Cease to Blush

by Billie Livingston

  My eyes pricked across the tossed white salad on her head, a carefully constructed tussle of pomade-stiffened eggshell hair, set off by the shriek of red across her wide mouth. The consummate lipstick lesbian. I set down my coffee cup and shoved a forkful of lasagna into my mouth to stave off speaking.

  When my mother first submerged herself in the women’s studies world, it seemed most of the women who came around the house eschewed makeup and bras, their breasts jiggling freely under loose tops. She had a hard time with it at first, it seemed to me. Like most women who’d grown up in the fifties, she was raised with a sense of propriety and vanity—you didn’t go out into the world without your face on. When she started leaving our house with no makeup, it didn’t strike me that she held her head quite as high.

  I recall a couple women she had over for drinks one afternoon in the backyard. I was about eight. Sally had come back to town and she was over to see our new place. She and my mother were just reconnecting, and here my mother had made these new friends. It was all a little stiff. The four of them sat in lawn chairs, my mother in a daisy-covered sundress sipping white wine rather chastely in comparison to the straight-from-the-bottle beer-gulpers around her. Sally had on one of her ankle-length Indian cotton skirts. The other two, with their Billie Jean King mullets, wore Bermuda shorts and tank tops. Bunching her skirt up between her thighs, Sally hauled an ankle up across her knee and dusted a hand over the pale down that covered them. As a redhead she never had much body hair to speak of and as an all-natural hippie chick, she couldn’t be bothered shaving anything. I lay on the grass, off to the side, eating a Popsicle, eyes closed, thinking about whether or not I was glad that Sally was back in the picture. I definitely didn’t like these new ones with the hockey hair. I didn’t like their construction-worker hands and mocking laughter or that my mother’s speech became clunky around them, stumbling and fidgety. Suddenly, one of them bent forward and grabbed hold of my mother’s foot.

  “Oh ladies—” The foot-grabber feigned shock. “Look at this: silky-smooth plastic leg. You’re like a little rubber dolly, Josie.”

  My mother pulled back with a nervous laugh. She didn’t much care for strangers touching her. The more anxious she looked, the more those spiky broads har-harred. The second one actually got out of her chair and made a show of rushing to get a feel. My mother pulled her knees up to her chest under the tent of her skirt.

  “That’s enough.” Sally’s voice was calm but with the kind of tone a kid wasn’t about to argue with. That teachery sort of voice she had started to use on me just before she left town. “You’re like a couple of damn longshoremen. Hands off.”

  The women reacted about the same way I had in the past: backing off with a swagger, grinning to prove they’d moved of their own volition not because they’d been told to. “Just tryin’ to let her know it’s okay to be a real woman, that’s all,” the foot grabber said.

  I think I would’ve shaved it all, after that, starting with my toes and ending with my bald head, to get even with them. But my mother let her leg hair grow in starting the next day. In the mornings at breakfast, she would touch her calves and the sight of all that coarse dark hair made her grimace but she refused to shave.

  As the weeks went by, her leg hair seemed to grow lighter somehow. Or I didn’t notice it as much. Then one night before dinner, her door stood slightly ajar and I came into her room. She jumped a little then smiled nervously, sitting there on her bed with a layer of white cream over both legs from the knees down. “I’ll be down in a minute, sweets.” She winced and waved her hands around the creamed shins as though they stung. I walked closer and picked up the package lying beside her. Extra-strength bleach for problem hair. She plucked the box from my hand. “I’ll be down in a minute, okay,” she repeated. It was a tone I didn’t recognize.

  Suddenly there was Sally, pink-cheeked and breathless from the night air. “I picked up some dessert,” she announced, holding up a bag, then frowning at my mother’s legs, which had dropped to the floor as though she were about to bolt.

  A bemused look crept over Sally’s face. “What is that? Nair? Have you given in to your feminine urges and Naired your legs?” she giggled.

  “N–o,” my mother said, with two-syllabled agitation.

  “Extra-strength bleach for problem hairs,” I said.

  Sally cocked her head.

