Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit

by Jessica Raya

  On television, Jimmy Stewart was running around town, accosting people. He couldn’t get it through his thick skull that nobody knew him anymore because he didn’t exist. I changed the channel. I was starting to hate that movie too.

  11

  On New Year’s Day, a lady in a pink suit and pink hat stood at our curb, holding a small pink suitcase and staring a hole through our front door. “Now what?” Mom said, standing at the kitchen window, tapping her ashes into the sink. We’d passed a pleasant-enough week playing cards and eating leftover Chinese, but she’d have to start looking for a job again in the morning and she was already on edge. She made me go outside to get rid of whoever it was. All that pink was making her uncomfortable.

  “May I help you?” I said, like a counter girl at Macy’s.

  The lady smoothed her pink skirt and lifted her head, adjusting her frown into something resembling a smile. She held the suitcase in front of her with white-gloved hands. A sprig of plastic holly was pinned to her lapel. I almost didn’t recognize her without a martini.

  Vera Miller took me in through heavily shadowed eyes. “Hello, doll. Is your mother home?” She didn’t wait for an answer.

  As she reached the front door, it swung open.

  “Elaine?” Vera said. The white glove tipped back the pink hat to get a better view. Mom’s hair was in its usual weekend shambles. She was wearing old jeans and a pair of my flip-flops, her toes dangling over the too-small soles. “Is that really you?”

  “What do you want this time?” Mom said. “I don’t see a casserole.” She kept one hand on the door, the other on her hip.

  “Casserole? No, darling. I’m here to introduce you to the beautiful world of Katy May.”

  “You sell Mary Kay?” I said.

  “Katy May,” Vera corrected, tapping her pink case. Katy May Kosmetics was emblazoned on the front in frilly dark pink letters. “I have in here the secrets to every woman’s eternal happiness. And it’s no casserole, I promise you that.”

  “Don’t Mary Kay women wear pink?” I said.

  “This is blush,” Vera said. “A far more sophisticated colour. But I can teach you all that. That’s why I’m here. In the nick of time too, by the looks of it. New year, new you—what do you say?”

  “I suppose you’ll want to come in,” Mom said.

  “I can’t work magic on your doorstep, Elaine.”

  Mom sighed and stepped aside.

  Vera stood in the foyer, taking in the piles of newspapers, the plates of toast crusts, dishes turned ashtrays, tiny funeral pyres on every dirty plate and mug. “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

  Mom moved the want ads, and Vera set up on the dining room table. She laid her little case delicately on the water-stained oak top and unlocked the brass latch. Layer upon pink layer was lifted and peeled back, as if her white gloves belonged to a surgeon and the suitcase was the belly of some poor beast. Its bowels revealed dozens of pots, sticks, and tubes. I’d asked my mom once why she reapplied her lipstick so often. “It’s my job,” she’d said and slicked on another coat. Now she peered into the satin-lined case and frowned. Vera did the same as she studied her blank canvas.

  “Why, you’re naked, Elaine. I don’t do the laundry without a bit of rouge.”

  “I get around that problem by rarely doing the laundry.”

  Vera shook her head. “Beauty should never be a chore.”

  Vera worked slowly, applying something to Mom’s eye or cheek, then rubbing it off with a damp sponge. Mom sat quietly, submitting to a barrage of powder, liner, and well-intentioned insults. Now and then, Vera would pause to frown at the results. “Funny, this colour usually works wonders for sallow skin.”

  While she toiled away, I asked Vera about her job. It didn’t seem as glamorous as being a roller-skating waitress, but it had to beat giving blood.

  “Well, first of all you don’t do this for the money,” she said. “Though many of the girls—Katy May beauty ambassadors, I mean—many of them do very well. But it’s really about the satisfaction you get helping other women discover their most beautiful selves. You can’t put a price tag on that.”

  “Apparently you can,” Mom said, thumbing through the Katy May catalogue.

  “A girl can always use pocket change,” Vera said. “My mother called it mad money. ‘Put something aside for yourself, Vera. Don’t be a fool like I was.’ But that’s what I thought she was—a fool. Who listens to their mother?” Vera winked at me.

