Reaching
She was named for the offspring of the most beautiful woman in the world.
Later, she would sit on the floor and find photos tucked into an old journal, fake leather and wrinkled pages filled with neat cursive sloping backwards. A laminated label, white with black lettering, dust filling in the places where it curved, unsticking, from the spine.
Some were old Polaroids, whose material presence held weight, perhaps, for those more romantic than her. She found a highly colored picture torn from a magazine, studied dark hair tumbling over shoulders tinted golden by an imagined sun. The body, smooth and symmetrical, rolling ivory robes fitted to it - perhaps more sensually than they truly would have.
Most captivating to the picture’s viewer was the way one arm curved, gracefully, away from the woman. The fingers seemed to be reaching out, reaching out to the world it seemed, for something that (she imagined) was just out of reach.
It was the only time she allowed herself to be sentimental, these stolen moments she had with the picture, with this woman (or girl? she couldn’t decide) who carried her name.
Even as a child she would wonder if her mother had chosen the name in futile hope of a daughter shaped so. Futile, because her hair curled, not beautifully, but madly about her shoulders in a mousy brown mass, her eyes and skin tinted the same tone. It was a tone without brilliancy or depth or smoothness, but something more regular and familiar, as practiced hands sinking into dirt feel the simple rightness of their being there, without more philosophical questions needing to be raised.
She grew up in the care of parents who were seemingly crafted of completely different materials. Her father, mostly silent and often angry, read almost nothing, instead preferring the literature of machines and engineered tinkering. Her mother, always awake and never quiet (for even in rest a foot tapped, a page shifted, a finger drummed ---), read almost everything. Her conversations with her child were filled of opinions and ideas, thoughts and contrivances, feelings of the past brought to the surface which frequently were too much for the daughter to bear.
Parental spats were many and explosive but resolved quickly and never causing permanent damage. As a child, they were a cause of distress. As a teenager, a cause of contempt. She learned acutely to forecast her father’s temper, and to ease it when she could, with food and silence and cleanliness. Her mother, whose character diverged most severely from hers, was harder to read and to soothe, but the daughter found that any unjust tempers were usually short and followed by heartfelt apologies and self-reflection.
So, she developed, out of necessity, an unusually pronounced sense of perception and tact. Her years, childhood and teenage, were spent either tiptoeing around her father or relating with him. She learned how to help her mother out of the dark pits of emotion she seemed to often fall into and to discern which ideas were truly her own and which she simply absorbed.
She had no siblings with which to compare her behavior, so she regarded it as typical for much of her upbringing, seeing nothing abnormal in the way she recognized small stressors in the environment surrounding her father and immediately removed them, or performed small check-ups on her mother when a particularly distressing piece of journalism was released.
Her father only saw his own behavior mirrored. Her mother saw nothing, for she never realized the actions her daughter performed to benefit her peace of mind.
Thus, with features imperfectly crafted by nature, and a temperament unknowingly nurtured, the girl stepped out onto the hard pavement of her home and felt the heat rise through the thin soles of her shoes and wondered at the brightness of the sun. She had no real friends, at least in her cynical mind, and her home was composed of two creatures she knew far too well. She wanted for more. She longed for more.
Regrettably, her hair still hung brown about her shoulders, and the world was far beyond her grasp.