colding. Her mother did not breast feed her, did not hold her much, and remained altogether distant. Isabel recounts one of her mother’s earliest rejections, as she watches her mother perform her feminine rituals in preparation for a date: “I knew what heaven it was to hug those legs…and press my face into the dark sweet trough between her thighs, impenetrable blind, where no one could separate me from the smell of my mother. She didn’t like me to hug her legs…she pried me off impatiently” (33). Isabel was banned from the connection, soon to be replaced by a man (any man), and was forced to know her own nonexistence in her mother’s emotional life. And often it was excused by its physical repercussions: “Many times she had pushed me off her lap complaining that my sitting there would cause varicose veins” (28). Isabel’s presence was against her mother’s own youth, and femininity. In essence, Isabel was unauthorized maternal intimacy. And while Isabel wanted some kind of corporeal interaction with her mother, she did not receive it positively. She did not authorize a particular kind of intimacy either: molestation. When Isabel was an infant—vulnerable, unable to fight and protest—her mother violates her with objects. She remembers in a sort of dream sequence, “Beats me, or pinch me. Introduce my genitals which have been so many times deflowered by objects of ordinary household function—why do I scream when I see a wooden spoon? No one understands it” (65). In these sequences, her mother never really touches her anyway, for it is always detached and obscured by some object of domesticity. These occurrences are representative of her mother’s view of Isabel. She is not seen as a child, but as an unwanted object. The sexual nature of the violation suggests unwillingness to let Isabel mature naturally, forcing these objects on ...
