She’s fourteen. Hands in her lap, back straight, plate barely touched, and she was doing it the way I do it — not sulking, not making a point, just gone somewhere behind her own face while her grandmother talked. I have watched that child eat three helpings of anything in her own kitchen since she was two. I have never once seen her finish a meal at that table and I had never, until that reflection, put those two facts in the same sentence. I asked her in the car. She said it started when she was about ten and Grandma made a remark about her legs in a swimsuit, and she’d decided the simplest thing was to be finished early. She said she’d figured out I did the same thing when she was twelve, and that she’d assumed it was just what women did in that house — that it was a rule she’d get told about eventually. That’s the sentence I keep hearing at two in the morning. She’d been waiting for someone to explain it to her.
I told my husband that night and he was quiet for a long time and then said she’s never done that to me, which is true, and which is exactly how it survives. Then he asked why I’d never said anything, and I said because for nineteen years the answer to has he said anything was that he hadn’t noticed there was anything to say. He didn’t defend himself. He sat on the end of the bed with his shoes still on.
We don’t go every Sunday now. Once a month, and we leave after coffee, and the last time she started on my face my husband said Ma in a flat voice and changed the subject to her hip, and it worked, which enraged me for about a day afterward — because it turns out that’s all it ever took. My daughter eats at home. She eats a great deal, loudly, and complains about the food, and I have never in my life enjoyed anything so much.
