Notes On Another New Life #16

Scar

Jun 06, 2024

A little girl and her mother are off to buy a TV. The girl crosses the hot tarmac in her bare feet. Her mother lets her. The girl thinks she’s toughening herself for life ahead, and sure enough, fifty years later, she’ll take care of her mother when she’s old and demented.

In the store, the mother talks to a salesman. He has a mustache. Looking back, all men in the memories of little girls have a mustache. The mother is smiling. The girl thinks that maybe, every so often, mothers slip off to meet a magician.

The child drifts away and looks back at the mother through a heavy glass door. The mother and daughter stare at each other with the love and incomprehension that will mark their lives. The mother is wearing a pink blouse and white Capri pants. She’s at the height of her beauty, but no one can know this except in retrospect. When the glass door suddenly opens, it rides over the child’s bare foot, and she’s pinned to the spot. She can’t move, and she doesn’t cry out. She takes the time to witness her mother’s beauty.

Her foot is bleeding. There’s a gash on her big toe, and she doesn’t find it strange she chooses to stand there. She doesn’t find it strange that everything in the world has a mind of its own, including her own mind. She doesn’t want to interrupt her mother’s conversation with the salesman. She doesn’t want to attract attention to herself. She might like to stand there for the rest of her life, silently bleeding and watching the TVs, all set to a different soap opera.

Many decades later, out of the blue—and for reasons no one could know, even if they existed—her mother will sit bolt upright in her bed and say, “Do you remember the day we went to buy a TV?” The daughter will say, “Yes.” The mother is living in the daughter’s house. Each day, many times a day, the daughter reminds her mother who she is, and then her mother forgets.

Her mother will say, “I was happy, but I don’t know why.” Her daughter will say, “No one knows why they are happy, or even why they’re alive.” Her mother will say, “I was wearing a pink top.” Her daughter will say, “Yes.” Her mother will say, “Why was I happy?” Her daughter will say, “You were on the verge of love.” Her mother will say, “I feel it now.” Then her eyes will widen and she’ll throw back her head and laugh. “We had to take you to the hospital. There was blood all over.” The daughter will show her mother the scar on her toe, and her mother will say, “Why did I let you go barefoot?” Her daughter will say, “You let me decide how my life would go. It’s the reason I like being with you.”

When she says these words, she’ll think of the great chain of accidents that are possible in a life and the great chain of unknown people who might pick you up from the ground. She’ll remember being a little girl, pinned under the door and holding her breath. Pinned to the moment and in training to be alert, because you never know if, someday, you will find yourself pregnant with a baby. A baby who, in the future, might come to your rescue, and who, then again, might not.