The Mother and Daughter

It was as though her mother had read the book on life and parenting and highlighted

the things that seemed important and grazed over everything else. She was half a person. She

seemed to always understand what her daughter was going through but her advice was of

little practical use, as if she expected a jump-cut to punctuate the moment for her. In

appearance, she was everything a mother of the 20th century was supposed to be: put

together while balancing the duties of being a single mother and working. She griped about

the PTA and had school portraits framed and propped around the house. She used email and

GPS but still had some Frank Sinatra vinyl on her shelves. She did everything for her

daughter her own mother never had. She attended all those school plays, swimming lessons

and uneasily tried to tell her daughter about the birds and bees, knowing that she wasn’t

listening and that she didn’t care. They liked to think their relationship was healthy; that the

lack of a male presence was so common now a days, it was psychologically irrelevant. Her

mother had been raised without a father with little impact, hadn’t she? They were middle

class, comfortable, but the mother always had rainy day funds stashed around the house, in

vases, under mantles, inside old mattresses. They were forgotten about and then inevitably

discovered by the movers.

The daughter would look back on the normality of her earlier life and wonder if it

had been staged. She would wonder why she was allowed ordinariness for so long, that if

living in a world of perfectly trimmed hedges and smoothly paved roads for 18 years had
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helped aligned the dominoes that led to where the girl was now. She spent so long with

everything being the same. The fluorescently lit high schools which so uncannily matched

the bathroom stalls at the malls. Every school gymnasium with the faded pennants hanging

from the ceilings. When she was younger, at the first days in her new schools, her mother

would click along beside her as they walked up to the fold-out registration table. The mother

would always pause, looking at the retractable bleaches, the folded wooden chairs, the scuffed

floors, as if she was home. The daughter would never quite realize the difference between

banality and comfort. The stucco ceilings in every living room the daughter had ever been in

mixed together until she couldn’t remember which crack had been at what home or even if

she had lived there at all. The living room furniture was rearranged in the same rectangular

formation no matter what the shape or size of the room, it was the only thing they

consistently brought with them. The rooms never varied much anyway.

The mother took pride in jumping on the Botox bandwagon early. The daughter was

15 and her mother was 40. She wasn’t wrinkled but when she smiled her skin lagged behind,

taking longer to fall back into place, even though the emotion had already left her eyes. Five

years later, her skin was perfectly preserved in a face you seemed to see on every woman,

solemn, pursed, as if the air always smelled rank. Every suburb brought a new gentle

procedure free of knives and with the promise of preservation. Her face reminded the

daughter of clay and the way in which a thumb could gently wipe away the remnants of any

imperfections.

Her mother was vain in the sort of way that everyone was, carrying a pocket mirror

in her purse, smoothing her hair while her reflection looked disapprovingly back, as she
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fretted over what Mrs. Dobson or Mrs. Jennely thought of her hemline. For a long time, she

attempted to keep her criticisms away from the daughter. Her daughter was aware of her

mother’s insecurities: the nervous tics she exhibited, how if a man slept over – she always

woke up before him to reapply her makeup. But for her daughter, she tried to be more

supportive, better. Better than her own had been to her. The mother focused on her

daughter’s posture, manners and enunciation with tricks she had picked up in old books she

found at Church sales, with worn beige covers, written by Mrs. Maiden Name Hyphen

Husband’s Last Name. And so, the daughter was unaware of the difference between a salad

fork and a regular fork but she did use "ma'am" or "sir" and called her friends’ parents by

their last names. The mother made sure they avoided the accents of the states and cities they

had lived in; neither was allowed to drop their r’s or g’s. They aspirated their t’s. As an

adolescent, one of their moving adventures dipped too far south, and the daughter came

home with a locution in her speech that made the mother uncomfortable – she worried it

would become a drawl. And so, when opportunities arose – as they always did, each city with

its own expiration date – the two women moved.

