My aunts are the frequent topic of discourse when I visit my mother in her bedroom, where she sits in her big chair, her feet in a basin of water, cloudy with salts and potions. The feet are lumpy, whorled, fish white, and riveting—trolls’ feet, the toenails thick and yellow, mottled with blue. A fungus, she says. Blue and red graphs of her suffering run up and down the suety legs, which her hiked-up dressing gown exposes all the way to the thighs.
Deborah Eisenberg [cf. “Homage to Paul Cezanne”]
