Security
My mother asks me, again, about going through airport security. Will she have to take off her shoes? Her coat? Her vest? Both of her scarves? Sunglasses too? Her hat?
The screening line isn’t long by Logan’s standards but there are turns and twists enough that I can’t see the end of it, and anyway I don’t remember exactly what’s required. My mother asks, Will we get pat-down? Will we go through a metal detector? Or one of those backscatter X-rays the TSA uses. I read they radiate your body, basically peel the clothes right off you. Do they hide the viewing screen, my mother asks me, or can everyone see through you?
My mother is not yet elderly. Still, there’ve been twists and turns enough in her life that I can’t see back to when she started hating her body. If I ask, Mom, why do you hide yourself? What are you ashamed of? What happened to you? She says, It’s nothing, I just can’t get used to being an old woman. An airtight excuse. So common, this self-censorship, I long believed my mature female body would be barren all enjoyment. But even when my mother was young, I never saw her in a bathing suit, never saw her wear shorts, or a tank top, or sundress. I’ve seen her wear turtlenecks all year long. Mid-summers, she’ll sweat through vests and casually say, Oh dear, I think I overdressed. As if I’d believe her layers were a planning error. As if she could hide her body armor from me.
I wonder if there was a time when my mother wasn’t ashamed of her body. I saw a high school yearbook picture once, back when she’d still let you photograph her: it was faded black and white but her smile radiated sunlight. And once I found an old dress of hers in our attic, a mini dress from the ‘60s: a rust orange background printed with white silhouettes of deer. I imagine my mother as a teenager trying on that dress, spinning to flare its skirt while her smooth legs bowed and flexed and the deer danced quick across the fabric—running for the joy of it, for the pleasure of being a body. I picture her twisting in front of a mirror to get a view of herself from the back, appreciating how the fabric hugged her slender waist and rung like a bell from her hips.
But my mother is the sort of person who asks questions, she doesn’t answer them. Like when she asks me now, Can I request a woman pat me down? And, Will a man look at my X-ray? Like when I was a teenager and she’d ask, Where do you think you’re going dressed like that? Defiant then, I spilled out of my clothing, curves of breasts racing toward plunging necklines, jeans shredded across my thighs, just a tease below my ass cheeks, my shirt hems sweeping up to my midriff, navel winking cloyingly. How I loved my body, the soft ease of it, and I longed for it to be seen. What’s wrong with that, really? Still, in recent years I’ve noticed my necklines rising. I’ve tugged at skirts to hide wrinkles creasing my knees. Maybe joy is careless, and ever-fleeting.
We inch forward in line and I hold my mother’s hat as she rakes her fingers through steely curls. She unzips her vest and asks me, again, about going through airport security. What else will we have to expose? Who will look at us? What will they see?
Winter ’93
We blazed comet tails across ice—my father, sister, brother, and I—heavenly cartographers with ice skate blades, speeding across the pond’s blue universe. We hurled snowballs indiscriminately, the way ancient gods aimed lightning bolts at calves and girls and trees. We fired snow after more snow, fearless in our growing bones that everything changes, but matter is matter, and destruction isn’t loss, only difference.
I fell often, as minor gods do, face-first on creation. I breathed raw ice translucent and saw through freezing depth how dragonfly nymphs wriggled, tearing algae from brown lily roots, inching by on green legs at once delicate and hardwearing. Life carried on, despite cold spells and thunderclaps and our seismic falling. Without even blinking, my father scooped me up from the ice and we flew through starry clouds of snow, his skates dusting heavenward, and I was close to his breath, close to his woodsmoke beard, close as I’ve ever been to safe when he placed me on a plastic chair and firmly retied the laces of my skates.
Years later he fell, as lonely gods do. His vows thinned and cracked, our family calved—not lost, he said, but different. Falling never bruises the ice, only you, but new worlds appear from that altered vantage. Pitted memories I breathe through and for the first time see their under-life: how our father awoke first to light the stoves and warm our skates in orange heat, how he walked out alone to snow-blow a path to our pond, how he shoveled clear the ice for my winged brother, sister, and I to burn like meteors across its sky.