Tag: me

The moral sense in mortals is the duty / We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty

At eleven thirty my mother calls my name from the living room. The rise and dip of the E resting into the guttural peace of the A, this Emma, Eeeeeeeemmaaaaaaa, Eeeehmuhhh, if anything, this name means home to me, but only ever when taken from her mouth.

I go and find a room lit by a television screen, and my mother sitting on the blue couch in her nightgown, knees close to her chest in the manner of children. Her back, she says, hurts, and so I take a tube of Bengay and circle the offending area with my hands, very carefully at first, then progressively harder. She does not swear at me for being too rough, a bad sign. She must be in quite some pain, perhaps more than she has been in for a long time.

It occurs to me that often I treat my mother like a baby, but she is not so very young, not anymore. She mentions that it might be the weight of her purse that’s causing her the pain, and I agree, a little too profusely perhaps, to avoid her coming to more dangerous explanations. That afternoon I’d had to spend a while convincing her that she didn’t have cancer, though there was no way I could be sure myself. But I can talk big if she is comforted, it is never a one-way cycle, after all. The oxygen I dedicate to her is always returned to me, when I am scared and require all the usual consolations: that I am strong enough, kind enough, smart enough, capable enough.

One of the loveliest things I’ve seen in my life was a photograph of my sixteen-year-old mother. I saw it once in a moment of idleness and have not seen it since. My mother is in profile, sitting on a bed with her back against the wall, and her long hair is unbearably exotic to me, I, who have only ever seen it cropped close to her jaw. Perhaps I find this photograph so striking because it depicts a time when my mother was close to me in age, something I have difficulty imagining. Will I feel the same way at fifty, looking at pictures of her taken now, and will she seem so wonderful to me as her teenage counterpart does today?

When someone mentions an attractive woman, or I am inspired to think of beauty in its female form, I think of a small kitchen with the doors wide open, and a little balcony where wet blouses hang, and a girl peeling fruit in a plaid dress, standing by a cheap counter made to resemble marble. This girl does not have a face, but her hair is always long.

A tangent that is related, but not by very much:

School starts in five days, and I am frightened, but for one of those reasons difficult to explain to anyone but your mother. We have spoken, and I have partaken of the normal solace, but now that this continues to worry at me I think: maybe I need to carry my own weight sometimes? Maybe it is time the daughter learn to take leave of her mother.

(title from Lolita by Nabokov)

That Which We Call A Rose

Someone needs to do for Emma what Nabokov did for Lolita. I am sorry, but I am no Janeite, and I hanker only for old Russian magic, Baba Yaga in a glade of silver birch, Count Leo in chalk blue and boots.

Actually I am not sorry at all. Why is every Emma a Venetian blond, eternally young heiress of industry or at the very least beauty, the authentic Woodhouse?

I want an Emma with uncut nails and a long neck. The curve of her back is warm, a mid-ocean ridge swimming with neon monkfish, and the skin behind her ear is like that of a white nectarine, or dark yellow Mirabelle plum. She can be as dirty as dishwater or as pure as the driven snow, femme fatale or Galatea. Hair gelled, ridden with lice, bronze glasses, bombastic. I want a gutsy Emma, a gutted Emma, salty, sour, housefly, dragonfly Emma.

She can be a spongy Swiss mademoiselle, hardboiled American lass, delicate Buddhist princess, mooney extraterrestrial damsel. My Emma is a prostitute, a seller of exotic curios, a British matchmaker as dear Jane Austen intended her to be. She gets to go home happy or up in smoke.

The whole time I was reading “Lolita” I was waiting for Nabokov to allude to the literal meaning of the name Dolores. Dolores, in Spanish, meaning sorrow, pains. He took that name apart and put it back together again, put little Lolita in every kind of metaphor, simile, allusion, elevated her to a special plane of literary beauty. But never does he once mention what the dictionary has to say about Dolores. Not once does he say, “and this is Dolores, and her future is sadness, as her name so indicates.”

Maybe that’s what I really want for my pen and paper Emma.