  “Well—” my mother tried to explain, grabbing the box and the directions, the little plastic spatula she’d used to mix and smear. “They didn’t match. That’s all. The hair on my thighs is light but the shins were so … I just—”

  A howling cackle burst from Sally. “You’re bleaching your leg fur?”

  “Fuck!” my mother spat.

  Sally and I looked at each other, with the old amused conspiratorial bond we used to have back when she was the new neighbour, before she and my mother became friends. Mum stood up and yanked the towel she’d been sitting on off the bed. “I’m just a slave and a pawn and I have no will of my—”

  “Oh, don’t get all wigged out—what’s the big deal? Just because a couple of bull—” Sally flashed a look to me. “Hey kiddo, why don’t you take this dessert downstairs and put it on a plate.” She pushed the bag to me.

  “I don’t—”

  “Go downstairs, okay?” The tone. My mother sat on her bed again looking forlorn. I snatched the bag out of Sally’s hand and she closed the door behind me.

  I hadn’t thought of that in years. My mother was probably thirty-three, thirty-four. About the age I am now.

  “Vivian,” Samantha Barnes was saying, “I don’t think we’ve ever formally met: I’m Sam. Sam Barnes. I’d like to offer you my condolences. We all loved Josie. She was really a terrific woman … just so smart and generous and funny and, of course, beautiful. I can see a lot of her in you.” She smiled and paused, took the green arm of her eyeglasses and pulled them closer to her face. “I wanted to give you my card as well.” She planted one in my palm. “If there’s anything I could possibly assist with, if you need help getting things organized or even selling the house—I’m not sure what you plan to do but I have some close friends in real estate who would be pleased to advise you. You and Sally will be sorting that out yourselves soon enough, I’m sure, but I just want to make sure you know you’ve got friends and support around you. It can be terribly traumatic losing one’s mother. Such a core relationship, it can feel as though your whole world is coming down.”

  Across the room I could see Len’s head bobbing as he smiled and chatted—being generally liked. He struck me as heinously selfish at the moment. I glanced back at Sam Barnes. Her girlfriend joined us. They looked so all-fired-up downtown, the two of them.

  “Hi, I’m Glynis,” the girlfriend said. She stuck out her hand. That hair of hers must’ve cost a mint, precision-cut edges, gleaming 1920s perfection. “I only met your mother a few times but she made such an impression on me—so strong and smart and really lovely.”

  “Thank you.” What is a person supposed to say to that, to any of this? There was a long silence. “I really like your hair.” Shallow. I shifted, wanting to lose myself down a crack in the floor. Josie’s trashy, insubstantial offspring strikes again.

  “Oh thank you,” Glynis said with one of those self-help-section smiles. I tucked my own hair behind an ear, my fingers catching in tangles. Catching a glimpse of myself in a nearby mirror I winced: like something washed up on the beach, my hair hanging in long chunky snarls, a skunk stripe of dark down the brassy crown of my head. A crack-addict mermaid.

  “That’s neat, that you wore red today,” Glynis said. “I remember when these guys—” she waved toward Samantha “—were organizing an event for the department and Josie was really pushing for red in the decor. It’s a victory colour, she said …” She swallowed and, pleasantly enough, I thought, appeared momentarily unsure of herself. “So,” she brightened, “Sam told me you’re a journalist?”

  “No, no,” Sam patted her arm. �
��Josie said once that Vivian has a sharp, curious mind and that she might’ve made a good journalist. Vivian’s in the entertainment business. Actually, Vivian, I’ve been meaning to talk to you: I’m in the middle of a project and I’ve been conducting a lot of interviews lately with women who—”

  Jesus Christ. “I’m not a stripper.”

  “Oh.” Sam looked slightly nonplussed.

  “I just played one on TV a couple times. I’m an actor.”

  “Oh.”

  Now she had a face on as though she was insulted that I was insulted. That divinely middle-class expression of haughty indignance that social workers and feminist anthropologist types get on them when someone questions whether Mary Magdalene was really a prostitute. The one that precedes, “Of course she was a prostitute. There’s no shame in that. What other occupational choices did a woman in her position have?” As if busloads of them were about to head to the downtown east side and whore for solidarity.