They stayed encased in the indistinct outskirts of big towns, where there was less of a

threat of outside influence. The mother was terrified of wisdom imparted from teachers or

coaches. She gently but deftly tightened the reigns on her daughter’s life. She felt safe, the

daughter, in the constant companionship of her mother, as if they were always holding

hands. The aunts and uncles who sent Christmas money and Easter cards were distant,

nebulous figures that the daughter had never met. The word grandparent elicited no emotion

in her: she pictures a caricature from one of those 1950s movies everyone had seen.
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She was 18 when the bump on her nose, caused by a brief flirtation with lacrosse,

became a fixation for the mother. It was the only school sport the girl had ever tried. Her

nubby fingertips rejected the sweeping motions a piano required, her toes always seemed to

dig into the backs of her heels when she wore pink ballet slippers and drawing was out of the

question. She had excelled at lacrosse but quit after one season. She was worried her mother

was lonely during practice. The mother would tilt her head from side to side, thoughtfully

critiquing her offspring’s profile. It was never easy to ignore the dramatic sighs and piercing

stares that came from her mother. Although initially subtle, the mother’s comments became

unrelenting. The daughter had taken pride in her nose, which albeit crooked, was petite and

delicate – unlike the mother’s beaked one (which she claimed to have inherited from an

Eastern European grandparent). The mother argued she was nostalgic for her daughter’s old

nose: reminding her of that time in the mall when they had their portraits taken

together. The comments throbbed in her temples and she could feel the wetness on her

cheeks.

She became self-conscious and wore her glasses more than her contacts, trying to

draw attention away from the flaw that seemed to veer farther and farther left each day.

Suddenly, the eyes of everyone on the bus, in classes, the checkout cashier at the corner store,

were on her nose. The insecurity became unbearable until, over a Sunday morning omelet, as

if she had planned it all along, the mother suggested getting it “fixed.”

The daughter could almost justify the procedure: she had trouble breathing, didn’t

she, her mother would ask? She missed the smoothness of her old nose, didn’t she? Wasn't it

for her own good to return to it to its natural, former glory? In a moment of sentimentality,
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the mother revealed her insecurities about her own nose – how it didn’t balance with her

features and that it was a genetic mishap; her jokes of a Hasidic heritage were to mask her

pain. These references were the most the mother ever said of their extended family – people

who the daughter knew existed in the way you knew that Frank Sinatra was once living and

breathing, walking this planet, it was just difficult to believe. She had once tried to trace their

family line but her mother grew suspicious at how much time the daughter was spending

alone. The project was abandoned and lost in one of many moves.

She had heard these words and stories about her nose before from her mother but

they meant something different now. The mother’s words floated together beautifully,

carefully considered, structured, as if she had wanted to weave a rug with them. Hot tears

streamed down their faces – they embraced as they began their journey together, paved by

what they believed to be justifiable excuses.

Three days before the operation, they sealed their decision with matching haircuts.

The two women stepped into a shop with worn hardwood floors that smelled of rubbing

alcohol and wet dog. They sat together in grey chairs that swerved from side to side and they

exchanged excited glances as scissors snipped synchronously. When they returned home,

stepping out of their beige station-wagon that they knew they could fit their lives into, their

neighbor, Mrs. Mills, smiled approvingly at the two. The mother glowed for days.

The process itself was painful, though not unbearable. Before being separated into

different operating rooms, they held hands and told each other to be brave. Even while

laying on the hospital beds, the mother tilted her chin down while looking at the doctor,
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sucking in her gut between crafted sentences. Their identical haircuts were flattened by

surgical nets. The daughter would remember laughing at the absurdly hammer and chisel-

like tools that lay on the tray beside the surgeon. The fluorescent lights flickered and made

her blink. The daughter was reminded of the malls they had been to together.

Out with the old and in with the new.

The daughter would leave the clinic that afternoon, holding hands with her mother

as if they never had stopped. The white gauze made the women indistinct, unrecognizable,

even to each other. They emerged from societal exile two weeks later, faces no longer bruised

and swollen. The mother had told her office there had been a death in the family. The

daughter had a spring break. They had chosen to have their noses shaped similarly, so that if

anyone questioned the change in appearance, they could rely on familial resemblance. No

one ever noticed or they just didn't care. The women were always too new, too disconnected,

to be part of the inner circles that would comment on something like that. Suburban polite

society was controlled and icily indifferent. If eyes lingered on the mother’s facial revision,

she didn’t notice.

The daughter was relieved by the lack of comments. Eventually, she would think

infrequently of her altered appearance, as mother had taken down her school portraits post-

lacrosse. It was more nostalgically appropriate to have pictures of her as a child – anyway. It

made the mother look younger. Their moves set themselves up for photographs of vacations

the daughter never remembered taking. Standing by a canyon or a skyscraper or a dam,

sometimes together but mostly alone because no one else was around to snap a photo of
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them. The mother always on the right hand side: hair smoothed and chin pointed down and

nostrils sucked in.

