XLVI. Mama's Jewelry Box.
My fingers creep toward the jewelry box of their own volition.
They cannot help it, and have never been able to, which is perhaps a problem particular to hands (and to daughters). There is a shimmering diamond tennis bracelet curled in the far corner, and something in the wanting of it, the wanting to know what it might feel like, cold and bright against the wrist, draws my eye the way a lit living room does from the sidewalk at night, all gold lamplight and belonging, close enough to see and nowhere near close enough to touch.
The swat is fast and light.
"Do not go rummaging through my jewelry box when I am at work, do we understand each other?"
I pull my hand away.
I do not say: but you are home. Or: I only wanted to look.
Between mothers and daughters there exists a whole language of the unsaid, passed down like jewelry itself, and we have been speaking it for years already without quite meaning to.
She studies me a moment longer. Then she sighs, sits down on the edge of the bed, and draws the box onto her lap herself.
Mama's bedroom holds the particular stillness of a room that is always kept. The duvet pulled taut. The pillows arranged in an order that has never been explained but must not be disturbed. And myself upon it, today in my Christmas dress, the scratchy good kind worn in the last days of December, disturbing the careful surface of things in the way that children do simply by existing inside spaces their mothers have made orderly and beautiful and not entirely for them.
Her pink jewelry box sits open between us like a small and very serious government. It has its own bureaucracy. The good pieces, kept in the velvet-lined top tier, out of reach even when the box is technically open. The everyday pieces below, cheaper, more forgiving of loss.
The smell of it rises, metallic and powdery and intimate:
her dressing table,
her bureau drawers,
her.
She lifts a pair of gold earrings and holds them to my face. I go still, the way one goes still before a painting, or before any moment in which one is being truly looked at. She tilts her head. Turns my chin half an inch with two fingers, professional, unhurried, the way she might adjust a picture frame that has been hanging crooked for years and finally caught her eye.
She is not seeing me exactly. She is seeing what I might be made into. What arrangement of light and gold might best illuminate whatever it is she recognizes in my face as hers.
"No," she says, mostly to herself. "Too much yellow won't go with..."
She sets them down. This is not unkind. It is inventory.
Her hand passes over the top tier, over the bracelet coiled in its velvet, and does not stop. She selects some pearl studs instead, small and matched and slightly cool from the box, and leans close. Her breath is warm at my ear. Her fingers are sure at the backs. Three motions, the same three motions, the ones she has done ten thousand times on her own ears in mirrors I was never in the room for. The tiny click when each one catches is the only sound in the room.
She sits back to look. For a moment her attention settles over me entirely, soft and complete. Late afternoon light slanting through a window, briefly making everything it touches feel significant and chosen.
"There," she says.
"Now you look like somebody."
I do not ask who I looked like before.
For what it’s worth,
-Charlene Iris
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