While a week’s worth of laundry spins inside my mother’s washing machine, we swipe through potential matches on that dating app, the one for post-menopausal women seeking love or something like it, a close mimic.
Her desires are clear enough. Retired male, preferably her height or slightly taller, bird boned and big brained, her exact words. The effete type of intellectual she always adored in her twenties but was too afraid to approach.
I want a person your father would fear, she told me, and I wracked my brain for a way to convey that in under 800 characters. ISO gentle educator, must know his way around a thesaurus. But what part of that would frighten my father? He is only unsettled by fiscal harm and disease, excruciating medical procedures as well, not other men who may or may not be smarter than he is, and I remind her of this. That’s what he wants you to think, she says. I let it be. What do I really know of his fears? Not enough. She has been exposed to another side of him, a side I’ve been barred from seeing, by virtue of his selective parenting. He is just my father, nothing more and nothing less.
Mother asks me to review her bio. I don’t want to do this, it feels rather invasive, more invasive than examining the most private aspects of her physical body, but she has asked so apprehensively I have no choice but to oblige. It is a difficult thing to witness one’s mother at her most unadulterated. Overly amenable, nonchalant, but in a fraudulent way. The bio mentions me and there’s a photograph of the two of us somewhere in the carousel of images presenting mother to the dating world. Our bodies are glued together in the photograph, the right side of her head jammed next to the left side of mine, adoration dilating her pupils.
You can’t put your child in here.
Is it frowned upon?
Very much so, I think.
I don’t know if this is true, if the sexagenarians seeking sentimental-ish sex would balk at swiping right for this unabashed display: mother and proudly so. She lets me erase all mention of maternal obligation. It’s for the best, I say as encouragingly as I can, and she nods, defers to my expertise, what little of it I possess.
I trim the fat with an unforgiving hand, the plain-talk and acquiescent language (willing to relocate for the right fit, great at cooking and darning and crocheting, a whiz with the hoover). You’re not applying for a housekeeping gig, mother. She doesn’t like this, my fat trimming. Those are the best parts of me, she says, oh so meekly, and I think I might cry or smack her on the neck, if I can get away with it. I replace that deference with pared down descriptions of her last few holidays. The trip to Togo with her cousins, another in Tanzania, and Madagascar. She offers up photographs from each vacation, the best ones, and I load them into the app’s image gallery. Sun splattered beaches, lethargic horses draped in garish ribbons, bells tinkling around their thick necks, tanned soft drink hawkers, crystalline sheaths of ocean water in blurry motion, seashells, coconut shells, seashells inside coconuts scraped clean of white meat, a few shots of mother in a flattering bathing suit, an orange one-piece I purchased for her fifty-ninth last year. She has a matching flower tucked behind her ear, and her face glistens with moisture, sea spray or sweat.
Not that one, and her finger jabs at the phone screen, identifying the photo she takes offense to, the unposed, bathing suit snapshot, mother splayed out on a damp beach towel, her smile careless.
Your body looks phenomenal, I say, and it truly does. Elongated, soft lines, from neck to ankle, a casual sensuality that cannot be repressed, and even I can see it, daughter or not.
Phenomenally decrepit.
Mechie onu. Don’t speak about my mother’s body that way. I tickle her belly to eliminate the crease of worry looming above her brows, and it changes to a line of mirth.
Your eyes need polishing, mum. Her eyes are in dire need of polishing, yes, but will she do the proper thing? She seems so small beside me, cross-legged on the laundry-room’s heated tiles, our backs supported by the appliance tower that is the washer/dryer stack. I must mother her, like she has mothered me. I must pluck out her eyes and replace those failing organs with newer, kinder ones.
Ezuola. Shall we swipe then?
Yes, let’s.
It is a grim landscape on this app for seniors seeking affection. But this is the nature of the hunt, isn’t it? First, one wades through brackish waters—openly hostile men appalled at their lot in life, truncated bios reeking of middle/late-life angst. We wade, mother and I, through images of former glory, the taut pectorals and abdominals, bachelors well past the cusp of youth. More wading and what do we see? Animal viscera dangling out of every other pictured hand, buffoon after buffoon squashed pompously into vehicles I know guzzle petrol like no tomorrow. One man becomes another becomes another, until it is a stream of wrinkles and dyed hair.
