The Ten-Year Order

I have flashbacks of her in a black dress, as if she attended her own funeral.

Perhaps it’s because she lived in constant scarcity, like she was always one step away from starvation. Short on humor, minimal in nonsense, tight-reined for schedules and speech and spending. Stoic as a Viking and rigid as a brick. Not failure but low aim was crime, and nothing I did was ever good enough for Ma.

Her only seeming weakness for some years had been chocolate, which I reveled. It afforded me one indulgence in my life-- that is, until one summer when puberty hit, my belly swelled, and my mother’s disapproving looks burned like lasers through my stretched shirt.

“You’re getting fat. You need to lay off the desserts. No one’s going to want to be with you if you are fat.” Tell me how you really feel, Ma.

It didn’t help that I essentially starved myself to win her approval. I skipped meals, I exercised intensely, but it was no use. I could never get that hollow cut-out below my chest, that accentuated curve from my waste to my hips, could never find my ribs; my mid-section was always safely and solidly cylindrical, at the very least. My body was relentless in piling any and all fat cells into my center, hugging my belly button, as if desperately trying to rebuild an umbilical cord, another chance to receive something tender from my mother. Attachment loss runs deep.

I met my first boyfriend in the wake of her absence. She died in winter, and after coasting through that semester, my feet never really touching the ground, suspended somewhere between my grief and my new-found space to be my own woman, I took a summer job at a restaurant in the city. There were many internationals, and I’d love guessing where they were from: Turkey, Ukraine, Jamaica, Ecuador. One boy, a little older than me with conquistador blood and eyes like chocolate, loitered longer than the others after his shift had ended. I was oblivious, until he handed me a chocolate bar and a poem he had written. My teenage heart flew sky-high.

Our first kiss had been in an ice cream shop. We both had been so excited that the connection was sloppy, and we both ended up with sticky faces. Later, by the beach, we had perfected our aim. He’d compared me to chocolate cake. He had been very careful to live a good and celibate life, and believed God would reward him for obedience. “No one wants a piece of cake just to look at from a distance. That’s no reward.” I, apparently, was the reward he had been waiting for.

But he was the one like chocolate-- his dark curls and every angle of his skin that drank the sun with no reservation. He was rich in every way— wealthy with copious amounts of laughter, romanticism, and ever-blooming hope. He could afford every lyricism, every dream, every luxurious moment of happiness. He smiled and loved as if he had nothing to lose. His family, too, lived in monetary wealth-- his father owned three homes in the foothills of the Andes, each house turning a corner as if it were a mall, and his mother wore the finest jewels. He was Spanish royalty.

For some reason I could not fathom, he was drawn to my freckles, my skin the color of cream, my prominent German features. When he kissed me, the ghost of my mother was there, always shrouded in funeral black, speaking into my ear, “You don’t deserve him. He’ll never really love you.” I didn’t know how to not hear my mother. Over those weeks her voice grew louder in the back of my head, a cicada drone I couldn't ignore. The July moon set on us, I turned cold like the Northern Winter, and he, brokenhearted and bewildered, returned to his golden life in Bogotá.

Ten years later, I am older, wiser, still the same body shape, and at peace about it. I find myself in my hometown, standing in the restaurant where I met him, absorbing the smell of shrimp and steak, the bustle of waiters and busboys, the dim of the lights, the Caribbean music in an eternal tropical haze. My stomach flips and for a moment I feel seventeen again.

My waiter introduces himself, earnest and confused when I tell him I need a table for one. “What can I get for you today, miss? Are you here for happy hour or dinner?”

“Neither. Dessert.” I’ve become more direct and unabashed than I was then. My teenage self would be intimidated.

“I’ll take the chocolate cake. Two slices.” The waiter controls his facial muscles and doesn’t raise his eyebrows too high, but pleasantly collects the menu and excuses himself in the most gracious way; he does not want to balk at my embarrassing decision.

I look around. That brief suspense of feeling seventeen is gone as quickly as it came. So much has changed since I was here last. I feel older, steady, grounded. It’s a restaurant, that’s that. It was childhood, nothing more. He was a boy, my mother was my mother, and I am me. Ironic, the profundity of those truths. We were all ourselves, in much different situations than we were ten years ago. He is married now to a woman who doesn’t look very unlike me, and they have two kids back in Colombia. Memories of mother are ten-years decayed, and though her loss is still very real, it doesn’t carry the same voracious bite it once did. And I, I am certainly not who I was ten years ago. It would not be so easy to sweep me off my feet anymore. It would not be so easy to believe my mother’s voice anymore, which has faded gently into the background of the past. Ten years later, I did deserve him, and he would have loved me, had I let him.

The cake is delivered, though the waiter is unsure of where to place the second piece. I wave my hand dismissively-- this is not a typical situation, you don’t need to be perfect, it’s alright.

I set one piece across from me.

“Happy Birthday, Ma.” I say, and go for the frosting first.