My mother is ninety-three and lives above my sister’s garage in a converted apartment, but not really. Her body is there, diapered and hunched and mostly immobile, but she is elsewhere. I guide her fingers to the soft ear of a toy rabbit. She smiles wide. This, she never would have done before. Toothy smiles stretched her skin and made her look like a crone, she said. By the time I was ten, my mother was old and done for, her beauty gone and her best years wasted. I told her always that she was beautiful, more beautiful even than Scarlett O-Hara. And always she corrected me: I was beautiful before your father ruined me.
When dementia struck the set and sent all the actors home, leaving my mother in the empty space of a bare stage, she forgot that she’d been unhappy most of her life. She forgot that she despised my father for being a two-timing-filthy-mouthed jackass whose dreams were too big for his brains — and on it went for five decades of marriage. She forgot, too, that she was beautiful and terrified of growing old. The ticker-tape of self-loathing was finally gone.
I sit with her now, surrounded by traces of a lost colony. There, is the clock that hung in the kitchen of my childhood home. There, is the tiny glass bird she managed to save when the Nazis invaded her home. I see her young hand reaching for the bird, a spoon, a pen — for something needed in…
