Pinup

Pinup

The yellowed pinup had been torn out of an old advertising calendar. Johnson’s Machine Shop. October 1959. More than a year before I was born. My mother on her knees, posing with her left side to the camera, chest up and out as she leans back with her palms resting in the sand behind her. The photograph shows her in a black one-piece swimsuit. A single red rose sprouts from her upswept hair. Artfully blurred behind her, frothy ocean waves strike the beach.

For a long time I stare at the woman in the pinup and try to imagine her the day the photograph had been taken. In October of 1959 she would have been eighteen with her whole life ahead of her. Was she as happy as the photograph suggests? Or did she even then -- as I vividly recall -- spend her evenings sitting quietly beside the window. I study her features in the calendar photograph. A strange and unfamiliar playful expression fills my mother’s youthful face. Her dark hair and dark eyes are perfect. Her red-lacquered lips are perfect.

Raising my eyes from the calendar, I glance across the room at my mother’s squat urn on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. By closing my eyes I try to recover an image of her in her final days. But my mind’s photograph of my mother in her later years fragments and refuses to remain inside my head. The calendar picture, the pinup of the unfamiliar smiling woman who kneels in the sand is the only image that fills the space in my mind.

A prickle on the nape of my neck tells me my mother’s watching me now. And she’s pleased. Pleased that while scavenging through boxes of her things in the garage, I managed to discover a part of her she'd never shared.