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with strippers,” I shrugged. “I’m just not one. I modelled for a few years. Arguably, the same thing.” I caught the gaze of two of those effete tweedy men smiling sheepishly in my direction. A fat agitated sigh escaped me.

  Ol’ Sam Barnes misses nothing. She leaned into my shoulder. “Hey, they can’t help themselves. Men loved your mother too. No matter how she tried to hide her light under a bushel.”

  “Will you excuse me? It was nice meeting you,” I said and headed for the front hall.

  I stopped as the young man from the funeral, the one who had handed me the shovel, touched my sleeve. “Were you, I mean, are you Josie’s daughter?”

  I nodded, my chest caving in on itself.

  “You look like her, the same mouth.” I looked at his mouth as it explained that he had been a student of my mother’s. “There were only a couple of guys in the class I had with her but we were totally knocked out by what she had to say. Like, about women in literature, the way they can be portrayed when someone appropriates—”

  “Vivian, hello.” Another hand on my shoulder. A woman I didn’t recognize, someone drapey and purple, likely one of Sally’s. “I don’t know if you recall, I’m—” Ellen, I think she said. Eva? I couldn’t hear anything anymore. There were probably only forty people in the house but it felt like throngs, like chomping needy maws, pecking birds.

  “Excuse me.” I rushed up the stairs into the quiet.

  I pressed my back against the wall outside my mother’s bedroom and realized the paper plate was still in my hand. The door beside me was closed. I inched closer, reached over and set the flat of my palm against it. Feeling for a pulse.

  I could hear the murmur through the floor, under my feet. All those people.

  I turned the doorknob and let myself in.

  The drapes were drawn. Light from the hallway filtered in, illuminating her king-size bed: a rumple of sheets and blankets in the dusky yellow. Their bed, I guess I should say, though Sally had been sleeping in the guest room the last couple weeks. I had the impression they’d argued about it. Sally wanted to be there if my mother had needed anything, water, the bathroom, anything. But my mother wanted stillness. Toward the end, the grinding thump of her own heartbeat was getting too much to bear. She asked Sally to keep visitors away. It was too much work being grateful for their presence. Keep them all away.

  Except you, my mother said, the last time I saw her.

  I pulled the drapes and leaned my forehead against the cool glass.

  The knowledge of what was in her felt like having bugs inside me. Hopping and biting and stinging. Flapping. A murder of crows, I thought. It seemed to me that a dying person would sense the black flapping of another soul, that internal squawking and shredding of loose debris.

  Nine days ago I sat in this room in that chair by her bed. The jostle of someone actually sitting on the mattress would have been too much. Everything hurt. An intravenous bag hung near her, morphine dripping steadily down the line into the back of her hand. The eyes that had once glittered blue were dark pits. Before she’d been diagnosed, I’d noticed that her near-iridescent skin had dimmed, that her eyes didn’t have their usual frightening purity. But I’d chalked it up to age, maybe a little depression, maybe the wear of the philosophical differences she had with the new grrl power regime coming into her department.

  By the time they named it cancer, its teeth were into every part of her—her liver, her lymph glands and ovaries. A course of treatment wasn’t even discussed. They sent her home with painkillers; it would be a matter of weeks.

  I have read that people—women—often come to some understanding with their mothers, in their thirties. Things always take me longer: I had anticipated this scorpion dance of ours might fade away in my forties. But she hadn’t given me the luxury of time. I was furious with her for it. I was always furious with her but this was the capper.

  She had never wanted me to find things out for myself—she was always pushing and prodding me to become some kind of starkly sensible brain-on-legs. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. When I graduated high school and started modelling, she patiently enunciated, “You’re a smart young woman. Why waste something so precious prancing around for the camera, looking like a drag queen.” My clever comeback: “Well, there’s sposed to be a Playboy scout coming to town. Then I could wear less and make more.” I tapped my temple. “Always thinking, see.”

  “Don’t be an idiot—that’s what you’d like to be?—one of Hefner’s heifers? Hugh Hefner,” she snorted. “Inventor of brothels where the whores are observed but not fucked.”

