Balancing Act - Part 4

 

I padded back down the hallway, feet leaving damp parentheses on the hardwood, and every step was a challenge. My thighs brushed, the hips swayed, and I kept catching myself in the glass-fronted cabinets and along the glossy surfaces of framed family photographs. I looked like someone’s mother—no, like a very particular mother, my own—and there was a residual flicker of shame with every glimpse of domestic nudity. At the end of the hall, the master bedroom door was propped open, and laundry was arranged in neat, folded towers along the cedar chest.

“Hi, honey,” my old voice called from the doorway.

“Uh. Hey,” I said, voice creaking.

“Thought I’d help you find something to wear.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure,” I stuttered.

Mom opened up the door to walk-in closet, and I followed silently.

I looked around at my parents’ clothes hanging around me, tugging at various garments hanging from the rack, as my mom dug through some drawers.

I started to dig around, too. As I pawed through the heap, my hand landed on a familiar flash of color: the one-piece bathing suit she always wore.

There was something perverse, even more than usual, about the idea of putting it on: it felt too direct, too literal.

I turned it over in my hands, then glanced back at Mom.

“Oh, no you don’t…” she protested.

I raised my eyebrow playfully back at her. I held the suit up to my new ribcage, making a show of matching it to the curve of my breasts, which—astonishingly—matched almost exactly to where the suit had faded. I crooked an eyebrow at her, relishing the reversal: the little kid who’d delighted in embarrassing his mother now incarnated as the woman herself, daring her to say anything.

“It’s your favorite,” I grinned, suddenly unable to resist.

With an awkward shrug, I loosened the towel, and one breast tumbled free, then the other, answering gravity’s invitation. I was completely naked in front of my own mother. 

“Peter,” she glared, “Don’t even think about it!”

But I was already thinking about it—in fact, I was already halfway into the suit, the foreign grace of my mother’s hips making the act as natural as breathing. I stepped through the leg holes, careful not to snag anything, and with a practiced snap pulled it over my thighs, up along the pelvic bones, the material popping into place with a sound like a slap. The crotch smothered and compressed, forcing me to adjust, and then I pulled the straps over my shoulders, the elastic biting into soft skin, arranging the new breasts into their assigned compartments.

It was a squeeze, but it fit, a perfect, uncanny fit, the suit’s old DNA recognizing itself. I stood up straight, faced the mirror, and saw her—my mother at the pool, hair still wet, frowning at her son as he cannonball-splashed her just to see her lose composure.

Now I was the mother, and the sight was so familiar it almost hurt. The pale blue,  the high-cut leg. I could almost smell the chlorine and sunscreen, almost feel the sting of sunburn. I turned, did a little spin, and the hips flared out, the breasts jostled, and for a half second I inhabited the summer afternoons as they’d been for so many years, but from the inside.

I did a slow twirl, and the suit rode up the way I’d seen it ride up on her a hundred times, the fabric cleaving into the valley between the hips, the back opening into a wide V that showed off the tan lines. I had the urge to pose, to toss my hair as I’d seen her do, to raise a hand in feigned modesty at the way the suit clung to every curve.

“Okay, you’ve had your fun,” she said.

Then her expression changed. She looked up at me—at herself. There was a vulnerability in her eyes I’d never seen before, the kind you only see when you catch someone off-guard. She didn’t look angry. She looked scared.

Then we both started to cry.

I let myself sag to the floor, knees splayed, swimsuit riding up, leaking tears down my cheeks.

The words tumbled out of me, but not as a statement—more as a desperate, guttural plea, dredged from somewhere below language itself.

“I’m you, Mom. I’m you,” I blurted, the syllables convulsing with every shuddering breath.

My fingers dug into my thighs, gripping so tight I thought I’d leave bruises in the new skin. I bent double, hair falling around my face in wet, wrung-out strands, and gasped, “I’m you, I’m really you, I’m really, really—” until the rest broke into a sound that wasn’t words at all.

She crouched down, still awkward in my old body, and touched my shoulder, “It’s okay, honey.”

I snorted, “No, it’s not.”

She squeezed, not hard, “I know. But it will be. Just—maybe not for a while.”