Dinner -Part I-
Chapter I: Growing up
Previous chapters: (Prologue), (Youth and Aesthetics), (Dolores), (Beneath the Silk), (Shazia)
The tables gleamed with a strange, sacred precision. Forks and knives rested in quiet obedience, as if waiting for a ritual to begin.
Father sat at the head, composed, contained. His black suit framed him like an unbroken line. His hair was trimmed close, his mustache drawn across his face with care. He seemed the image of order, a man built from habit and self-control. Yet beneath that face lived a softness, a gentle surrender he tried to conceal. He was a wall that could fold when pressed by those who knew the hidden places where rules bend.
Mother was different. She did not bend; she defined the room. Her hair fell over her shoulders in golden silence, her eyes the color of honey that would not let itself be read. She dressed as if authority could be worn; short skirt, black stockings, leather vest over a white blouse, tall boots that carried her as though the ground adjusted to her pace. In her hand, she held a rod, not for support but for command. It was her mark of power, a sentence that needed no voice. One shift of her weight, one brief glance, and everyone at the table straightened, as if answering to a crown unseen.
I watched her and felt two currents moving through me; thirst and fear. The thirst to possess that same deliberate power, to move through the world with such quiet dominion; the fear of what I would have to surrender to stand in her place.
Father might have been a presence, but she was everything that framed him - the figure, the stage, and the author of the play. Her silence directed the room as surely as her voice. And somewhere within me, though I could not yet give it words, I longed to one day inherit that authority, to feel the world bend in recognition of my will.
I sat apart (as always), a small doll wrapped in red satin and white lace, confined within my own fragile beauty. On my feet, red shoes gleamed, their gilded golden edges catching the light like a secret. They looked as though they had slipped out of a fairy tale, but without the curse that might have made them real. That evening, the ritual demanded fish. Always the same, always cold as the silence that accompanied mother’s gaze across the table. Fish that I despised nearly as intensely as I adored my shoes.
But then, an unexpected fracture in the atmosphere. A plate was placed before me. Pizza. God, pizza!
I felt my gaze melt into a stunned smile. First, I searched for an explanation in my mother’s eyes, then my father’s, but they simply let a quiet smile pass across their faces, as if they knew something I had yet to understand.
The girl who brought the pizza wore black, dropped garters. As if they had revealed themselves by accident, yet as if she had chosen them for me. The warmth from the box in her hands collided with the cold, dark hem of silk.
“Mom… are there guests again tonight? But… isn’t it late for me to go to grandmother’s?”
“No, darling,” she said, her voice soft like velvet brushing over my skin, as she reached for the plate, understanding the question I hadn’t fully spoken. “Tonight, it is worn in your honor.”
I stopped. My eyes traced the curve of her hands, the weight of her voice, the unspoken rhythm that I had yet to name.
“In my honor?”
Her smile unfurled slowly, deliberately, like a secret offering.
“Yesterday, you were brave. You saw what should not have been seen… and you did not recoil. You touched the filth and chose to reveal it. That is how I want you; with hands fearless, unafraid to plunge into the darkness surrounding you. To press it, feel it, release it. And to stand unwavering behind the fire that burns within you.”
Her words settled on me, sliding along the length of my spine, warming, lingering. Amid the aroma of baked bread and the faint scent of soap clinging to her fingers, I understood: the garters were not mere decoration, but an invitation to a story I had yet to learn how to read.
For a brief moment, I felt pride swell within me. My mother, strict as the silk edge that refuses to fray, allowed herself a rare tenderness that evening. If all of this had been for me, it meant only one thing: she was satisfied with the woman I was becoming.
“So… tonight I may eat pizza with my hands?”
I asked, the question balancing delicately between plea and provocation, just as I once asked about wearing the garter.
“Let’s not get carried away, Laura,” she replied, a smile soft, almost conspiratorial.
I hated cutting the pizza! The knife, the slices… such ceremonious violence for something that begged only to be touched, to be felt directly! At school, I ate it differently, clandestine and wild with friends, fingers sticky with dough and ketchup. She never saw me like that; if she had, the rigid order of her world might have crumbled, or perhaps she would have recognized, in that small defiance, the freedom she once silently let me taste when I pressed silk against my skin.
“Where is Shazia?” she asked the girl who had brought us our food. The girl hesitated, her gaze flicking from me to my mother, as if requesting permission to speak.
“She’s ironing your clothes, Mistress,” came the careful reply.
“Ah. Bring her here. Enough of this ironing,” my mother said, her voice calm but absolute. The girl paused, uncertain, teetering on the brink of compliance and hesitation.
“Should I remove her’s ‘‘instruments’’ ?”
My mother’s expression sharpened, patience thinning like fragile glass.
“Did I tell you to ask her to remove the instruments?!” Her voice cut like a blade. Precise, commanding, a note of fire beneath the civility.
“No, Mistress,” the girl whispered.
“And then?! Schnell!”