They do not appeal to my mother, this crop of aggro-senior, too familiar for comfort. My father’s visage is theirs. His ways are theirs, spite dressed up as forthrightness. Don’t swipe if you can’t handle a satirist, no time for babying the humorless, one retiree says, and I swear he is my father, this man oozing malice from pores doctored away with smoothing tools. Every one of them, built from the same chauvinistic material. In fact, I worry that we will encounter him here too, the original, my actual father.
Soon we find a rhythm, and mother starts to enjoy our project, our afternoon of cyber matchmaking. Left, right, left, left, left. Right. It is a test of patience, swiping. High risk, middling reward. Our fingers decide before our brains sometimes. She squeals whenever this happens, the accidental acceptances without thorough vetting. I watch my mother molt her responsible skin, exposing girlishness, ridiculous joy, so much of it!
See! Something is happening!
Yes, she’s right. A match announces itself with lackluster fanfare. Iconography bubbles around the chosen one’s face, balloons, asymmetrical hearts, confetti, above his head, and then nothing, just a chat box, empty, waiting for conversation. We click on the circle of his profile, for a refresher on who it is we’ve let past the velvet rope. Neither of us remember choosing this person. K, 61, partly retired, museum aficionado, amateur Latin dancer, weekend cyclist, year-round epicure. A Libra. He doesn’t include his height in the bio, he doesn’t need to. K seems tall, arboreal, and there are animals in many of his selection of photographs, but they breathe. Rabbits, ferrets, a reptile with luminescent scales, more. K loves all god’s creatures; he prefers them alive, their guts undamaged, their fragile necks unsnapped.
He’s a looker, my mother says.
I agree with her. He has the mien she finds herself drawn to. No rippling muscles spilling out of steamed satin. No dead fish cradled reverently in large hands. Not one convertible to be found on any of the images in his carousel. Everything about him, at least superficially, is attractive. She tells me this is the sort of man she sees herself accompanying to grocery stores, street side restaurants, even to his place of worship, should that kind of spiritual meditation appeal to him.
Do you think he has children?
Does it matter? I ask.
She believes it does, or it will, in the long run. Without the anchor of a child, how will he understand the gaps in her social resume, the many ways she has fallen out of step with her adult needs (she whispers the word adult, squashing every syllable into her chest). Without the anchor of parenthood, his understanding might be limited. Severely. She will appear brittle, unsophisticated to him, this unknown man with the dimensions of Michelangelo’s David, this Latin-dancing, museum lover.
Only a parent would understand, she says.
I have no children and I understand.
Ah, it’s not the same. You must understand. We are related.
But this isn’t true at all. I have a father, and he is a parent, in a largely biological sense. He has sired a child. More than one, we suspect. At least three, excluding me. His social resume boasts of liberty, a determined uncoupling from the shackles of involved parenthood. Does he understand? Can he understand? I ask mother this, rubbing her knee. She shrugs.
He is different too.
If you say so. K awaits, mother. How shall we proceed?
We scroll through K’s profile again, poring over the bio, zooming into every provided photograph, searching for telltale signs of possible offspring, grandchildren. We find nothing. Perhaps, on the other side of this digital portal, there is a son or a daughter, my age or older, trimming the fat, engineering a desirable persona for their father, selecting the shiniest photographs, eliminating his perceived blemishes.
Say hello to him, she mumbles finally, hiding her face in her hands. They smell like detergent, like fabric softeners and dryer sheets. This is my mother’s smell, one of the many. Sometimes, my mother carries a specific umami odor from ground crayfish in these same hands, the perfume of freshly cut grass on lawn mowing days, antiseptic and cotton wool. If all goes well, she will leave an imprint of this clean scent, the others too, in K’s bed. One day maybe. For now, we settle on two unassuming letters. Hi. And look! Faint dots of grey, three of them flashing under our short message. K is typing.