Their lives, however, did not realign as they once did. Their pre-packaged

monochromatic dinners were the same and their home was the same, the shag carpeting that

slithered its way up the stairs but always stopped at the entrance of the bathroom, the fake

wooden paneling and linoleum kitchen floors. But the mother wasn’t satiated. She had

fixated on that imperfection as a bull’s-eye. The results weren’t satisfying and if people didn't

notice her radiantly improved self, then, what was the point?

Driving along a perfectly paved road, on another temperate day just like the others,

the mother stalled the car at a corner and looked at her daughter. She touched the tip of her

daughter’s nose affectionately. They smiled. The mother felt her youth slipping away, staring

into the eyes of her adult daughter. Never blinking, the mother suggested they get their noses

pierced, gesturing to a shop front encased in black paint and red vinyl adornments. The

daughter shook so violently in the piercer’s chair that the two had to leave.

The mother laughed. “If you can’t do, there’s no point in my getting it done anyway.”

One graduated high school but chose to pick up her diploma rather than attend a

ceremony. The other was bureaucratically promoted with no raise. Every city had an

expiration date. She was transferred out of state to new employment and her daughter

followed her; having nothing better to do with her own life. The daughter loved suburbia

but her mother grew bored of the people easily. They snipped the threads of their social

circles as they had always done. They would miss some friends and not others but would
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never feel that longing for an extended period of time anyway. The daughter had left behind

that tall boyfriend with the overbite; although she would not be able recall his name now.

They lived an arbitrary life in a house that resembled the one they had just moved out of,

with the same living room furniture and stucco walls, and lawn. The only thing that

remained the same was the beige station wagon and their family resemblance. In this way, it

was easy to move, to uproot themselves, because it often felt like they hadn’t gone anywhere

different at all.

Their existence remained was the same as it always had and they didn't seem to

mind. The daughter had no immediate goals and just existing seemed like the lifestyle for

her. Days began and ended as they always had. They left their old lives behind, proceeding

on with their ski-slope noses of perfection. The daughter would finish her degree at a

community college where they wouldn’t check if she had completed her credits anyway.

Later, they would both be with jobs in which their bodies carried out the work as their

minds wandered, skirting through the trivial details of their lives. The daughter could never

remember being unhappy or unhappy either way. The only change in her life was that the

periodic comments on the elegant beak, by the neighbors, the PTA mothers and envious

daughters, that caused a twinge of guilt. But that felt like it had always been there.

The mother would occasionally work overtime to earn extra money but their

indulgences were unoriginal. They never really vacationed, they bounced from coast to coast

but neither had a passport. The ideas of Europe, or rather, the ideas of adventures in new

terrains with brightly colored windows, pulsating music and strange unfamiliar languages,

seemed too terrifying to the daughter. Nothing seemed to matter as much to her as her
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mother, anyway. They had once been to a fair, accidentally, as the daughter had craved

strangeness of the sounds she heard while they were driving from another point A to point B.

She regretted it immediately. The ground was dry, the air sticky. Overweight men and sad

looking women in floral dresses. Children wove like blazing fires through the crowd, their

laughter assaulting the daughter’s ears. She gripped her mother’s hand. They did not ride the

roller coaster or Ferris wheel – the mother telling her that everyone in the family hated those.

She never wanted to go back.

The mother decided five days before she turned 47 that she would begin a process of

plumping her lips. She invited her daughter to join at the last minute while touching her

shoulder, squeezing gently, something the mother normally only did on birthdays or in

photographs the daughter knew would later be framed around the house. The daughter felt

needed and wanted. She agreed. They sat together in the sterile, gleaming white office of a

doctor. There sat a brunette receptionist whose hair fell so perfectly that the daughter

wondered what time she woke up in the mornings. The mother looked at her pearly pink

nails then brushed her hair behind her ear, before turning to the daughter and doing the

same to her.

The mother paused. “I never noticed how small your upper lip was.” She ran her

index finger across it. The daughter looked down at magazines with glossy covers where the

recipient address was cut out in the corner.

They were ushered into his office, through a hallway of glass doors and white rugs

that showed no evidence of the feet of the testimonials the mother had read on his website.
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He gestured towards two chairs angled towards a shining glass table. The daughter squeezed

her mother’s hand supportively. Gently slipping her fingers free, the mother excitedly leaned

forward in her chair. It took the daughter a few minutes to realize that his friendly comments

were addressed to both of them. He thumbed through two small files of medical history. She

had wanted the daughter to go with her all along, the mother confessed. Her mother then

crushed her daughter’s fingers in her own and the daughter’s stomach warmed with what she

thought was happiness.

