As I lowered myself into the pool, I couldn't help but wonder what I really wanted out of all of this. The question was inescapable—why did I like this? Why, out of all the things the universe could have thrown at me, was I not only enduring but enjoying the sensation of being her - inhabiting my own mother’s body?
Maybe everything that had happened—this sudden, seamless merging of self and mother—was the answer to a need so deep I had never given it a thought.
Beneath the usual thicket of my teenage rebellion and posturing, beneath all the jokes and occasional power struggles, I'd always wanted to know her, to have her know me.
What I wanted—what I had always wanted, since I was a child—was to be understood. To have her know me, not as an enigma or an appendage, but as a person with a mind and body and soul all my own.
I had never figured out how to ask for that. We were not a family of easy words or casual touch. I suspected she had her demons, though I wouldn’t have dared to say so aloud.
And yet, here I was, suspended in the chlorinated blue of the pool, her muscles working in my limbs, her skin tingling in the sunlight, breathing in the same air she’d breathed for decades. Now, in her shape, I could access all of that comfort from the inside out.
There’s a strange intimacy to it, a kind of forbidden knowledge. When I flexed her shoulder, it pulled at the same old ache she used to complain about after a long day. When I cupped the bottom curve of her—my—breast, I felt the gentle heaviness she must have learned to navigate after puberty, the way it tugged a little at the chest. Even the little freckle on the inside of the left knee, the one I remembered from baths as a kid, now belonged to me.
But maybe there was something more than just wanting to be understood. Maybe the real root of it was much stranger than that: to be not merely known, but collapsed into her, dissolved and reconstituted in her image. To eat her up from the inside out.
That was the true nature of my secret appetite, I realized: not to dominate or even to imitate, but to become. To wrap her tight around my bones and nerves, until her gestures and postures and way of standing in the world were simply mine, and I, in turn, was simply hers. There would be no need for admiration or approval; the need would be subsumed by the fact of our mutual existence in one body.
But there was the inescapable sense that it was all borrowed time. My real body—boyish, angular, stubborn—was waiting for me on the other side of this.
Mom—my old body—was still in the kitchen, peering through the patio glass. I could see her in profile, jaw set with that familiar, boyish stubbornness. It was jarring: my face, slightly sunburned, eyes sharp, watching me watch her.
I smiled back at her.
I did a lazy lap, then tucked against the lip of the pool, arms out, chin resting on the slick tile. A few feet away, Dad waded in, his hair slicked back and his eyes a little red from the chlorine.
“Hey, you eat lunch?” Dad asked, floating closer, eyes flicking to the suit, then away with a careful casualness that spoke volumes, “Want me to grill some dogs?”
“Sure, I’ll get plates,” I said, trying to keep my voice level and warm, the script of a perfect summer wife.
I hauled myself out, felt the shock of air on wet skin, the suit’s spandex clamping my breasts and hips as I padded across the deck.
I caught my reflection in the glass door, hair wet and wild, the suit shockingly vivid against my skin. I looked, simply and completely, like her. The part of me that was still Peter shivered at the sight, but the part that had become Mary ran a hand over her thick, sun-warmed hair and smiled with genuine pleasure.
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