  “Which feminist text did we extract that from, Mother? Dworkin? Steinem?”

  She grabbed dramatically at the air between us. “Vivian. You have a terrific lateral mind—the kind that creates, that invents. Why not use it? Why not get behind the camera at least? Why be the model when you could be the photographer? Why parrot the words when you could write the text? That’s where the real power is, the respected and sustainable income.”

  Who knows what I said to that. Len had been taking pictures of me for his photography class, much to Josie’s chagrin—she accused him of exploiting my sexuality as a way to impress his male teacher. As a result he’d shown the shots to a visiting freelance professional who in turn showed them to a modelling scout. A few weeks later I was offered a two-month contract in Tokyo. My mother refused to give her parental consent. I turned eighteen a month later and hopped a plane without her blessing.

  And now here she was fucking off on me for good. Before either of us was ready to say uncle. That cawing and tarry raven self was still demanding answers: Why do you always have to … Why didn’t you ever once … Who do you think you …

  I’d kept as still as I could on that last visit. There were no clocks in the room, the drapes were shut. I didn’t know what to say to her that wouldn’t involve my life, my work, my boyfriend. I wanted to say something neutral. Something quiet that would not cause flapping in either of us. My father? Seemed inappropriate to ask about a dead man right now. I’d never met him, he died before my time; what could I ask that I hadn’t already asked as a child? Never saw so much as a picture. John Smith. Really. Once when I was very small, I tried to look him up in the phone book and discovered pages and pages, a phone book inside a phone book of John Smiths.

  I opened my mouth, modulating my voice, keeping it smooth and low. “Are you glad you went to New York when you were young?”

  She moved her head to get a better look at me. “It’s always better to know,” she said.

  Before I was born, before she’d seen the light, she had gone to New York in hopes of a career singing and dancing. She waited tables as she held out for a big break. The only thing that got broke, she said, was her back. She learned hard and fast that even when she sang, even when she danced up one stage and down the other, she was still somebody’s waitress, a dolly whose only purpose was to serve everybody’s appetite but her own. Men owned the bars and clubs, the stages.
She was just the menial labour, the thing looked at rather than the person looking back.

  And then she got pregnant. The Vietnam war was raging. Hundreds of thousands of boys and men died. John Smith too.

  It’s all so vague. No family, no pictures, nothing of him. I don’t think they’d been together long when he got shipped out. I think it embarrasses her.

  What I wanted to know about New York was where she’d gone wrong, how it could’ve been if she were more on the ball. My ego: I could have swung it if I’d been her. If it had been me singing and dancing, I would have gutted that town. I would’ve gotten to know whoever it is you had to know and gone for it. None of that wallflower shit.

  Why didn’t you just …If I were you, I would’ve …

  Her hand slipped out toward me, palm up. I laid my own palm over hers. Wasn’t sure how to touch her. She was so sensitive, her skin, her eyes, as if she were one big inflammation. I let my fingertips touch hers. Then backed off, too scared. All that grinding inside me, those gargling black furies.

  “I wish,” she said, “you didn’t react. So much.”

  I clenched hands into my lap. Even now. She couldn’t help herself. Why can’t Vivian be settled? Why must Vivian be so reactionary?

  She should talk.

  “To me,” she added. “I didn’t know—” Her words were cut off by a deep cough, almost a gag. I reached for the waterglass, aimed the top of the accordion-bent straw toward her. She waved it away. A long high cry came out of her and she seemed to levitate with a sudden racking pain.

  I panicked and got to my feet. “Sally? Sally!”

  The door flew open. Sally had a kit with her. On her knees in a flash, she took out a hypodermic needle. I backed off from the bed.

  “No, no, no …” Mum whimpered as she turned her head to Sally who had hold of a rubber stopper along the IV tubing. “Don’t let her see it. Where’s little Vivvy? Don’t let her see.” Sally injected the extra dose of morphine into the tube. “Don’t,” my mother said again more slowly as her body relaxed. Sally’s jaws worked. She kept her eyes on my mother.