As he spoke, turning an oversized computer screen towards the two, the daughter felt

uncomfortable with the version of herself that stared back. Her mother chirped excitedly.

But it was as if he could feel the irregular beating in her chest or see the beads of water

collecting in her palms because he stopped and complimented the daughter on her nose. The

mother quipped about good genes and he authoritatively placed his hands on the medical

files before him. The daughter agreed to the plumping.

The pricks of the needle made her eyes water, the sensation of her lips slowly

bloating caused the daughter’s skin to crawl. But he assuredly murmured words of neutrality:

natural, hardly noticeable, slight improvements, proportionate. He shook the women’s

hands, leaving them with neon bottles in their bags and the promises of future visitations.

The daughter hardly ruffled her sheets that night.

Polite society prevented acquaintances from commenting on their change in

appearance although Mrs. Clemens tripped over her front step while leaning forward too far

when the women came home. The daughter called in sick to work for the next four days,
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keeping ice cubes pressed to her lips. She kept her phone off, letting a generic voice replace

her own. On the fourth day, the women stood side by side in the bathroom, looking at the

mirror, a fluorescent light beating out the color of their skin. Their lips had taken on the

same shape with perfect cupid’s bows. The mother ran her index finger over her daughter’s

upper lip again and then restrained a smile. They applied the same ruby lipstick after

brushing their auburn hair behind their ears. They, perhaps, resembled each other too much.

They looked more like mother and daughter than they ever had before, as if they had been

strangers cast in a movie. No gene pool could be so precise. But they would soon leave this

suburb anyway. The grass was turning brown, the women uglier, the schools worsened and

the water soured.

What felt like weeks later, but could have been months or even a year, they were in a

new town. One that felt just as familiar as the last. Time passed and the mother grew

increasingly frustrated with her appearance once again. She would stand in front of the

mirror for hours, angling her body, leaving red finger tips on her skin and drawing the black

lines of a surgeon’s hands.

They sat together at a table, the mother’s arms outstretched. Her eyes were closed.

The daughter’s weight was on her fingers and she could feel the faded, beige wicker pressing

into her skin, leaving harsh imprints.

“Don’t you love me?”

“I don’t think that’s the point.”

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“The neighbors will notice, you know. They’re more perceptive than you think. Mrs.

Johnson has an eye for everything. She even noticed when we got those subtle brassy

highlights.” She averted her gaze from her mother.

“Darling, you can change your hair or your nose or just put on some high heels but

that isn’t going to change the person you are on the inside.”

“What you’re suggesting isn’t temporary. It’s not a haircut or pouty lips. This stays in

me forever”

“Speaking of haircuts, dear, we need one, I’d like to see you with bangs.”

“I don’t want to do it. I don’t want them inside of me.”

“How about long hair? When you were nine, you refused to cut your hair for over a

year. We could try extensions.“ The daughter had a bob when she was nine. The daughter

felt her mother’s eyes darting across her nose, sliding across her lips and down to her

collarbones. They rested on her chest.

“Stop.”

The mother was still staring at her, unblinking.

“The extensions would look great with your new look,” she said, finally. “We could

dye your hair blonde. Or red. I was a redhead for a time in my life, dyed it with henna at two

in the morning so my mother wouldn’t stop me. I was dating this boy, Phillip…” Pregnant

by 25, she knew her mother hadn’t dyed her hair until her 40s. Her daughter had helped

scrubbed her neck when the chemicals stained it. She rose.

“I’m not talking about it anymore. I want to go unpack my room.”

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“We’ve been here three months, you haven’t unpacked yet? Ask that boy you’re

seeing to help – Ryan?” There had never been a Ryan.

“Besides, you can unpack whenever. Isn’t this what you want? You’ve never had this

problem before. You’re usually so reasonable.” The mother didn’t blink.The daughter looked

down. “This offer isn’t going to stay on the table forever.” The daughter felt something –

disgust? Bile was slowly pushing its way up her esophagus, her stomach hollowed – was this

what excitement felt like?

“You love embarking on adventures.” That wasn’t true – she hated roller coasters,

opening the mail and she never checked her voicemails from unknown numbers.

“This will be easy, just like the last time. Think of how close we felt.” Her mother

was her best friend. She sat down.

“ I don’t want to miss any work.” The daughter knew this argument was weak.

“You get vacation days. We could go somewhere tropical. Haven’t you always

wanted to go to Hawaii? Didn’t I buy you a snorkel one year?” She hadn’t. “If not Hawaii,

how about Florida? We could make a whole trip of it. Remember when we lived in Florida?”

