Step

You are so much a woman, I’m sad for you.  Or maybe I’m sad for me.  You are tall, much taller than I remember – a graceless figure soaring atop a pedestal, and you are delightfully rare with your curiously uneven features, lazy posture, honey hair that sags out of a clip.  There’s a tattoo on your shoulder of a symbol I know nothing about.  I imagine you chose it after much deliberation, that it means something only you can understand.  Something fierce. 

The fabric, a deep ivory color, is draped past your feet, bunched – like a child playing dress-up, and it sparkles with every turn of your body.  I think about how dull your eyes are in comparison. Flat brown.  My fault?  Or just the light?

“Something’s off,” you say.   

The petite, older woman has been fussing with your corset for the last fifteen minutes.  She is tight-curled and graying with a puffy weathered face and I have already forgotten her name – because it’s a simple name like June or Lynn – and I find myself, instead, hanging on to her voice: deep and brittle, a smoker’s voice like your father’s.

“Maybe,” the woman says, “We should go one size up.”

I feel my face tightening.  You are obsessed with your weight – always have been, because your mother wanted you to be a dancer.

“This is my size,” you say. “This is the right size.”  And your face becomes pink like it always does when you’re frustrated.

The woman doesn’t notice, and I imagine she’s immune to brides; that she’s been doing this for too long.  “I just can’t pull any tighter,” she says.

“But there’s room,” you argue.  “I can feel it.  Are you certain your familiar with corsets?”

It’s a silly question, one that pours out without thought, and the woman takes offense – rightfully so – and her movements become abrupt.  She is thinking you are spoiled, but you’re not.

“Probably runs small,” I say, because I want to ease the tension.  “Really Cosie – it’s lovely.”  And the name slips off my tongue like chocolate on a sugar cone.  Our name.  But your mother’s voice is sour in my head: Not Cosie. Cosette.

Your face relaxes for a moment, the familiarity of my presence bringing you comfort.  It is short lived.  I am a contained pleasure whenever your mother is expected. 

“You don’t think it’s too much?  Be honest.”

I want to say: Yes, it’s too much!  Not you at all! – the beading and Chantilly lace!  It’s her!  All her!  And there’s another dress just within reach – pure white and cotton (so it won’t scratch your skin), and I see you in it, barefoot and laughing amidst a wash of sunset red, a bouquet of delphiniums brought to your face, careless hair that won’t restrict you.  But it isn’t my place to decide.   It isn’t yours either.

“You’ll do wonders with it,” I say.  “You’ll own it.”  Because you will.  Once you’re in motion, fresh and alert, sliding through a crowd as if everyone’s a friend, the dress will no longer wear you.  Nothing has ever worn you.  But first, you must leave your reflection.

“No.  Something’s wrong.”  You are sinking, sullen and crinkled.  You are poking and pinching your skin.  You are thinking, perhaps, about the abundance of food over the holiday or the fact that you haven’t been swimming as much. 

It’s true – you gained a little weight.  You are like your mother, thick and fluctuating.  But who cares?  It’s a gift, I think – the slopes and curves – because I am only skin and bones, aged already, sunken.  Either way, none of it takes away from anything – and I want to say this too! -  because you are generous with your heart and because you are deeply in love with a small-pocketed, big-dreaming Irish boy.  A boy I know well because he followed you around and kissed your boo-boos when you were young, and then he was there to fix your bicycles, and then to escort you to the prom. You are lucky.  And you know this.  There’s a future ahead; a future with more.  I knew it when you were fourteen.  I told your father: They’ll marry. And he had laughed – you know, the obscene guffaw that followed any off-color remark, because he thought I was being overly sentimental.  This isn’t a movie, he’d said.

“What is it?” you ask.  You are reading me, the way you used to as a child.  I give it all away.

“No – nothing.” 

You sigh, rolling your eyes and mumbling something about civility – because you know I am holding back.  But what can I do?  Nothing I say will be heard.  Everything I say will have consequences.  You are in a moment you can’t leave yet.  We both are.  We need to be guided out of our moods, coerced – something your father never fell for.

