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Show Motherlunge a novel 99 In the frame was a black and white photograph of my parents on their wedding day. In it they are standing next to a three-tiered wedding cake. My mother, her pregnancy hidden under a highwaisted white dress, is young and beautiful with movie-star waves of blond hair gleaming like Cling wrap against her neck. My father is a boy, tall, with shoe-polish hair cut close above his ears. There they were. Dorothy is looking down at her hand on the shiny knife, and Walter is behind her with his hand over hers, helping her push it in. Both my parents are smiling the small, terrified smiles appropriate to real love. On top of the cake, the fat baby Cupid has a cruel grin and a bow, no arrow; evidently his arrow has already flown, struck, pierced, stuck. As I held the photograph I heard squeaks from the back bedroom, then the sound of Dorothy turning the bedroom door handle the wrong way, then the right way, to open it. She came slowly down the hall and stepped into the light of the kitchen where I was still sitting with the phone cord in my lap and the photograph in my hands. Dorothy's hair was high and flat on one side, smashed into a jaunty, going-to-the-races shape. "Hello, darling." She smiled gently at me and it hurt sharply, how much she has always loved me, how wrong I'd been to think she'd make me return to stay with her. "Where's your father?" I pointed toward the living room, and she nodded. Then she saw the photograph in my hands, and when I started to tuck it back into the bookcase, she moved toward me. I clenched my jaw, characteristically. I thought she was going to want to look at the photograph more closely. I thought she would want to reminisce. |
