Seven Thoughts

When I have nothing to do I study my hands. Or subtly moisten them by pressing my lips against my knuckles, which are usually the driest part. I'll press back the cuticle with the thumbnail of my other hand or wedge my index fingernail underneath another nail to gouge the white soap residue out. I might chew off a line of nail, ripping it off cleanly with my teeth so I can neatly clip it later. Or just interlock my fingers and study the lacing underneath.

My hands are like my mother's, so I know what they'll look like someday. They're paler than hers, but they're the same square shape, and have the same earth palms. Someday they'll be just like hers, and the veins will sit on the hand, tracing a river of blood too agitated to run smoothly. We have the same exaggerated moons in our nails and slender bones. And our hands are exactly the same size, my mother's and mine.

My mother is fifty-three this year. I can't remember what she looked like at a younger age, not without a picture. So I study her face, like she sometimes studies mine, and try to memorize the lines and textures. She has a habit of pursing her lips, and there are pucker lines and jowl lines that fold easily into that expression. She has brown freckles in her grey-blue eyes which she says are a sign of some latent disease. My own eyes are jade green and come in a little plug-topped bottle once a year. I've had green eyes since seventh grade.

When I first was told I needed glasses my mother picked out the frames. She chose a lavender pair with eyes shaped like apples, but seretly I stole glances at the ladder of hundred-dollar glasses with sleek shapes. Two weeks later the matronly lady at the Wal-Mart Vision Center took my glasses out of a blue plastic cubby, fitted them expertly across the bridge of my nose, and misted them with something that smelled like orange. My mother, always a shrewd customer, suspected that they were crooked, but after repeated adjustments she clucked her tongue and resigned to the fact that it was me who was crooked. Then she purchased a bottle of orange spray for her own glasses and we left the store, mother and daughter in thirty-eight dollar frames.

Today my mother is swtiching diets. For three and a half weeks she ate nothing but meat: steak, chicken, shrimp and imitation crab, pork, and bacon. The fridge bulged with shrink-wrapped packages of meat, pink and bloody under the tight plastic. Today she went to the grocery again, and came back with a new sort of food, all sugarless and skim. Cartons of sugarless gelatin, diet yogurt, diet soda and baskets of strawberries and grapes. So now, like me, my mother eats cereal in the evenings. Or she cooks noodles with no sauce and no butter and eats them morosely by herself in the kitchen, and afterwards mops the blue placemat and sighs loudly through her nose. My mother hates diets, but she hates her body more.

My mother calls herself a widow when she knows Dad can hear. It's the worst on Tuesdays, bowling nights, when he'll gather with his league for drinks and poker afterwards and we sometimes won't hear him padding in the house until eleven. But by this time my mother has been in bed for two hours, her comforter pulled tightly under her armpits, and is staring at a book with bleary eyes. Other nights she has finished reading and begins her nightly prayers when Dad walks into the bedroom, her voice raspy with audible fervor and her hands clasped fast under her chin. She's praying that her children will be safe for another day, that her health will return, that Thomas won't come back so late and that he remembered to turn off the entryway light. She prays she'll find her keys. And maybe sometimes she prays other things that she doesn't want Thomas to hear, something personal to Jesus, who smiles down at her from somewhere near the bedroom lamp.

Sometimes when I have nothing to do I study my hands. And I see the likeness of them half-folded under my mother's chest as she sleeps on her side. The skin on my mother's hands is loose and rough, and I see a patch of white callus on the ridge of her thumb. She's wearing a ring that isn't her wedding ring, since she says it doesn't fit her anymore. I've seen it in her jewelry box: a gold band with a flat gold oval pressed into the front like a mirror. I've worn all her rings because the metal is smooth and heavy on my hands, and it seems like they give my hand more weight, more grace. My mother's hand curls and uncurls in sleep, grasping at nothing like an infant's hand. And lingering above her I mimic the gesture, a sympathetic motion, feeling that maybe it feels exactly the same for both of us.