Be Mine Read Free Page B

smoke, lost it all, and looked no better for it.
    And then I got pregnant, and never touched a cigarette again.
    Now, I wouldn't touch those green beans if they'd even been
near
butter.
    (All this self-control! Where did
that
come from?)
    Looking at myself in that three-way mirror this afternoon at the mall, I thought I actually look
chiseled.
All this muscle definition in my arms.
    And my waist! The other day I took a tape measure to it, twenty-eight.
    And my breasts, 36 C—exactly what I always longed for and never managed, even when I was fat. Don't ask me how my breasts got larger as the rest of me slimmed down, but the evidence fills the cups right here on my chest. My diet—no refined flour, no white sugar, no added fats—has done away with even that lip of flesh I carried below my belly button for years after Chad was born—the evidence of my maternity, which I thought would stay with me forever, gone.
    Jon says that if he could have my body of twenty years ago again, or my body now, he'd take my body now.
    My body, which just keeps getting better, and better, until...
    A sobering thought:
    Once you've entered your forties, how much longer can this go on?
    Even the celebrities in
People,
cited as sexier now at fifty than they were at twenty—the photos of those women all look as if they were taken underwater. Something happens to the face. (
The neck, the hands, the knees.
) No amount of surgery can fix that, and no one really wants to see it. Better this blur, the photographers must think—this buttery light, this distant hint at the beauty that was once there—than to look dead-on into what's actually left.
    Still, this dress is gorgeous, with or without my body in it. A sensuous memory, a slow song, a beautiful immoral thought turned into something wearable, buyable ($198!). Something you can bring home on a hanger, gather in your arms, accessorize with heels and a handbag—weightless, feminine, eternal, mine.
     
    N OTHING like spring yet, but only one more week until Chad comes home for his spring break. This morning we woke to more snow—a long cold carpet of it on the lawn, curtains of it blowing in fat flakes sideways in a hard wind. While Jon was still sleeping in the bed behind me, I stood at the window for a while, and watched it, and I started to cry.
    Why?
    The snow?
    Or maybe the realization that it was only one more week until Chad would be home, and how excited I've been now, since he went back to California after New Year's, for my boy to come back. And, because I couldn't help but wonder—is this what it will be like from now on?
    From now on will I count off the days of my life in black check marks between Chad's vacations?
    Season to season. Holiday to holiday.
    I could, I suppose, move through them just as I always have—buying the appropriate cards, sending them out at the usual times, putting up the Christmas wreath, taking it down, planting bulbs in the fall, seeds in the spring. But will I do all of it emptily, waiting for Chad?
    And, after a few more years off at college, how often will he even come home?
    There will be, I suppose, some summer backpacking through Europe. A spring break with his friends in Mexico. Soon, he'll start calling in November to tell me, "Mom, I'll only be staying a few days this year around Christmas, because—"
    Then what?
    Is
this
the empty nest?
    Is that what I was crying about at the window, watching the snow?
    At Christmas, Brenda went on and on about it:
    So, how is it having Chad off at school? What do you do with yourself? Is it like getting to know yourself and Jon all over again, after eighteen years of motherhood?
    She and her partner eyed me smugly from their superior positions on the love seat, childless lesbians with books and Welsh corgis and endowed chairs at a fancy college as I followed Chad around their town house with my eyes. They'd been waiting for years, I thought, to see me crash and burn when my "career" of being Chad's mother came