FLASH FICTION

My name is Elizabeth Wilhelmina George, but everybody calls me Bunny. I was born on October 31, 1969, to Herman and Maude George, a well-groomed couple who already had three nearly grown sons and were looking forward to being empty nesters. The youngest of their sons was nineteen when my Father brought me home from the hospital. Mother wasn’t with us. She went straight from the delivery room to San Marcos, California, where the staff at a luxury spa called the Golden Door did their very best to help her reverse what childbirth had done to her body.

She remained dedicated to that goal for a good many years, an enthusiastic penitent on a grueling pilgrimage that involved a lot of grapefruit and boiled cabbage and chocolate-flavored laxative. Oh, she tried everything, even an at-home residency with a slimming expert from New Jersey named Rick. The President of her bridge club recommended him. We later found out that Rick’s real name was Milorad and that he had once been an umbrella maker somewhere along the Dalmatian Coast. But, Rick, as we knew him then, had Mother up at the crack of dawn every morning doing yoga out by the hydrangeas or swimming laps in the pool that she had built for just that purpose: one lane, one swimmer, she used to say. Anyway, Rick lived with us for almost a year. And by that time he had mother on a strict all-liquid, jaw-wired-shut diet. My father sent Rick back to New Jersey when Mother jokingly suggested that we all get our jaws wired shut. Nothing she suggested was ever really a joke.

Mother was… beautiful. Everyone thought so. Even she thought so. But, she was forty-one when she had me, which at the time wasn’t as common as it is today. She never really forgave her OBGYN for writing the term “elderly multigravida” in her chart, and she never really “got back” to the body she remembered. It became necessary for all of us to spend a little quiet time each day paying homage to what once was, while also accepting full responsibility for the role we played in destroying such a sweet and treasured gift.

The only person who gave Mother the courage to carry on was Lydia, a Parsons dropout who custom-made all of Mother’s clothes and who hand-fitted each garment with an embroidered label that read, “petite.”

Lydia also hosted a short-lived, public-access television show called Sew It Goes. Mother was a frequent guest. She told the audience on multiple occasions that Lydia had practically saved her life.

On the sad sad, final episode of Sew It Goes, Lydia assembled a panel of her best clients. They sat in a row of metal folding chairs under a homecoming-style banner that read, “Sew It Goes, Sew It Went.” Each of the guests were given a bit of copy Lydia had prepared, little blurbs plugging her services, alterations and fittings and customer whatevers. When it was Mother’s turn, Lydia said, “Maude, darling, do you have any final thought you’d like to share with our audience before we sign off one last time?”

Mother was supposed to say something about hiring Lydia to make cocktail dresses, but instead she looked directly into the camera and said, “If I could just share one piece of advice with anybody out there who would listen it would be to never, ever have children.”