Page 23 - WTP Vol.VII #2

my shoes scuffing. My friend was seated when I found her in the elegant restaurant she had chosen, and she was tall and lithe and exceptionally beautiful, all the more beautiful for making her beauty unintimidat- ing, for crushing any possibility of a beauty hierarchy. All afternoon we talked, first avoiding the clock, then growing wary of it, now rushing our questions and rushing our answers, and I told her about this piece that I had started writing, this brief history of not beauty, how once, at the start of my career, my mother found beauty in me, and then again, in the final stretch of my mother’s life, a day I had gone to see her in the hospital—my hair swept up, a red dress on, sequins along the neckline, for I’d been dancing.
Beth, she said, you look so beautiful, and her eyes filled so that their purple-green was more purple-green, and I did not say no, I did not deny her, I did not diffuse the beauty she saw by confessing its source and inevitable disloca- tion—another had blown out my hair and pinned it up, another had drawn on my eyes, extended my lashes, and I already knew that I would never wear the red dress again; the plunge of its neck made me nervous.
My mother had not yet had her last terrible stroke that last time, I told my friend—though that stroke was coming, it was near. My mother had thought, we had thought, she would get better. We had grown to be at ease with one another, and the hallway to her room was long, and the day was gray, and there were hardly nurses anywhere, hardly anybody anywhere, and now I was running, and when I entered my mother’s room, she looked up from her bed, slightly shaking her head of beautiful white hair and nodded toward the gift I had brought (orchids, the color of pumpkins, for this was October, nearly Halloween), and she smiled.
No. I stood where I was, not moving, not breaking the illusion of my temporary self, just being what my mother needed, finally and especially then, toward the end of her living, to see—a first-born daughter in a red dress and smooth hair in a gray room of hospi- tal machines, a pumpkin-colored orchid still in her hand, lending credence to the idea that it was only my mother’s illness that was temporary.
Telling my friend this story. Telling the page this story. Until the story fixed the beauty.
Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of twenty-four books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and the co-founder of Juncture Workshops. Her new book is Strike the Empty: Notes for Readers, Writers, and Teachers of Memoir.
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digital photograph By Valerie Kabis