t h e   d a y   i   s t o p p e d   b e i n g   a d o r a b l e

t e r r i   c a r r i o n

I stuff my cheeks with soft, buttered Cuban bread, sip Tang and ask my mother about my dimples. I’m seven and curious, but mainly fed up with strange gringas pinching my face and shrieking, "Oh, how adorable!" Particularly Mrs. Hobbs, who boards the bus at Seville Street on the way to St. Mathias for mass, reeking of Jean Nate body splash and dressed in too much powder blue.

My mother clears the table and tells me my dimples are marks left by the steel forceps, giant tweezers, the doctor used to yank me out of the womb.

Later that morning, when the bus reaches Seville Street, I sit up tall in my seat and smile. Mrs. Hobbs wobbles down the aisle, blue pleated skirt diffusing the morning light, her cold arthritic hands slowly reach out for me, fingers uncurling, her face bloated with delight. I stand up and announce that my "adorable" dimples are dents from delivery, scars of birth, "I was plucked out of the womb like a splinter."

Mrs. Hobbs gasps, looks at my mother who sits beside me, clutching her purse, not understanding a word of this English. She backs away from us, zigzags and bumps into arm rests then drops into a seat near the front of the bus and never says another word to us. Ever.

Years later, in Teen Magazine, I read that dimples are fatty deposits, something like "cellulite of the face."

[]

© copyright 2004, terri carrion, all rights reserved