smoked L & M cigarettes.
While my mother had always seemed fat, strangely enough, I never recall witnessing her overeat. What she did to excess was drink. Most of the time, she drank alone, and always the same concoction -- Canada Dry ginger ale with Seagram’s Seven whisky over ice.
My mother wasn’t an exciting drunk. She didn’t resemble Elizabeth Taylor in any of her classic film roles, where she played a woman who liked gin a little too much. If drunks can be seen on a continuum from boisterous to blubbering, we would find my mother on the latter end. The more she drank, the lonelier and more pathetic she got. By the time my mother instituted the nightly ritual of drinking enough to throw up, my father had left. And so, my mother sat in front of the television each night and smoked and drank and chatted quietly with herself.
Even to this day, I can’t let go of the terror of becoming my mom. This is after years of having it not come to pass. I long ago gave up alcohol, except for occasionally sipping wine, which I nearly always keep to one glass. And though I spent a lot of years as an unmarried woman, I never found myself totally alone. I’m married now to a man I adore.
But there’s a piece of my mother inside me of which I’ve never quite been able to let go. That’s the sadness she passed down. Most of the time it hovers sparsely across my forehead, like fog when it first begins to blow. There are days when something unexpectedly joyful occurs and the fog burns away, as if the hot bright sun came out. But those days are rare. Generally, I do fine, except on the occasions when the fog settles down thick and refuses to lift.
I thought it had something to do with the bathing suit’s style. Wasn’t it the extra layer of material sewn around the middle of the suit to subtly keep the belly tucked in, that caused me to look so thick? Or the way the legs were cut low, slicing into a layer of fat I hadn’t noticed before? And from the side above my waist, I saw what looked like a sausage or a window ledge or bookshelf. There was nothing about the style of the suit to which I could attribute that.
Almost every day afterwards, I noticed something new. My arms poofed out at the top. When I raised an arm up and held it parallel to the floor, a second arm appeared to hang down below. Little hooks formed on each side of my waist that my arms bumped into as they swung back when I walked. Worst of all, those hooks, I soon saw, extended around the back, creating the shelf I’d seen in my suit. But now the shelf was obvious, even when I had on an oversized blouse.