Controversy

Darling

Darling. Copyright © 2014 by Jasmine Tabor. All Rights Reserved.

Dedicated to my sisters, my parents, and to everyone (in my english class) who thought I couldn't write a children's story on rape.

Darling didn't know what made mother so upset, what made her coil up inside. Darling didn't know so Darling didn't ask but mother answered anyway.

1. My Converse

Mother said we would never be dependent on another soul ever because she was still able to purchase my church shoes every year along with a pair of crisp, white converse. She had said so while we sat in our usual positions in the back of the library where the art books were kept.

“We can go to any ice cream parlor we please because we have the money,” she said while flicking through a book about Salvador Dali’s great works. I sat across from her and felt and inhaled the air being created from the quick movement. The pages smelled like they had been waiting to be touched for years.

I didn’t understand why Mother was telling me this. I hadn’t asked about our money, of course, or my shoes but it looked like Mother didn’t care anyway.

I did not respond to her comment and continued to look through my book. I couldn’t quite read that well yet, but I could read the pictures in the book.

One day I wanted to be a painter, painting out in the New Mexico desert like Georgia O’Keeffe or in the ballets like Edgar Degas. Mother said I could do it, if I just started with something simple and noticed the little things and so she educated me in the art of portraying visual thought precisely, abstractly, and realistically. Then, all I had to do it translate that feeling I got from that thing and draw it.

Mother took me to the library every Sunday after church to the art section so I could learn from the greatest of visual thinkers. But, one time, the library was the place where she shared a deep and very dark secret with me.

2. Mother's Eyes

The first thing Mother told me was that she was scared. “When I was little, couldn’t to go to any ice cream parlor because I didn’t have the money, Darling.”

I looked directly at Mother when she said this. Her eye was just barely looking in my direction and I realized something about her.

She was beautiful. Of course, no one noticed her delicate allure because she hid it so well behind her sharpness. But sometimes, she let me see it sparkle in her eyes and her lips.

The look she was giving me was one of business. Mother wanted to tell me something so I prompted her by asking the first thing that came to mind. “Did you have enough money for converse?”

Mother smiled. Like I said, even her lips sparkled with beauty when she let them. “Darling, everyone could afford converse. But, no, I didn’t own any.”

I had been told many times on previous occasions that Mother’s life before me was both fun and penniless. She couldn’t afford the prettiest of clothes but she still caught the eyes of young men with her ink-stained hands and long legs.

“I met Father that way,” Mother said dismally.

3. I Imagine Mother and Father

I visualized the two to be in love. In their relationship, Mother would be the paintbrush, directing the wildness I envisioned Father to be to him who was the canvas of their love.

They would constantly say ‘I love you’ and Father would brush his fingers against Mother’s blushing cheeks. They would lay in bed together into the late morning, listening to the noise of the urban neighborhood: the traffic, the opening of shop doors, children going to school, parents going to work, the night-life shutting down and going home.