Growing up, I never saw my mother naked. Mom was conservative in the way the postflapper generation often was. She did not breastfeed even one of her five children, never left the house without a hat. Now I see her naked nearly every day, whenever she’s feeling dizzy and needs an extra hand to steady her in the shower, whenever she needs her hair washed because her arthritis makes the scrubbing hurt, or on days like today when she drinks four cups of coffee on an empty stomach and can’t quite make it to the toilet before the explosion. I lower myself to my knees (which are also arthritic, and they sear on the way down) with bucket and bleach and latex gloves and wonder again who the heck thought carpeting a bathroom was a good idea, and also why Mom won’t just listen when I tell her to switch to tea after the first cup of coffee.
I am the only daughter and the youngest, and in childhood I would have preferred to play ball with my brothers, but I dutifully dressed and undressed my dolls, set a tiny table for tiny tea parties with plates of the tiny pies my mother made with leftover crusts. She did not play with me and my dolls. She scrubbed this and folded that but was always watching and smiling a little, which made my girl-play worth it. Now I think, what a good thing it’s always been for her, that after four boys she finally got the daughter she wanted, because in her old age she is more vocal about what she thinks of her daughters-in-law, and odds are a thousand to one she’d be in a nursing home, lying in a dirty diaper and buzzing the orderly, before any one of them would get down on their knees and scrub brown stains from her carpet.
I try not to wrinkle my nose as I scrub because Mom has always prized her dignity, and a sour face would embarrass her more. She is not looking, though, she is a blurred shape in the frosted glass of the shower, washing shit from her thighs. In childhood the most of her skin I saw was when she wore her one-piece swimsuit with the pleated skirt, her thighs already doughy and dimpled. She does not dimple now, she folds, her skin like the film on boiled milk left to cool. I do not stare, but in snatched glances I see my future: her nipples the same shape and color of mine and where they will hang, the way my slouch will start to hump, the way my second toe, longer than my first, will curl slightly under.
All the people we meet tell my mom she is such an inspiration. They wish their mothers or grandmothers were still living, they hope to reach her age someday. Mom was not supposed to reach old age. Both her parents died in their forties. When Mom hit forty-five, the age her mother died, we all held our breaths, and held them every year after until we started secretly to wonder if she’d ever go at all. At the nail salon Mom and I got matching reds for her birthday dinner, and the technicians oohed and aahed and said, “Momma, you’ll make one hundred!” I smiled and Mom shrugged and we both tried not to think of the mysteries of if and when.
Everyone says, what an inspiration. Everyone also says, though not to her or me, that old people are like infants. I’d heard this many times before Mom grew old, and I can’t help but think of it now, as I change out the browning water, how right and wrong it is. Because she’s lost all her teeth and most of her hair. Because she doesn’t make it to the toilet and she won’t do as I say. But she is not like an infant, too, in the most important ways, because she is too big to hold and comfort when she hurts, because she shrinks and shrinks and never grows. For a moment as she steps from the shower, clean and fresh and dripping, I imagine her shrinking down, down, until I can cradle her against my chest, her skin elastic over firm flesh, the shock of baby-blond hair that turned brown with age, before I ever knew her, crowning her head. There would be everything before us, her pink skin like petals waiting to blossom in my arms.