[Editor's note: this will be published as a series of shorter pieces.]
The first vagina Tandy sees is not her own.
It must be explained that Tandy has never really had a need to look down there. She has never had the need for exploration of any kind, except for that which can be found in books, and thus far, none of them adventure to vagina land or any of its tributaries. You might say that Tandy is ignorant on the virtue of the vagina though one can say that while Tandy’s own vagina may be virtuous, the virtue of vaginas is often left on a need-to-know basis for the woman in the middle of her life who needs to make sense of everything before it is too late ... younger women like Tandy have no need for sense, common or good.
(continued)
Before Tandy sees the vagina, she discovers breakfast. This is fairly recent and it is nothing that held any interest for her before. All of the voices that touted the importance of that first good meal — the surgeon general, various news shows, and sugar-laden cereal companies with 10 essential vitamins surgically infused — were never of any encouragement to her. She found their messages bland, over-orchestrated, and remote grab-worthy. She started feeling that certain hunger pang in the morning and when it roared beyond the confines of her belly, she knew to accommodate it. She felt cereal was simple and after several failed attempts, the correct one is purchased and stuck with. It is of a wheat variety, floating as little straw rafts in a milk pool. The fact that it is good for her as well is almost too much to bear. Sometimes she adds an egg simply because she likes beating the crap out of it in a mixing bowl and then totally reinventing it in the fry pan.
Every morning Tandy comes down after showering and dressing. She gets up early to do this for the sensation of being the only one alive in the house. She knows where the floorboards creak their ‘look at me’ pleas and easily sidesteps their cries. She knows where the sleepy silhouettes of the furniture are, jutting out their edges, taunting her knees and arms for a bump and a bruise, black and blue proportions that Tandy once based an abstract art project on. Settling in her chair which is lifted rather than dragged to insure that it doesn’t scream across the linoleum, Tandy is ready to conduct breakfast business ... the cereal bowl is filled, the egg shiny in plate, newspaper in hand, and spoon in the other. When done, she will place the rinsed bowls in the dishwasher, fold the newspaper back on its original creases, re-brush her teeth, and leave for work. She will not exactly greet the day for the sun is never quite up yet from its plugged in socket in space. The rest of the day will force itself onto her — all of its people and conversations and coffeebreaks and water cooler moments. But Tandy always has her morning.
Until now. It is true that she came down this most recent breakfast just as quietly as every other. She may have even been quieter than most which would be most difficult to measure because that accountability hasn’t even been invented yet. But should Tandy ever be questioned about this day, she would surely say, “Today started ou t as any other.” However, and the word should have sparkles and other luminous things attached to it so that it really stands out here, HOWEVER something will be different about this day and once the day is done, and so too the difference, the next will be more of the same, but that of a different kind of the same: Tandy gets some company.
Mid-way to a bite, there is something. Tandy is not sure for she has not heard it before then something is on the top stairs and it is lumbering down. The entire flight. Tandy puts her spoon down. Milk splishes because her wrist effort is too delicate to splash. She turns her
head in the direction of the bottom step, which of course becomes number one on the way back up [talk about your psychosis in a flight of stairs as if they were capable of going anywhere themselves ... they can transport but cannot transplant themselves; the irony of architecture]. Yes, this goes through Tandy’s brain as the horsehoof thud on the stair gets louder and bolder, announcing its intention of being there and then here in a matter of 12 steps.
Mother and daughter look at one another — their eyes meet, though not for the first time but for the first time in this last year of early morning solitude. Today’s eyes close or maybe it is an extended blink or the beginnings of a protracted eye thing that will force Tandy to the doctor who will shine a light into the lash framed jelly, claiming that everything is fine and an optic nerve does have nerve sometimes. Tandy looks at the cereal which has since flattened and dissolved from firm squares into splinters and mush. She looks at the paper and does that headline really say Your Mother Is Ruining Everything?
The first vocal utterings Tandy will hear will be her mother when she says, “I had to get up and pee in the middle of the night. Three times. This is what happens when you get old. You will get old someday too.”
The spoon in Tandy’s hand sloshes things up — an attempt at revival or simply suffocation in
order to put the cereal out of its misery. Her mother goes to the refrigerator. Tandy can feel the
cold air, seemingly real but made in a box where vegetables and meat are served their last rites.
Her mother takes a bottle of diet cola, a liter in a land where everything else is marked in pints
and quarts, and as consumed by the matron of the house, bubbles with a carbonated ego.
Tandy’s milk is now second place.