“Sorry,” you say, quicker than I expect.  And I smile.

You and I have always apologized to each other.  For words.  For him.  Your father didn’t know much about apologies.  But – oh, how his presence, even without his presence, made all the difference.  How I wish there were more pictures of him.  No - I wish there were more pictures of you with him.  I think you would have liked proof.

At night, sometimes, when the windows are open and the sweet, salty breeze is swimming through the rooms, and I’ve burrowed myself into the grey, tufted armchair, the flokati rug at my feet, I rummage through the shoebox that used to be under the bed.  Remember when I caught you with it?  I couldn’t let you have it.  You were curious.  Bored.  But there were things you couldn’t see: evocative, perfumed letters from my youth; my mother’s silver locket enclosing the face of a man I never knew; a pair of matching silver rings from a street fair in Lima because there was a time I lived in Peru.  There would have been questions I couldn’t answer, reminders when I didn’t want reminding.  There’d been life before you.  Happiness, even.  The pictures of your dad – the ones lying brazenly on top – were fillers, a trick I used to cover my past.  There is one picture from our honeymoon, but I don’t like it at all because it displays your dad as colorful.  There’s another one of all of us at Lake Wallenpaupack, but he is waving me away and you are half cut out.  Then there’s the candid one – and this is the one that pinches, that doesn’t seem to leave.  It is early enough for your dad to be focused, and his eyes are dark and scrutinizing.  You are off to the side reaching up for him.  I don’t know if he ever noticed you there, or if you simply gave up, resigning to the fact that he wasn’t going to take you – but the moment, frozen, depicts much about the way he was with both of us: brutally inaccessible.  Funny, how honest the unexpected pictures are.

It seems only yesterday I was sitting on the brown-gold recliner and he, trying to usher you in.  You’d clung to his jeans, thick, straw-like hair covering your face, and you were cautious, barely peeking at me from behind him.  I had been thinking, before you came, about how it might be too soon for introductions.  Your father and I had only known each other for a few months then.  I had my doubts.  He was different from me – blunt and boisterous, and I was more subdued like you.  On our second date, he’d taken me for sushi, and there was a specific table he wanted – one with a window overlooking the park.  He knew the place, he’d said, and the owner.  I suppose he was showing off.  When the table wasn’t readily available and nothing suitable was offered, he became instantly red in the face, his eruption barely contained.  I watched him swell, then tower over the soft-spoken maître d, demanding, too loudly, to speak with a manager – and she had gone out of her way to pacify him, offering nervous chatter with gyoza and sake.   Afterwards, while I nibbled on tuna tataki, I noticed he was changed – no more jokes, no more compliments, a different, solemn man.  The man he would become.  Perhaps, at the time, I had brushed it off.  I’d been lonely by then – doesn’t loneliness cry for excuses?  He filled the gaps.  I may have thought: This will do for now.  And wasn’t there always the idea that something better might come along? 

I’ve found that rewinding the mind is virtually impossible.  Memories only appear anchored.  The way I used to see your father has changed over time.  I see him then as I see him now, not even as I saw him five years ago.   But it’s different with you.  Isn’t that strange? 

After you got the courage to separate from your father’s leg, you kept your distance.  While I fussed with my hair in a mirror your mother picked out, you watched me from a corner.  When your father tugged at the zipper of my new, linen dress, you reached out and touched it, then scurried into a shadow.  We went to lunch by the water.  You wanted a hamburger, but they only had seafood.  You held on to the menu, your eyes not leaving it because you wanted to hide.  Your father pulled it from you because he thought you were being rude.  He didn’t understand.  I did.  I offered you the decorative notepad I kept in my purse, and I gave you a pen.  You didn’t take it from me.  You didn’t acknowledge me at all.  So, I left it on the table close to you.  When you thought I wasn’t looking – when I was touching your father’s hand and raving about the pickled-green armoire he’d build (Ah – the days of good behavior!) you slid it into your lap with one quick, pasty finger.  By the time dinner was over and you placed the notebook back on the table, you had drawn on nearly every page.  Later, when I opened it, I saw you were talented.  There were sketches of animals: birds, cats – even a snake.  On the last page, there was a single word: No.

