Now, Then
Kathleen Levitt
The woman was now alone. All of her maternal plans completed. Her marital aspirations now thwarted. Her garden out there now readying itself for the frost. Her house gaped. The plaster walls had cracks and the eaves got to talking in the dark—or was it the floor? The nights after all were long. The house was older than it had been. But the woman had been good about keeping the greys covered with her weekly dye kit. And she could still, even with the cataracts, manage to paint up her face into a nice lively look. Of health. Of heartfulness. Of continuity. Of preparation for whatever was to come. The woman had known her daughter was coming. And when the girl arrived the woman stood on the opposite side of the counter from her and saw her demise. They looked too much alike for the woman not to see it. Those same few milky freckles the girl had around her forehead. The woman had also had those once. Cute now on the girl and sunny but soon the woman knew the girl would curse them. And so would end her pure-faced life. So full of herself now, standing there with all her feigned confidence in her widelegged pants—the same ones she’d once chastised the woman for wearing. So high they crushed her ribcage, held her breasts up. Or would soon. She had three years at best before the underwire met the waistline. And her wide arm movements—the display. Those half laughs she made with her stubbed nails in her mouth. As if her childlessness made her innocent. Superior. No baby-memory mound under her sweater—cropped—like she wasn’t a grown woman. Was still on the hunt for adolescent romance. Not romance, worse, sex. It gave the woman a tight turn in her throat. This girl. Once silent and watching. With her books and her socks pulled up above the hem of those prairie dresses. Carrying a candle around in the dark. It’d been the turn of the century. She’d been hoping for the predicted fall. That’d been the girl. She’d craved that primitivism. She’d cherished what the woman cherished, once. Now here with this wide mouth. So eager to spout its cruel flat assaults. As if her deadened tone could make anything insensitive a joke. No doubt her legs splayed with the same eager vengeance. Against her childhood, the woman knew, against her own mother. And it wasn’t fair, the woman thought now, halving one of the corn muffins she’d made that very evening before the girl’s arrival for them to share and pushing it towards her knowing the girl wouldn’t eat it, knowing she herself would end up crumbling the thing to shards and pinching the crumbs into her own sorry mouth in clumps. It was a waste. All those ingredients and all that time spent being the one who’d been compliant. That’d been her, the woman. She’d been the one to put off iniquity. She’d been the one who’d chosen—yes chosen—not to denounce the god she’d been raised with. She’d been the one who’d borne those thirty-six years so this girl, this girl’s sisters, had had a father. She’d been the one down on her knees late into the night running a butterknife through the cracks in the woodfloors to bring up that dirt. Not the girl. With her rich tameless hair. With those cigarette-stained teeth. Her eyebrows untweezed. That daring critical look. With her ideas. Her dumb calculated ideas—they were canned, that’s what they were—served up and turned out like spitup after a voracious feeding. Oh to be her. To lie nubile and possible on a mattress in a squalid flat in the city. The trains overhead, underground, wherevertheywent, the sirens. The racket down below. To be unknown but trying. To have made a risk. Dumped out her heart all over the place. Not into one barren marriage, one barren house. To have chopped herself off from what she’d been told. To feel sadness—and the woman knew its berth—and to be able to say, I’ve been discouraged, Mom, to be honest I’ve been down. And to have a woman like the woman to come to. To drive through the night to. To knock on the door for. And to hope, to know that that woman, crushed as she felt by life, would open up her arms and hold her.
Kathleen Levitt earned her MFA from Portland State University. Her work has appeared in “The Writer,” “34th Parallel,” “The Unwinnable,” and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Artwork: Sarah E N Kohrs is an award-winning poet, potter, and photographer, who contributes to The Foundation for Photo/Art in Hospitals. SENK has photography published in *Beyond Words, CALYX, Culinary Origami, Genre:
Urban Arts, GROUND, Months to Years, Lavender Bones, Litro, Nassau Review, Paper Dragon, Peatsmoke, Progenitor, The Sun, Quibble, Voices de la Luna*, and numerous other journals. Sarah has a BA in Classical Languages and
Archaeology from College of Wooster, Ohio, and a Virginia teaching license endorsed in Latin and Visual Arts. She volunteers with VECCA, an arts education non-profit in a rural Shenandoah Valley community.
http://senkohrs.com http://senkohrs.weebly.com/