File #504: "Mosaic vol. 1 1993_014.jpg"

Mosaic vol. 1 1993_014.jpg

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BEAUTY
JANET JENNINGS
The women of my mother's family acquire a slow beauty. It is a beauty that is barely evident in their photographs of forty years ago. They are so fresh-faced in those poses with their hair curled just right, shiny and clean. There is a fresh look to their skin, too, and when they smile their eyes light up. It is there, though. That slow beauty is waiting to grow. It can be seen there only in the bravado shining from their eyes and in the slight crinkles at the corners that make a frame for it. The beauty that they have in the old photographs, you see, is that of youth, but the beauty that has come to them over the years is the kind that comes from living. It is the indefinable something caught in the wrinkles and hard lines and in slackening bodies too. Perhaps it is best understood as character. I don't know, but I do believe it is a grace acquired from living through adversity. Whatever it is, that peculiar kind of beauty began to come early for the women of my mother's family.
I remember when my mother and I sat on her warm couch one afternoon with not much to do, looking for something to talk about. She began to tell me a little bit about her father, a gaunt old man whom I barely recall. To me he was a long-1 imbed stick figure who stalked slowly through shadowy rooms wreathed with smoke. I thought he was as acid as his cigarettes and was afraid to speak to him. Mother's story gave him motion and life. It was a story that made her laugh until she cried, and it added to my understanding of her and of how she began to acquire her beauty.
Daddy was an alcoholic, and he sometimes did strange things. I remember the time Doris had a date, and we younger ones held back, giggling, waiting for the arrival of something foreign to us-- a date. Then daddy got crazy. We hid behind the door while he threw the pillows around. He actually slit them open and shook them out like some crazy rooster in a cock tight. oh, the feathers were like snow falling! Imagine, snow in our front room... covering the sofa, the floor, and Doris. Was she madi Oh Daddy, how can you do this, she cried. She went away, after she brushed the snow out of her hair, but there was a look in her eyes."
Yes, there was always a look in their eyes that showed an awareness that life was dangerous. It showed in the photograph of my mother what a little thing she was at eleven!) sitting on the back rim of the bicycle with two little brothers balancing in Eront other. That must have been taken about the time her mother had died. The boys were grinning like inps, but she had a wry half-smile on her face, which brothers were those? They were my uncles, but I have had many uncles, some of whom I never knew. They were casualties of red-hot racing on southern speedways and bad hearts. I wonder if they had time to acquire a look in their eyes or any of the beauty of age?
Aunt Dorothy has had plenty of time. She never intended to live her life the way she has. I assume that she was happy being the wife of a navy man, but because I was just a kid then, I wouldn't have known how she felt about those long months without hin. I do know, though, that his death changed everything. It was a family catastrophe. When my mother received the phone call notifying Us of what had happened, she sat on the bed in her room and leaned on my father's shoulder. I don't think I can take any more!", she cried. She got us ready, though, and we took the train to Norfolk.

We found out that our cousins had been anxiously awaiting the arrival of their daddy. Aunt Dorothy had bought new dresses for then to wear for his homecoming. The young one, little Melinda with the long silky golden hair and the cherubim face was to wear a navy blue sailor suit. The day before he came home he was robbed of his simple gold band somewhere on a small, lonely deck, and pushed overboard to drown. His death was too senseless and sudden to be anything but a tragedy. My cousins wore their new dresses to their daddy's funeral, but Aunt Dorothy wore that look on her face, that look of strength pulled out of the depths of her heart. She never lost that look and wears it now, in the straight lines of her face and in the jutting angle of her chin. That look represents something more important than the simple effects of time. It is the outward manifestation of the courage that she always carries inside. It is part of the beauty of Dorothy.
My mother's beauty is different.ller eyes look tired, but her face is remarkably unlined and soft looking. It is not a face of youth but not of age either. I can only describe it as abiding, and I wonder how that can be because her life has held an endless string of surprised. Just one of those surprises was me. I was born with a collapsed lung, and was not expected to live. When I did go home, it was with an extremely bad case of asthma. My birth was the beginning of years of midnight dashes to the emergency room and countless days and weeks spent sitting in hospital rooms.
My earliest memory is of lying in an oxygen tent in an intensive care unit. i listened to the aide tell my mother that nobody, not even her, would be allowed to put their hands inside the tent to touch me. It gave me the strangest feeling to see the tears well up in my mother's eyes, and to know that somehow I had put them there. Then she took a slow, deep breath and the tears did not fall. How many times since then have I seen her take a breath in just that same way? It has been a million times in the dead of the night and a thousand times in the day. She seems to take something from the air around her and hold onto it. She fortifies her heart with it and imbues her face and hands with some calm serenity that she gets from it. She takes the al that I cannot breathe and extracts from it enough strength for us all to live on.
That transmutation of the very air she breathes explains to me why her face has that abiding look. She has swum through her 11 Ee as though it were a pool of water. She never stops moving. for she must move to breathe and she must breathe to swim on through. The beauty of what she has been, and done, and it shows in that enduring calmness other face.
I have seen beauty in the painfully raw humanness of my daughters at their births. I see it now in the five year old walking herself through the big doors at school. It is in that Saucy ten-year-old dancing down the hallway and in that funny and fevered teenager anxious to grow up. I cherish their beauty for what it is now and for what it will be. They do not know it yet, but they have within then the seeds from which the more enduring beauty of my mother's family will grow. The slow beauty that is in the eyes, and on the faces and sheathed in the movements of those women is the beauty of humanness. It is imperfection, and Cear, and surprising courage. It is the struggle of life and endurance. It is the beauty within us.