Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom

Author:Allie Rowbottom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press

FROM THE DOORWAY of my mother’s new room, I saw that she was awake. But her body looked unconscious, arms limp and noodled.

“Let’s get you untangled,” a nurse said. She leaned over the bed, parsed wires. “Okay?” she said and wedged a call button, a PCA bolus, within reach. My mom said, “Yes,” and “Thank you,” like a shy child, the words sing-songed and soft. I felt like the hidden witness of a private moment, but walked in anyway, swinging the turquoise purse too enthusiastically.

“I’m the daughter,” I said.

“Hi,” the nurse said. My mom stayed quiet.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “I brought your purse.” She mouthed hi at me, then closed her eyes.

The nurse wrote her name—Nancy—on a whiteboard and asked for mine. She put “daughter,” in parentheses.

“She’s been through the wringer,” Nancy said.

There were faces, happy to miserable, at the bottom of the board. She circled an expression of anguish. I rifled around in my mom’s purse for my phone, which I’d dumped in there before leaving the house, along with two Diet Cokes, one of them for her.

“Have her use the button if she needs anything,” Nancy said, and left.

I put down the purse, glanced at my mother. Her face was bloated, her eyelids thin and blue, as if her body had been dredged up from the bayou, where it had been dumped. That did happen sometimes. Quickly, I looked away. At my phone. My camera. I pointed the lens at the whiteboard, the faces, smiley to sad, then uploaded the image to Instagram. “Mood,” I typed and added to my story. Beyond the bed a wide window looked out on Rice University, rows of live oaks, brick buildings, the cross-country track like a leather belt, buckled around nobody. Someone had arranged a powder-blue chemotherapy recliner to take in the view. I went to it, propped my phone upright on the sill. I pushed the chair close to the bed and felt the effort in my breasts, a sharp, pulling pain. I hadn’t yet revealed them to my following. But before the surgery, Jake and I had planned a shoot: lunch at a Hollywood restaurant where Bella and Gigi had recently shot content of kale salads and turmeric tonics they posted to their feeds. I would order a burger, Jake said, sit in front of it and lift the hem of my top to show a hint of under boob. Did she or didn’t she? followers would ask, and fill my comments with conjecture.

I looked at my mom, tucked in bed, covers tangled like a feverish child. Lightly, she snored. I unzipped my hoodie, beneath which I wore a sports bra, and my new breasts looked obvious from some angles, dubious from others. “You want people to wonder,” Jake said when we planned the reveal. “But never really know.”

I went to my phone, turned on selfie mode, video mode. I pressed the button to film and angled the recliner to see the screen. The shot caught my mom in the background, her sleeping face turned to the lens, showing both her sickness, and our likeness.

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