Her mother makes noise with the drink, as if she is gargling at the bathroom sink, as if she is getting ready to hurl a really great mucous macrame wall hanging, as if maybe cola just really tastes bad this early in the morning, as if her mother is testing Tandy’s silence by breaking into it. Clumping to the chair next to her daughter, Tandy’s eyes shutter as her mother drags the chair from the table, linoleum shrieks, and behind closed eyes, Tandy somehow thinks her ears will be protected. Upon re-opening, her mother will appear seated on the pulled-out chair, her bunions flat on the floor, her housecoat open. Really open. Six buttons sleepily slipped through their slots, stoic, all the way down, but not nearly all the way down enough. What do the children in underdeveloped countries think while laboring to make these things ... ‘we are a nation of poverty, and so too, should you consumer, be poverty-stricken in around the mid-section because we are not going to make the buttons go all the way down.’ Tandy imagines the children at their sewing machines, rows and rows of them, and they all look like liver Twist, only darker. But with English accents because don’t foreigners of poorer nations always speak English with such proper English accents like they were boarding school educated? The commercials on TV say for only pennies a day you can educate and feed one of these sewing machine children. Such dangerous work for smaller hands, why Tandy remembers
Janine Dennenburg in junior high home ec, sewing her misplaced finger to the wrap-around skirt they were each making and how in a class of pubescent girls their teacher threatened to take a whole class’ points away if anyone cooed at the cute paramedic saving Janine’s finger. “It Hurt”
ran the headline in the school newspaper that came out the following month. Old news to be sure, but a cautionary tale no less.
“I dropped my napkin,” Tandy’s mother says. “Get it for me. You’re younger.”
Unable to bend, unwilling to bend. Neither one is closer to the fallen napkin than the other. So this falls into that category of parent and child the same distance from an object, and by right of age in dog years, parent telling the child to retrieve. Tandy folds herself in at the waist and reaches. The napkin is on her mother’s feet, gnarled and abused with the weight of so many years. As Tandy comes up, napkin in tow, Tandy sees, and who among us can honestly say why it is that we see what we see. Tandy sees her mother’s spread apart legs coming from the housecoat without the buttons all the way down, and there it is in plain view: her mother’s vagina. Tandy comes up quickly and if this was scuba diving she would have gotten the bends. She drops the napkin on the table part in front of her mother, and goes back to her cereal bowl. But she is not hungry anymore. Today’s breakfast has been ruined several times over now; the most important meal of the day down the drain for a much smarter sink.
This is not anything most any of us wants to see. A naked parent. We are not interested in our roots as far back as that initial explosion while our parents were horizontal for a brief moment. A forefather on a boat from the old country, yes; one’s mother’s vaginal birth canal,
no. We are just not prepared much in that way. Our parents don’t have sex and if they do we certainly don’t want to think about it. The ooh ick yuck meter dies an untimely death, its springs and motors kaputting all over the place. Tandy leaves the kitchen table, cereal bowl in hand, does a quick rinse and dishwasher stack. Her mother calls after her, “Don’t leave your dishes for me. I am not the slave.” This causes Tandy pause. She looks at her mother who is looking at her. Her housecoat legs are still an arm’s length apart and Tandy’s not sure if it is such a good idea, getting the arms involved here, but measurement was never her strong suit or suit of any kind.
“I always clean up after myself,” Tandy says. “I never leave that to you.”
“Well you never know,” her mother says, scratching the inside of an exposed knee.
Tandy goes to work thinking, ‘is this really real?’ Her creative writing class is waiting for her down at the senior center. All those old ladies sit with their legs clasped.
The next morning Tandy showers, dresses and comes down for her breakfast at the usual time. She believes in flukes and believes that she will have breakfast to herself. She has decided to give the sports section a try, determined to get beyond the ‘always picked last for
teams in gym’ subterfuge that was her growing up life. She is enjoying an article on ‘Concussions In Student Athletes’ when she hears the lumbering. She pauses her spoon on the bowl, a generic no-nonsense china that boasts its stand-up power against the dishwasher and it’s nice to know that there will be something else around besides the cockroaches when the world is no more. Tandy’s mother clumps to the seat beside her. It’s a different housecoat but with the same amount of buttons on it. She sits with her legs apart again, wearing a pair of Tandy’s father’s socks. Tandy looks for a moment to check — the socks are the only things her mother wears on any body part below. Tandy goes back to the sports page, an article on golf. Somehow ‘hole in one’ takes on a new meaning here.
Tandy didn’t know they made so many different patterned housecoats. She didn’t know her mother owned so many of these housecoats. For the next week, everyday at breakfast, the meal of solitude found in a cereal bowl that Tandy used to love, she is joined by her mother with the spread apart legs. The two females never pass the milk and never share a meaningful word other than her mother’s warning about the dirty dishes being left for her because she’s not a slave.
Sharon Goldner is the author of numerous fiction pieces, including George Stories over at dispatch litareview.
Permanently archived http://girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/prose/short/152-sg-0310-tandy1 & shortlinked http://frsh.in/89
