by Daniel Weinshenker
©1999, Rights Reserved
What can we say about our grandmothers?
That they were nice to us. That they sang to us.
That they smelled of juicy fruit and pond's cold cream and watched wheel of fortune.
They wrapped everything in plastic baggies, and pinched our thighs.
What about what they did to our mothers?
Mine was always so sweet to me, but I remember the time mom and I met her at the airport. And before she sat down her valise, she looked my mom up and down and said, "You know Debbie, you'd be very pretty if you had larger breasts."
My mom was almost 40 years old.
Years later, we talked about it and my mom would try and laugh some and say her mother, my grandmother, was crazy.
"Your feet are too bony"
"You look like a stick"
"No man is going to want that"
"You should where falsies, like I do"
She would beat her with a hair brush, and drag her around the house by her braids.
After one such event, my mother went into the bathroom, took a pair of scissors from the medicine cabinet, and cut them off.
We sat on the couch and tried to figure out how not to care so much about what our mothers said.
She showed me her high school picture. We looked at it.
And I told her how beautiful she looked.
She had never known.
This Spring, my mother and I are going ot the California coast.
We are going to take the doll my grandmother always compared her to...
And burn it.