PREGNANT MADONNA SCRUBBING FLOOR by Kim Dana Kupperman
Take the matter of being born . . . . If most people were to be born twice
they’d improbably call it dying –
– e. e. cummings
Her name was Dolores, a prophecy of sorrows.
My mother was pregnant with me in my best memories of her. I have a photograph of her at that time, though you can’t tell she’s carrying a baby. She’s sitting in a poolside chair, dressed in a black-and-white bathing suit, hands clasped on her belly, face framed with blond curls. She smiles as if she was just roused from sleep – a soft-at-the-edges expression, not toothily self-conscious – and squints those sharp eyes, which seem to dare the photographer, my father, to release the shutter. Maybe she was emerging from a good dream, one in which her appearance didn’t matter. It’s one of the rare photographs of my mother where she’s not wearing makeup or sunglasses or a hat, and her hair isn’t sprayed stiff into an updo of the late 1950s. She looks as if she might have been happy, and perhaps she was for that one instant when my father said, “Smile, Dolores.” Of course the moment stretched into one minute – then three or four – as the man she had married fiddled with the camera and focused the lens, and the whole time, she had to maintain that smile, knowing vaguely that this interminable holding of the smile and the dragging out of the picture-taking – of being the beheld – was precisely the kind of thing she’d say later was wrong with the marriage.
A tiny, only partially formed being, I float inside her, suspended in an amniotic flux where syllables are drenched in my father’s voice and that original, unforced and unheld smile works its way down to me from my mother’s lips as a mild infusion of heat, as if she had bared her belly to the sun.
Half Catholic and half Jewish and at home nowhere, my mother tried to bleach out that darker side and soften the angles with peroxide, strict avoidance of the sun, a nose job. But she couldn’t change the deep peat brown of her eyes. If she were alive today, she would have used those contact lenses that change the color of your eyes. My mother, who once worked at Revlon, took the party line of the cosmetics industry – why not change the things you can? – at face value, literally.
“Beauty hurts,” she was fond of saying.
I wouldn’t understand until after she died that men had harmed her because of her beauty. Or that she carried the pain of that hurt in the same way she carried me – because she had to – and that she carried too the pain of her mother and her grandmother, women whose beauty hurt. Eventually, because she could not change her belief in some truer identity made not of image, but of faith and love, my mother became as intimate with despair as she was with her reflection in the mirror.
Being beautiful takes a lot of time. Hair alone consumes an hour or two a day, depending on length and style. Then there’s the perfecting of skin: masks, toner, astringent, soap, moisturizing cream (three kinds: one for the day, one for the night, one for under the eyes), blemish control and concealment, hair removal or bleaching, lip plumper, and, for some, appointments with the plastic surgeon. Saline injected into the spider veins. Liposuction. A tuck here. A lift there. Scars at the hairline. Beauty that hurts.
But the day my father took the photograph, my mother sat in the shade, her hands resting on the belly that would harden into a shell to protect me, and there was only a pretty woman smiling – pretty because she was naturally pretty, and smiling because she was pregnant with the photographer’s child. There was only her brief happiness, washing me in warmth as I floated.
My mother passed on to me (among other traits) her gift – others may call it an obsession – for cleaning. If I had been outside her womb the day before I left it, I might have seen her on her knees in the kitchen. I call this scene Pregnant Madonna Scrubbing Floor. The image seems so familiar to me, as if my consciousness had been allowed to transcend the border of my mother’s uterus, and hover near the ceiling or a wall.
If I could paint this tableau, the window would be washed in stark white, obscuring the ledge, the buildings, the city beyond it. I’d place my mother’s hands at the center of the composition. A wisp of her almost platinum hair would stray from the confines of a red headband. Fire-engine red.
With the sleeves of an old, pinstriped man’s shirt rolled up past her elbows, my mother’s hands make strong circular movements with a stiff, soapy brush. She wears only that shirt, and some underwear. Her feet are bare, ankles puffy like fresh bagels. Her expression placid as a lake. Her lipstick – a union of tangerine and red curry – burns like an ambiguous fire.
In spite of the danger of truth and fire, she utters the truth to me for the first and last time that day.
“Clean makes true,” she says.
With that annunciation, she rises from the floor, whale-bellied, pink-kneed, splashed with soapsuds. Her lips painted oracle red, full of proclamation. Afterward, until the day she died (and even after that), she teaches me exactly what it means to set one’s house in order. Scrub the floors. Remove dust. Make sure the dishes are washed and dried and put away. Clean the fridge at least once a week. Empty the trash. Keep a list of what is necessary.
In my vision of the pregnant Madonna scrubbing the floor, I am about to emerge from my mother and I’m restless; after all, she is restless, washing a floor she’s probably cleaned five times in the last two days. Gone the softened smile of the woman in that photograph taken by my father. In its place, my mother’s lips are tightened into a swollen line. She wants to get this birth over with, and though she’s been through a lot of pain already, from the operations on her spine to the maintenance and consequences of a beauty that hurts, to the ache in her back from pregnancy, she’s unsure she’ll be able to handle all the pain she thinks will come flooding out of her when she delivers her baby. She suspects she carries a girl, and this belief overwhelms her: to carry on a tradition of hurt across these generations of women – her grandmother deaf and widowed at twenty-something; her mother dead at thirty-six of multiple sclerosis; her own spina bifida and consequential drug addiction – it has to stop somewhere. Perhaps it is at that moment, on her knees, shirt wet, embracing every hurt she’s ever known, that she prays her child will be the last in this line.
As she scrubs and rocks, then rises to empty the bucket of soapy water, I flex my limbs against her womb, push down and to the sides.
“Trying to kick your way out?” she asks. “You’ll have to wait until I push you out.”
I am trying to kick my way out, and I can feel the chill of her fear, how terrified she is of my urgent need to leave this place, my first home, and come up for some air.
When it is time for me to arrive, she does not, in fact, push me out. Instead, the doctors prepare her for a C-section: wash, shave, and anesthetize her. I know the medicinal wave is coming before she feels it, and I stretch my arms and legs out in her womb, bracing for its impact. The wave crests and I taste wild mustard and clay, smell olive trees and caves. I catch bits of these flavors and odors, as if they were pieces of some enigmatic poem. The wave swells, crests, breaks, wells, and ebbs again, a cycle that will last until I am delivered. When it’s over, I’ll close my eyes and listen to her breathe. Or, dream about what it was like when I floated inside her and the luxury of her voice read me poetry. It will take over four decades to remember how her brief, sleepy smile warmed me on the day my father said, “Smile, Dolores.” As if he could coax happiness out of a woman whose name meant sorrow.
Kim Dana Kupperman’s essays have appeared in the Baltimore Review, Eclectic Literary Forum, the Louisville Review, the Maine Scholar, and Quarter After Eight.