Fiction

The Photograph

There is a faded photograph on my Grandmother’s wall of her at eighteen standing in the front yard of her mother’s house.  She is wearing a skirt and a sweater and one of the incredible bras from the late thirties that shaped and lifted a woman’s chest into a missile-like defiance of gravity.

One foot in front of the other to show off her legs and the new high heels she bought for her date, she stands with her back arched to emphasize the promontory of her chest, her shoulders straight and proud.  She is not smiling, but she stares in provocative challenge at the photographer. 

She was a sweater girl – one of the well-endowed young women whose tight sweaters were daring and a little risque.  She knows her appeal and revels in her power.

Her mother is almost lost in the background; a faded house dress, shapeless as a cloth bag, obscuring her stooped figure.  Her hair hidden beneath a kerchief, her shoes clunky and practical with thick soles, she stands with both feet planted solidly beneath her, sturdy as a post.  An almost imperceptible smile crinkles her eyes but does not reach her mouth as she watches her daughter pose.  Gazing at the gorgeous young thing before her she seems proud and sad, as if she knows all of the missed chances and disappointments that will ruin that youth and arrogance. 

She is a ghost, a specter of spent youth, a fading apparition with no power to protect her daughter from the cruelties and little tragedies of life.

There is no resemblance between them.

My grandmother looks at the picture now, points at her past self and jibes, “snotty teenager.”  We laugh, but I suddenly see her mother in her face. 

Jacaranda Tree

The jacaranda trees are blooming again, punctuating the gray landscape with exclamations of vivid purple, bringing dreams of spring to life from the drear concrete winter.  Graceful branches arch over sidewalks and roads, delicate trumpet flowers drift to the ground, Technicolor snow that paints the sidewalk violet and lavender. 

I sometimes wonder who brought them here.  They seem so foreign in this grid of roads and block-houses squatting behind fences, blank walls peering with suspicious eyes. 

The jacarandas glow against the false, verdant green of golf course fairways, shading a lake that shimmers in the relentless Southern California sun, a mirage of tropical rains that never come. 

I sit and watch their petals float in the still air and dream of where they grow wild, blanketing tropical landscapes with their celebration of spring.  But when I look away, the concrete remains and the truth that I am well and truly planted here, like the jacarandas, and I wonder how it is they bloom each year.