“Isn’t she?” says my mother.
Isn’t she is my cue. I fall back into my chair, the tentacles billowing then settling, the women and I exchanging embarrassed smiles. I take a long sip of Diet Coke, my mother in my eye corner, her face twisted by pride, her features all tied in little bows of glee.
“Show them your bicep,” she says.
“Mom. No.” Like I’m above such a request, but actually the first thing I did when I got off the plane was show my mother my biceps.
Look!
I see, I see!
“Works out all the time now,” my mother continues. “Had to get a trial membership at the gym across the street just so she’d agree to visit me.”
“Mom. That isn’t tr—”
“Walks too. Two, three times a day. All along the lake,” she says, marching her index and middle finger across the air like they’re my legs. “Fast. I’ve gone with her a couple of times but I can’t keep up.”
“You can keep up,” I say, even as I recall marching forward, trying to be oblivious to my mother breathless behind me, my eyes fixed straight ahead, until I felt guilty and turned back. She was standing several yards away, her broad back heaving. Pretending to examine shells on the beach.
“It’s those legs,” she says, looking down at my new spiked heels. “Those legs, I can’t compete.”
I pretend to look out the window but it’s too dark now to see anything but my own slumped, shoulder-tentacled silhouette, my mother’s wild gesticulations, the indulgent nods of her acquaintances. I excuse myself to go to the restroom, aware of all their eyes on me as I teeter away from the table.
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“You were great, just great,” my mother says as we stroll through the market, arm in arm, later. She walks me along the stalls like she’s leading me down the aisle, loving how I’m immune to the plenty. How I wrinkle my nose, shake my head at everything but a Fuji and some fish for later, while she helps herself to fistfuls of whatever samples are there for the taking. We go to the monger’s, where I buy my four ounces of whatever’s fresh. She waits, watching me, and I feel the blaze of her eyes on my profile.
“When you went to the bathroom? They couldn’t stop talking about how beautiful you were. Couldn’t stop.”
“That’s nice.”
“Not just nice,” my mother says, steering me toward the flower stalls, where she treats me to a bouquet of stargazers. For my daughter, she tells the woman behind the tin pails brimming with blossoms. I smile. Me, I’m the daughter, yes. We watch her gather the stems while my mother rubs my exposed husk of shoulder like it’s a genie lamp.
? ? ?
“So tomorrow night? You’ll meet me at my work. Then we’ll go to the mussel place.”
She’s turned toward me to see how I’m taking this, but I keep staring straight ahead at the windshield. We’re in the car going home and the highway wind is whipping my hair into my eyes, making them tear. I’m trying to light a cigarette but keep lighting my split ends instead. “Careful,” my mother says. She rented a red Sebring convertible especially for my visit. “I want the wind in my hair,” she explained, tugging her black pomaded spikes, immovable even in a gale.
“Why can’t I just meet you at the mussel place?” I ask her now.
She closes her eyes, sighs like I’ve just made her very tired. “Just meet me at my work first. Okay? Indulge me. Can you just do that?”
? ? ?
A bandage dress the color of Pepto-Bismol. She must have laid it out for me on her bed before she left for work in the morning. I stare at it from the doorframe in the French cuts she bought me the other day at Target, a cigarette turning to ash between my lips, my morning Fuji in my fist. All afternoon, I dare Mick Jagger, her obese Abyssinian, to walk all over the dress, but he doesn’t, even when I pick him up and place him on top of it. She took photos of me in it the other day with her cheap yellow disposable. Some with me leaning against her stove surrounded on all sides by her chef-themed kitchen accessories. Some on her balcony surrounded by her pots of dying purple flowers, the lake blazing behind me. In all of them, I look like the smug but uncertain solution to a stomach problem. I see she’s placed a pair of discounted strappy slingbacks the color of iridescent vomit on the floor close by.
“Jesus,” my mother says, shaking her head as, later that afternoon, I lurch toward her in the vomit heels. In her cubicle, she takes a lighter to the plastic price tag loop because I forgot to take care of this detail at home (I always forget these details why, exactly? her eyes ask me). Makes me switch lips at the last minute from Rebel to Craving. “Better,” she says, “But blot. Little more? Yes.”
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