Private Yoga Instructor Santa Monica & Los Angeles Westside private yoga classes in-home or on-location Jennifer Pastiloff Contact Jennifer (310-926-0172) Yoga at home - comfort and convenience! |
The Collected Works of Jennifer Pastiloff ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Bubby We swung from the great white flab hanging from her arms. And while she drove, sometimes lapsing into Yiddish, we played with it, like language, palpable growing in our anxious hands. Loving every minute of it, this curious feel of age, of skin that had been through more winters than summers. Letting it slip like liquid through cracks between our fingers. Wishing we would get old just by sitting in that car, by playing with her deteriorated years. Years which swung, somehow transformed into flab on the backs of her arms. Maybe we’d even become her, skip fifty years of our lives, and change into an old woman, in a strange country, with two grandchildren, both leaning over the backseat of her car just to touch her. Maybe we’d change our shape, our bodies, maybe our cheeks would sink in, falling away from bone, as her own hard life had changed into something soft and malleable. Back then, we’d never believe it possible, that there would ever come a day, when we’d cringe, cock our heads to one side, take a step back, and ask Really? You think so? when someone said we resembled her. We’d recall: short and fair skinned, great pockets of flesh dangling from arms, loose skin swinging from side to side in floral polyester dresses, blue veins so prominent we thought her arms were maps. When she came to this country, all she had to do was hold out her arms, and they’d fly her where she needed to go. We never guessed: that her map would tell us things. Like, our father had died in the night. He died before he reached the hospital. We never knew we could have read the swollen blue veins as anything other than what they were: strange little lines we could trace all over her. We traced those lines all over her flesh, marking off all the countries on her body. Her breasts, long and saggy, were islands, beginning at her shoulders, stopping at her navel: they were the center of her. The blue circles around, and on the back of her knees were Rumania, Russia, and Northeast Philadelphia. She was a globe, her homes she carried with her always. Her marks were our marks. This prophet gave herself to us. Some sort of angel, descended down from Rumania. I can almost hear her, laughing, as we squeezed her fatty maps of flesh with our own bony arms. Girls, she’d say, you don’t want big fat arms like me. You don’t want to get old. j.pastiloff |
 |
| |
 |