Mother must decide what’s best for her son, incest, family taboo, Snowy days dot my memory. Seminal events in my life seemed to play out with a white background. I looked out at the rounded mounds in the back yard while thinking about my mother. Even her name sounded round to me; Robin…Robin Owen. Everything about her form spoke of roundness… places for the eye to rest… places for the hand to glide over and caress. I wasn’t supposed to notice of course because she was my mother. No… not much.
I laughed to myself as my mind flew into a poetic flight of fanciful amusement. I imagined that her breasts were moons of snow, capped by strawberries and that anyplace my mouth touched would taste like vanilla ice cream. Most of the time my thoughts about her couldn’t be deemed poetry.
That she looked good was pointed out to me many times when I attended the middle school where she taught. The kids knew her as Miss Owen, and most didn’t think we were related because my name’s Tom Owen Blanco. She had gone back to her maiden name when she started teaching. More than once I had to say, “Shut up that’s my mother” to guys who wanted to rhapsodize about her looks with me.
It never seemed to bother my brother Paul who was a year older than I was. We had different friends and we probably fought less than most brothers but we really weren’t close. I guess I was jealous of him and he was indifferent to me. I loved it when he wasn’t home and it was just mom and me because then I would be the one who took care of her after school.
By that time she seemed always tired and down. I remember that she was a good cook, but for five years we hadn’t had a meal that didn’t come from a can, a box, or the microwave. She took some kind of pill or other all the time and her answer to almost everything was,”Okay… take a jacket.” If I said I wasn’t coming home at night because I was staying at a friend’s or I said I was going to drown myself in the river, I could expect, “Okay… take a jacket.”
She came home physically and emotionally exhausted and what she wanted most was a massage on her legs or her arms or her back. Many times she fell asleep while she was being rubbed. I became intimately familiar with her skin… the creamy smoothness… the supple curves of her calves and thighs… the smell of… her. Sometimes I would bring my face close to inhale her; it was a musky lemony fragrance I’d never encountered.
She was then only thirty-one, and thirty-five when I graduated high school. She had a young face and could have passed for a woman in her twenties. When we all went out together, to the casual observer, she could have been our sister.
Her young marriage had lasted three years. Early on she dated occasionally but she never had a boyfriend that I knew of for more than a few months. As we got older, she was open and honest with us and never minced words. When I asked her how come she didn’t date more she said, “I don’t seem to find the kind of men I want spend time with… it’s all small talk and games… there aren’t any white-knights out there… forget it, I’d rather stay home… and sex isn’t that big a deal for me.”