focused and intense — as she reaches down to wipe the shiny tub. She’s in ready position, as if waiting for a serve. Her knees are slightly bent, her torso hunched forward and twisting slightly to the right: almost contrapposto, but more athletic. I wonder if she’s cold, wonder who was there with her, who decided to snap the picture in this moment. Her mother? A nanny? A shadow arm, a mirror of her own, extends out from the tiled wall to grasp her cocked left elbow, dissolving her body into the negative space, her flesh holding its form but dissipating at the edges like ink bled through water. The shadow arm tugs her back and slightly upward, toward a garland of chiaroscuro bodies unfurling across the porcelain, accordion-style, into a paper doll chain of Mom-shaped shadows.
I touch the shadow puppets beneath the picture glass. The largest and darkest — the one closest to Mom, the one who has her by the elbow — snakes down the wall and into the tub to prowl the picture’s dark belly, the crater beneath the bathtub rim.
I lose myself there fingering the glass, in the chasm between the rim and my mother’s bottom. There’s nothing to see: just darkness. But I can feel the vacuum of light sucked away. I feel the push, relentless, in the drop from her belly into the birth canal. And then I feel the shock, icy, as I plummet in free fall: out of the hole (I can’t see it, but I know it’s there) just in front of the butt crack, at the mouth of the delta. Separation is painful. I land hard on porcelain, curl into myself, shrieking like a banshee, desperately trying to becoming fetal again.
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About Lynne Huffer