The door jingles and the fragrant, spring breeze enters with your mother, her creamy hair unmoved and cut, sharply, to her chin.  She stops to fondle a bridal shoe because it’s vulgar and expensive and exactly her taste – am I sounding much like him? – then rushes past me, throwing a half-smile and a quick, dismissive wave (Recoil!).  She approaches you incautiously, taking over the petite woman’s job, who steps away with her voice – because that’s what people do when your mother is around – and at the sight of her you begin whining, and she feeds you, pulling and tweaking and pinning until you are skinny again.  There, she says, standing behind you, all better.

When I married your father, you stood beside me in a satin, green dress.  You wore your hair in a twisted braid, a single, emerald clip pinning it in place.  There were candles all around us, and you were illuminated – and I let you have the attention because you hadn’t known attention.  After your father kissed me, when he was turning to the door, you tugged at my sleeve.  You wanted a kiss from him, too.  Tell him, you’d said.  But I knew that wouldn’t work.  So, I lifted you up and kissed you myself.  In the car, later, with you asleep on my lap, I knew I’d made the right decision.  I thought: I’m not in love the way I should be.  Because it was you I loved, not him.  But wasn’t that enough?

As the years passed and the scotch brought your father back to his eremitic childhood, and then to the failing of your mother, it was you I remained wrapped beneath the blankets with.  When I wanted to dance, you’d stand on my toes and oblige.  When I couldn’t get pregnant, you asked me to teach you how to cook.  You kept me busy.  You kept me sane.  Or rather – we kept each other sane.  In the winters, while your father slept, we’d watch old movies together.  In the summers, we’d nestle in the hammock with novels and pitted-green grapes.  I confessed that I sometimes cried when the day and night collided.  You told me to paint it – but I didn’t.  You did. 

The year you were finally taller than me, when your mother made you choose, and you stopped writing Mom in my cards, and your goodbye kisses morphed into hurried, awkward pats, I looked at your father clearly for the very first time.  I saw he was old: lined and tired.  The alcohol had won.  He was sorry, he had finally said, for things he didn’t give.  And I cried with him because I was sorry too – and because I didn’t want to mourn anymore.  At his funeral, my legs gave out on me, and there were strangers there to pick me up, and they said things like: Time will heal everything.  But would time give me you?  That’s what I wanted to ask.  And I watched as you leaned into your mother, the tears not falling; your eyes already reaching for the life I wasn’t in.  I knew it then.  It wouldn’t work without him.

Your mother’s phone rings, and she disappears into a corner of spilt veils.  We are alone.  I stand to retrieve my coat. 

“A rain jacket?” you ask, and you smile generously – to make up for before.

“It was cloudy this morning,” I say.

You laugh – and it’s a beautiful sound, silvery and dulcet.  “Silly.  Always prepared, aren’t you?  For the rain?”

“I suppose.”

“I hardly prepare for anything.”

“I know.”

For a moment we are silent, our reflections unmoving, and we are close but very far apart, and your mother’s voice is slicing into us.

“Thank you,” you say, “for coming.”  And it’s too standard.  Too polite.  I search your face for what you cannot give: the bedtime songs, the porch-swing storms, the blue-green water cool against our skin, and my arms loosening around you because it’s time to let you swim.

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” I say, snapping a picture of you in my mind: the girl-woman who used to be mine.

I leave you standing in the spotlight – a fitting place to stay.  The door lingers behind me and shuts without a sound.  I turn to see you through the window, but the sun is reflecting off the glass and so there is only the dwindling sun, and the bustling street, and an image of me, clutching an umbrella and looking for you.