HomeScars
by Deena Batten
Sometimes when I stand thus, naked in front of my bedroom mirror, staring intently at the strange woman who lives behind this silver barrier, there is a fleeting feeling of comfort and acceptance, elusive sentiments that dance just beyond my grasp, like fairies in a moonlit garden. I have heard that they exist: contentment, acceptance, approval. And I can sometimes glimpse them, fairies that flit about in the dusky twilight amongst the cool white lilies, but I have never been able to capture them.
I watch as the woman in the glass glides wide, smooth palms across the expanse of her belly, tracing faded, purple-white stretch marks that rise like sea coral from the depths of her skin. I mimic her every move as if we are pale participants in an Indian Dandari dance. Our fingers trace jagged scars that run the length of our bellies, from the tops of well-trimmed pelvises to the Caves of Bellybutton; we examine the crudely-cut portals that once gave alien beings access to the thumping, pulsating world of existence.
“You've had a child,” I say.
The woman mouths the same accusing words back to me.
“It was long ago,” I reply.
“Long ago, ago, ago,” the mirror echoes, as mirrors always do.
It was long ago, 1985, but it is even more remote in the fuzzy world that is her history. What a scared teenager she was, worrying and fretting in her pink and white-frilled bedroom, trying to find the words to tell her mother that the very child that she had nursed would soon give birth to a child of her own. While the rest of America tried New Coke and listened to Wham! I stared into the mirror and watched as the girl behind the glass looked for signs of her growing pregnancy, practicing the words “Momma, I'm going to have a baby” over and over like a scratched tune on a favorite record album, echoing as mirrors always do.
I look at the long, strong legs of my mirrored nemesis. Can those be the same limbs that helped a scared teenager walk away in the middle of the night from her home in that far-away Georgia town? Are those the same legs that helped that terrified, disgraced child walk away from her family's shame and pain, from the little boy who, standing in his night-shrouded crib asked, “Coming back, Mommy?” She never came back; you can never really go back.
Now, more than twenty years later, I stand in front of this mirror in this bedroom, in a picturesque village in the west of Germany. If I open my window, and I often do, I can smell the sweetness of the elder flowers in the hedges by the field. I can see, across the green expanse of our lawn, my perfect husband playing a game of hide-and-seek with my perfect child (not the one who was left behind. The left-behind boy is not so perfect and has a hard time finding his way in life).
“You should not have left him,” I say to her.
“You should not have left him,” she replies.
I remind myself that I am happy and successful. I travel to Paris, London or Rome to relieve slight feelings of boredom. I visit art galleries, attend operas and discuss philosophy with my husband's Oxford friends. Everyone says that my life is perfect, so it must be true....perfect as long as I can continue to hide the woman in the mirror.
