“Outside my window there is a magnolia tree. It too reveals itself with the spring. The white of its buds is so pure it is excruciating. Its purple-red tips ache. This color is the first signal of death, a stain that will eventually contaminate the entire flower. Over the course of the days, its petals unfold slowly, secretively, to reveal the confounding emptiness within. The tree offers itself to me: a balletic profusion of agony and tenderness. I am, or so I believe, its sole witness.”

There is a first bright day in May when the sun shines and all of the town seems to have blossomed overnight. The sky is cerulean. The leaves are tipped in the fiery gold that is responsible for everything. The air is warm, flavored with anise. It is as though the entire world has unclasped, startled from the white void of winter—whole, aching, delirious to be seen.

Outside my window there is a magnolia tree. It too reveals itself with the spring. The white of its buds is so pure it is excruciating. Its purple-red tips ache. This color is the first signal of death, a stain that will eventually contaminate the entire flower. Over the course of the days, its petals unfold slowly, secretively, to reveal the confounding emptiness within. The tree offers itself to me: a balletic profusion of agony and tenderness. I am, or so I believe, its sole witness.

It is around this day that my mother tells me that my face has changed. She says it has occurred suddenly—it must have happened in the night, she says. Did I have a dream? I cannot remember. Was it a strange dream, capable of marking me? I don’t know. I was asleep, oblivious. It is French thing, my mother says. It is something that her mother, whom we all call Maman, taught her to recognize. Before, she says, I retained the look of a child, but now there is something else, something adult, she cannot pinpoint it. She tells me this in an affectionate way, as though I've become closer to her, more like her. 

To be like her has always been a matter of great importance. She holds my difference over me as though I have some control in it. Bearing this new face she has found, I still do not look like her. The resemblance is so unalike it is disturbing. Someone meeting us for the first time could easily think that she is not my mother. Who I look like instead is the other, this other whose name is forever unspoken in our house. It has always been this way with my mother. She forces me to wear my face as a secret, even though it is there, unavoidable, with whatever small bit of myself there is behind it, peering out at the world through the mask.

It is always there, my face, in the bright streaming daylight when we walk outside in the fury of summer, under the cold fluorescent lamps at the hotdog- and pizza-scented shopping mall, or at night, in the frolicking flames of Maman’s hearth or the ultraviolet swelling of the television screen in my mother’s bedroom. But it is not just my face, and my mother knows it. It is deeper inside me, whatever it is. It is in my being, and it projects through me convulsively. Even in an absolute darkness, I would not satisfy my mother. She would still know. What she knows of me is primitive, terrifying, beyond appearance.

Often I see her look at my face wryly as though I do not notice. I see her trying to form the parts or to recollect the parts that have imprinted themselves upon me so unabashedly. And I stare in the mirror, looking for the other face I’ve never seen, trying to compose in my reflection some semblance of his face. In imagining it, it is as though I see my mother in the form of a photographic negative. I know her blue eyes, her pale freckled skin, her hair in loose champagne-colored ringlets. Instead, I find my dark eyes, my tawny skin the color of a bruised nectarine, and my coarse black hair that gains some streaks of gold in summer. I never see it exactly or clearly, myself. 

I will be beautiful, my mother tells me, once I outgrow this mawkish girlish look. My mother did not make up nice things to say. She did not flatter. It was difficult enough for her merely to acknowledge what was readily there, especially if it threatened her. When she expressed this sentiment to me, likely she surprised even herself with the words. I mean to say that she was so struck that she did not have time to stop herself from the compliment.