Saving Elijah

the only valid ones. It was what she always did.
    But this time she didn't do it. Not at all. She pulled a tissue from the pocket of her robe, wiped her eyes, and said, "If I hurt you I'm sorry, Dinah. I didn't mean to."
    "It always seemed to me that you did mean to." For the first time in my life, I was telling my mother the truth, how I felt, and I wasn't even sure why I was doing so. Perhaps because I had nothing left to lose.
    Her face seemed to collapse, the truth—my truth—was wounding her deeply. "You thought I meant to hurt you." She was making a statement, not asking a question, as if she were repeating my words to try to make herself grasp their meaning.
    I nodded, still staking out my territory in the doorway of the kitchen.
    "But I love you." Her eyes naked and brimming with tears.
    "It never seemed to me you did."
    She shook her head. She didn't deny, defend herself, or resist. She simply said, "I'm sorry. Tell me."
    I stood very still, and sighed. "There are so many incidents, Charlotte. So much hurt."
    She gripped her teacup, her knuckles stretched taut and white. "Maybe if you tell me we could try to understand each other," she said. "We could try to be friends."
    Friends. She never had a friend, I don't think. Not like I did. And I did have friends. Good ones. A few in a lifetime is a lot.
    My mind was teeming with images and sounds, my mother's face when she was young and beautiful, her gargoyle expression, the vicious names she had sometimes called me, the apparent constancy of her anger. What was the point of telling her these things? She wouldn't get it, she'd remember it differently. Of course she would. I'd given up trying years ago.
    "When I was thirteen," I said, "you sent me to that diet doctor. You were always on me for my weight."
    "But that was thirty years ago."
    "It still hurts."
    She nodded and sighed, seemed to shrink back into the kitchen chair. "Yes. I suppose it does."
    I took a deep breath and went on. "That man put his hands inside me."
    "He what?" Her eyes were wide, astonished, repulsed.
    "Charlotte. He gave me an internal exam. I was thirteen. He put his hands inside me and I had no one to turn to, no one to tell, and you wouldn't have done anything even if I did tell you."
    "Yes I would, of course I would. I would have killed him. I had no idea." Her lower lip was quivering.
    "You should have known, I thought so anyway. And then you let him give me those pills, they made me crazy, jazzed. They rotted my teeth. How could you care more about my weight than about me? You were supposed to be my mother."
    She clapped her hand over her mouth and stared at me in wide-eyed shock. After a moment, she said softly, "I just wanted everything that was best for you. I wanted you to be beautiful so people would want you."
    I suddenly realized that this was how she looked at the world, had looked at the world, anyway. I wasn't sure about now.
    "Is beauty the only reason people would want a girl? Who told you you only had worth because of your beauty?"
    She was crying again. "My father, I suppose. My mother."
    "I'm sorry," I said.
    "I just wanted people to like you." She put her head in her hands.
    I stared. Perhaps she had wanted people to like me, but mostly she wanted herself to like me. I was going to be not only beautiful, but compliant and submissive, too. Those were the two qualities she couldn't be, despite her own parents' efforts. I would make everything right for her. Like it or not, I would be a reflection of her, even if it was a false one.
    For the first time in my life, I was feeling compassion for her, not for her as my mother, but for Charlotte Blake Rosenberg, for her own hollow places, her longings and regrets and pain and missing pieces. She had looked at the world this way for me because this was the way she looked at the world for herself. She couldn't help it.
    My mother nodded, then took a deep breath and stood up. She moved over to the window, looked outside at the dark night for a long moment before turning back.
    "My mother hated me, Dinah. Do you know that? My own mother. She couldn't stand the sight of me. She blamed me for Charlie's death. I was only a little girl. Only six years old, and she assigned me to watch him. I just went to pick some wildflowers in the field in back of the willow tree and he wandered away. My mother blamed me, do you see? I was only six and my mother took to her bed and she never hugged me again and she never looked at me or loved me