She turns on her heel and trots off to get more belts for the big-assed woman.
And I feel suddenly deserted. Discarded. Cast off like an ill-fitting dress. Suddenly I want to bathe in the light of Trixie’s eyes again. I want her to ask me to turn for her. I want her to fix her eyes, the eyes where everything fits, where it’s just a matter of the right accessory, the right attitude, on me. I want my mother’s eyes.
As Trixie walks off, she puts a hand on the big-assed woman’s shoulder and squeezes and says she won’t be a minute with those belts. And the woman glows, basking in Trixie’s attention. She says, “No problem at all,” her eyes moony with love as she turns to once more admire her terrible ass in the mirror.
My Mother’s Idea of Sexy
Tonight, she’s trussed me up in a one-strap midriff-baring bit of turquoise gauze she bought me just this afternoon at The Rack. Paired it with skintight low-risers and pink strappy heels from Payless that are like a shoe version of a Frederick’s of Hollywood thong.
“I don’t know about this outfit,” I tell my mother, frowning at the tentacles sprouting from my left shoulder. We’re at this seafood place on the wharf because she thinks fish is my secret. A touristy place in the city she recently moved to on the west coast. A table by the window so she can watch for her friends. My wide slash of bared stomach feels like an emergency no one is attending to, my feet like they’re doing bad porn under the table. Shoulder and hip still buzzing from where she cut the price tag loops off with a butter knife. Mother, these clothes are ridiculous, I should have said. They mock us both. I can dress myself. I’m a twenty-six-year-old woman. Instead, I say, “You think maybe it’s too much?”
My mother sits across from me under a giant net full of plastic crustaceans, watching me ignore the fact of the bread basket and the crab dip appetizer, my fingers braided over my empty side plate. She eyes me from gauzy tentacles to bare stomach. She says, “What do you mean ‘too much’? How is it too much? Trust me.”
She riffles through the bread basket absently. “Those shoes.” She shakes her head. “Shit. Show me again?”
I bring one foot out from under the table and wiggle it at her.
“They’re going to flip when they see you, Elizabeth, flllip.”
“They hurt.”
“Humor me.”
I watch her pile her slab of sourdough thickly with crab dip. Her patchy red face. Her preternaturally bright eyes. It’s in my throat to ask her if she’s checked her blood sugar today. Instead, I look out the window at the mongers throwing fish for show, the Vietnamese women rearranging flowers with delicate hands. I pour a mound of salt onto the table and begin raking it with my fork tines, my latest non-eating way of eating. “So who am I meeting tonight again?”
“Just some people from the office,” she says, dusting crumbs off the front of her dress. She moved out here to take a corporate job, much higher paying than the middle-management hospitality positions she’s held most of my life. “Dawn, Pam, Denise. Maybe one or two others.”
“Okay,” I say, giving up on the salt and screwing a cigarette into my mouth, fishing through my purse for a lighter. My mother brings a candle to my unlit tip.
“Don’t sit like that, though,” she says.
“Like what?”
“Slouched like that.” She does an impression of me, hunching her hulking shoulders forward, causing her costume jewelry to jangle. She’s wearing the red set today: rings, necklace, bracelets. All but the oversize clip-ons, which she just affixed to my lobes in the restroom because It still needs something.
I look at her from her spiked hair to the hillocks of her arms swathed in Lane Bryant lace. Mutinous words rise in my throat. I swallow them. Straighten.
? ? ?
“This is my daughter,” she announces when they arrive, gesturing toward me like I am a just-turned letter in Wheel of Fortune and she is Vanna White. “She’s just visiting. Stopping by on her way to her boyfriend’s—sorry, fiancé! You guys remember.”
“Quite the ensemble,” one of her friends offers. Five of them, not three. Their smiles thin as Communion wafers. Looking at me in a way that makes me want to snatch my mother’s shawl and drape it over my bared shoulders. Or at least wrap my arms around my exposed midriff, but she would never forgive me. Instead, I smile.
“Isn’t it?” my mother says, pleased as punch, and I hear the words before they even bloom on her lips: “Show them.”
“Up, though. Stand up.” Using her hands like she’s a preacher raising the dead, her bracelets of blown glass clacking against her wrists. “Turn so they can see the back?”
I turn with my hands out to my sides, staggering slightly. The turquoise shoulder tentacles swell and float around me. I turn until I hear the word beautiful erupt from her friend Dawn like a belch.