Body Painting

My Mother’s Beauty

57 My Mother’s Beauty If I could recover my mother’s beauty, look in the mirror and see her young face staring back, everything could be different. I could unravel the past like a thread pulled out of a hem, stitches popping, without breaking. I could roll the black and white film of romance and courtship back, back to the scene where my mother doubles over with her roommate Gertie, laughing. She wasn’t yet caught in a photo, a story, the moving picture that towed her inexorably toward the happy ending. If I could recover her beauty, I would hold it in my hands like precious water, not scatter it over the sleeping form of a husband, three children who refuse to be still. I want to flick back through all the frames that hold her face, want to burn the movie, the books the whole story of love that takes a woman’s beauty out of her hands, that takes 58 her motion away, saying, here, stand still, let me take your picture— as if her life could ever stop flowing. ...