She did remember. Her first boyfriend was back in Florida, so was her virginity.

“Why are you so unreasonable?”

The daughter’s stomach jolted. “I’m not.”

“I’m going through with this. I’ve made up my mind.” The daughter gritted her

teeth and could swear she could taste the collagen in her mouth.

“People are going to notice.” The daughter looked down, her mouth was dry.

“You’re really going to make go through this on my own?”

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She reached out to touch her daughter’s wrist. She knew that her mother could see

the look of defeat. She reflexively jerked her arm back then stood up, shook her hands out

and vomited into the sink. The mother picked up her phone and booked the appointment.

But she couldn’t vacation for this surgery or take sick days for this procedure. Her

chest was bound for six weeks and she constantly felt like she was heaving. The daughter quit

her job, the mother said there had been another death in the family. They lay together, on

the mother’s king size bed, watching television and painfully ambling from bathroom to

kitchen and back. No one to take care of them but themselves. The mother spent hours

staring at her reflection, her bathrobe undone with the ties hanging loosely at her sides. The

daughter avoided mirrors and had never been so thankful for the beige, shaggy rugs that felt

comforting between her toes.

The attention was palpable this time. Suburban mothers’ upturned nostrils flared at

the sight of the women and there was always a man to help them with groceries. Free drinks

that the mother greedily gulped down and the daughter left untouched. For their next move,

almost seven months later, the mother suggested they go south: to warmer waters and

brighter suns. Y’all and sho’ ‘nuff were no longer dirty words. The daughter bought

turtlenecks and scarves while the mother wore spaghetti strap dresses. The mother went out

dancing despite her hatred of most danceable music except Sinatra. The daughter’s two-piece

swimsuits went unused and in summer she would notice them plucked from her drawers.

Time and the sun were cruel and, soon, even Botox could not completely halt the

mother’s defiant skin. Her shapely figure would soon no longer be enough to compensate.

Her conclusion was therefore to make her features pull emphasis away from the creases that
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winged from the edges of her eyes. The mother wore dramatic eye shadow. She looked at her

daughter’s youth and chastised her for abusing it. She sighed heavily when she forgot to wear

moisturizer or if she slept too little the night before. The mother cursed the happiness of her

childhood, her own mother who had never taught her how to take care of herself. She cursed

the smiles and laughs she had so readily delivered. The daughter had never known her

mother to be a happy person but now assumed that, in her youth, she must have been.

The daughter was hardly critical of her mother’s face but was too dismissive with her

responses. But her constant comments meant that the daughter was always hyper aware of

her mother’s supposed imperfections. Sometimes, she had nightmares of being engulfed in

the loose skin around her eyes. Then makeup no longer became enough. No solution was

ever enough. The cutting and rearranging by a man with a glassy office using his soft hands

and comforting voice was the only remedy to the insecurities.

The mother had once said she would not stand to have her skin pulled back, like

delicate silk on an embroidery loop. Or at least the daughter remembered her saying that. A

different doctor, in an even more gleaming, sterile office, convinced her it was a preventative

measure after complimenting the daughter on her curvaceous figure. The elder never needed

convincing. The surgery went fine. But, the healing process tore the daughter apart.

She looked in a mirror, her brown eyes slits that were being swallowed by her lids.

Her once smooth nose was swollen, bulbous. She looked sunburned. Her body refused the

changes her mind had been too weak to resist. It desperately tried to release the sutures

deeply embedded behind her ears, she heard a constant ringing noise. She would wake up in
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the middle of the night, hives crawling down her neck and across her back. Soon, she

couldn’t sleep at all. Her skin felt so taught she worried it would rip. It cracked and flaked.

Stitches had already popped out of place. The mother smiled, reservedly and brought the

daughter chicken soup or brownies. The gas line to the stove had never been plugged in. She

did not leave the condo for three months. She lost her job and her friends and that grocery-

store boy with the long hair stopped calling.

The scars crusted over and gradually healed, when her skin loosened slightly, she

looked in the mirror. She stared. Her hair had grown long, her skin was translucent under

the yellow bulbs of the bathroom. The mother booked another appointment for them to get

haircuts. The daughter hesitantly ran her thumb across her smooth ivory skin, kissable lips

and her perfect nose. She did not know why she so quickly she accepted this new face. How

little the change seemed to matter to her, how it didn’t shake her core at all. All she needed

to know now was that could still sleep with men, as long as the lights were off.