russian mother

Once my family was quite nice, almost important. My mother came from a bloodline of slender-necked ballerinas, the first American born to her Russian family. She lived in furs, a pale blond swan among the dreary pool that is New England. She painted as a child, little moonscapes and poor imitations of Degas, and her lovely little head was full of fancies on how important these were. How charming, how full of talent she was. How she had a future in it, without a doubt.

Much of these compliments were doled out with eager hands by my brown eyed father. My mother had slender, delightful eyes. The color of blue satin, and decorated with fine, light lashes. Her hair was the color of wheat, and it cascaded down her back like wet moonlight. When she leaned over me as a baby, I would grab fistfulls of it. Trying to pull it from her scalp, much to her chagrin. But I was desperate to touch it, feel it. I needed to possess it.

My mother called herself a painter as I call myself a poet. She captured no imagination in her oils, slathering pale ballerinas of her youth and Russian winters she had witnessed across the canvasses. Sometimes she painted the family, though we all contorted to suit her pinkish view. My brother was an emaciated beast, my sister was a fat little brute, I was a pale ghost of a shape. My father was a sniveling old man, clutching the finest piece of ivory beside him. My mother.

My mother froze herself in time. Forever nineteen in her turpentine world, forever lacking the sunken lacquer to her features. Forever missing the cruel gleam in her eyes. 

She met my father when she was still a girl, they wed when she was nineteen and he was twenty eight. He was terribly rich and frighteningly charming, and my mother had been a victim of the gleam of his sportscar and the glint of the diamonds studding his wrist. She weasled her way out of the workforce, she snuck her way into being, technically, an artist.

Nearly everybody in my family is dead. My mother, a swollen corpse in some fancy cemetery in Boston. Her sisters and brother had died in a smattered pattern in the years before. My fathers side has a famously bad immune system and to decorate that title so went my uncle, my brother, my grandfather, my aunt. My grandmother stays alive out of spite. My father and whorish sister, too. Not that she will ever continue on our bloodline, she’s ill and a fright to look at.

Mother died of melancholia (her thin body laid across the metal coroners table, her skin ripped in ribbons, pale without blood. Still pruned and smelling of salt from the cliffs she was dragged from. Teeth marks on her stomach from where passing fish had tasted her) at age forty. she had never looked older than there in her casket.