Maybe That Was Okay Then
By Melissa Witcher
THEN
Most mothers are mere appendages, scurrying in revolving orbits around their children. She was the pulsing center, defined by sharp angles and effortless sophistication. Twenty-nine with a ten-year-old daughter, snotty-nosed with mullet hair, her youth had been consumed by the child. That fact did not make her an angry or cruel mother, to the contrary, it made her slightly better. Her beauty was made more remarkable for having endured motherhood.
It was 1989, people still smoked on planes, Brazil was electing a president for the first time in my lifetime, and she was beautiful. It was easy to be beautiful then
LATER
—I can’t believe you didn’t fucking tell me —Violeta shouts at me. Fuck is one of those English words that meant nothing and everything. It had meant something different when I’d first arrived in the U.S. and was the beautiful mother of a relatively docile child.
I remember the weight of Violeta in my arms then, skin tender and hair soft. Now the girl is heavy with rage and impossible to embrace. Most recently she’d started proclaiming that my beauty had been a distraction, that I’d been absent not marvelous, vacant even when present. This, according to the therapist whom I subsidize with the money earned from my beauty. I’d read once that children are of fundamental economic importance. As Violeta snorted and raged I could feel the cost.
Maybe things would be different if we'd stayed in Brazil.
—I thought you knew. —I say.
—Liar!! You don’t care if I knew.
I will my face to remain slack, covering any reaction in a shroud of wrinkles and emptiness. I remain silent. Even a beautiful woman knows when not to press her luck.
THEN
She sat on a lounge chair on the concrete patio, smoking a cigarette. The girl’s father was at work. She had nowhere in particular to be, nothing in particular to do. Her art degree would have been more useful as rolling papers—her skills had grown as brittle as the charcoal she used so passionately ten years before.
Her arm was flung out to the side and she considered licking the smooth expanse of skin, blue veins barely visible in the afternoon sun. She willed her hemocytes to slow, imagined the tickle of their flow. The phone rang, the sound muffled by the sliding glass door.
The dusty rose phone shook slightly on the wall and she walked into the kitchen.
—Hello —she said, before inhaling.
—Flora? —the voice was unfamiliar.
—Yes.
—It’s Cleide, from next door. Your daughter, Violeta, is with me.
—Violeta? —she asked, putting out the cigarette in the glass ashtray the girl’s father gave her for their anniversary. —Violeta!
—I saw her walking down the street and asked her where she was going. She said to get her father at work.
—Oh my.—she said, lifting her fingers to trace the particles of dust suspended in the air.
—I know he works downtown so I immediately told her to come home with me.
—I was in the bathroom, just for a minute…— she trailed off, vague but plausible.
Ah, Violeta. That small unremarkable girl had more energy in the tip of her pinky than Flora had in her whole body. She had the girl intentionally, excited to be pregnant at nineteen. She was no longer capable of wanting something so much.
—I’ll be right there.
NOW
I'd never felt my biological clock ticking—I had a child far too young for anything like that—but I can feel the clock of aging. My face is collapsing on itself, no matter how many peels and injections I pay for. The tissues from my fingertips to my kneecaps are degenerating minute by minute. My notable hard angles have all pooled into soft folds.
I haven’t had a cigarette in thirty years, not since the day my daughter slipped out of the house unnoticed, but I yearn for one. Undoubtedly the smoking and sun damage are most responsible for why I look older than many of her peers but desires often aren’t based in reason.
Funny how hard it is to please a child and how easy it is to obsess over every fold, crease, and jowl. Funny how the things I’d enjoyed the most are most responsible for what I hate when I look in the mirror. Funny how I wouldn't do anything differently.
THE END
Author Bio: Melissa Witcher (she/ela) is a self-taught writer, collagist, muralist, and embroidery artist. She was born in Brazil, raised in the U.S., and has lived in São Paulo since 2011. Her writing has appeared in 805 Art + Lit and Panorama Journal and is forthcoming in other journals.