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Show Motherlunge a novel sized Venuses from the foam. I was seventeen, it was a Friday night in the summer after my senior year, and Adam had said I was beautiful. Six days later in a hotel bathroom, my mother found out about Adam and me > because I told her. "You are in love," she suggested, jaw in the palms of her hands, dry elbows on her knees as she sat on the toilet. "You are in love with him," she repeated. A garrulous Gemini, my mother's stories tend to puff up, double; eventually everyone is implicated. "Think!" Dorothy continued, straightening up slowly and pneumatically, "You-my daughter Thea-on the very day your sister is to be married, declare your love for Adam!" In the orange glow from the heat lamp overhead, her tears sparkled like funeral candles on the Mother River Ganges. "Oh honey!" My mother began to weep then, slumping forward and wiping her eyes with a wad of toilet paper, then spreading her giant thighs to wipe again. "Oh, oh, oh!" She flushed. Above the crashing surf, her sobs floated up along with her arms, reaching toward me. And in the mirror above the sink, I watched myself bend down to her embrace. "Oh!" I heard myself repeat. In the circle of her arms I discovered I was crying, too. Is this what love feels like, then, everything suddenly remote, falling away like objects in the rear view mirror? Panic, relief, regret-it was an hour and a half before |