  “Your husband doesn’t mind you working?” Mom said.

  “Cal doesn’t care what I do, now that he’s got a girl in the city.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mom said.

  “I was always good at catching lipstick on a collar, but these new girls don’t even have the decency to wear any.” Vera’s laugh caught in her throat. “It was the wheatgrass juice that gave him away. How do you like that for modern? He reeks of it now. Have you tried it, Elaine? Lawn clippings in a glass.”

  Vera’s hand fanned away something invisible. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You must find this all very tasty.”

  “I’ve lost my appetite for gossip,” Mom said.

  They stared at each other for a moment, like they were waiting for the other one to blink first. Finally, Vera reached into the case for another pot of shadow. “This will really bring out the gold in your eyes.”

  Mom lit a fresh cigarette. Vera worked on in silence, pulling a mascara wand through Mom’s lashes, then curling them with a horrifying instrument she claimed was a woman’s best friend. The eyelashes succumbed, curling up and back until they kissed the lid. Who are you? I imagined one saying. Who am I? Who are you!

  At last Vera stepped back and handed Mom a mirror. “What do you think?”

  Mom’s eyes bulged at her reflection.

  “Gorgeous, isn’t it?”

  “I hardly recognize myself.”

  “That’s our motto!” Vera said. “With Katy May, you’re a whole new you. Now don’t feel obliged to purchase everything I used. I wanted to show you what we could do, but Katy May is so good you can make do with just eight or nine products.”

  While Vera arranged products carefully on a square of pink satin, Mom made a face at herself in the mirror. I got up to peruse the little pots of colour.

  “How about you, doll? It’s never too early to establish a regimen. Remember, beauty is a privilege, not a right.”

  I shook my head. Vera sighed. “Youth truly is wasted on the young.”

  “I can hardly get her to brush her hair,” Mom said, forgetting her own ratted ponytail.

  “At least she talks to you.” Vera said, packing up her case.

  “How are your boys, Vera?”

  “Blaming me for screwing up their lives, as usual.”

  “Did you give them makeovers too?”

  Vera arched one perfectly groomed eyebrow at her, then laughed. “Oh, Elaine, you look like a hooker who got ready in the dark.”

  “It really is awful, Vera.”

  They doubled over with laughter, gripping each other’s arms for balance. Then suddenly Vera wasn’t laughing anymore, only crying, diluted black liner dripping onto the pink satin square. Mom shooed me out of the room to fetch a glass of water.

  “How do you do it?” I heard Vera say. “How do you not fall apart?”

  “When I figure that out, I’ll let you know.”

  An hour later Mom stood on the front step, a pink box full of cosmetics she couldn’t afford cradled in one arm. Vera honked as she drove away. She didn’t even drive a pink Cadillac, just the same boring brown station wagon like everyone else in the world.

  —

  The next morning, I woke to the sounds of things breaking. I followed them through the house. Earthquake? Burglar? Mom. She was rummaging around in the pool house, butt poking out the door. At last she emerged. “Ta-da!” She held Dad’s Rolodex above her head like a trophy. She was bright-eyed and pink-cheeked. She’d put on her Katy
May.

  Mom arranged everything on the dining room table. The Rolodex sat in the middle, orbited by her coffee cup, cigarettes, notepad, and pen. The cards held the names and numbers of Dad’s insurance clients, country club cronies and sundry wives, people whose calls she’d avoided for months, wearers of reindeer sweaters. After two cups of coffee and three cigarettes, she was ready. She pressed her palms against the sides of the Rolodex and closed her eyes, Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent without the feathered turban.

  “You can do this,” she told herself. “You are a whole new you.” She pulled out a card. “Ken James. Shit, shit, shit.”

  And so it went.

  “I’m not asking for handout,” she told Ken James and Ed Stephens and John Bartlett and Barbara Green. “I need a chance, not charity.” Then she’d nod, light another cigarette, and thank them, exhaling, for their generous time. After each call, she tore up the card and added it to the tree of crinkled yellow balls. This went on all afternoon. The conversations were short—it was the cigarette breaks between calls that were long, the ten or fifteen minutes it took for her to hurl the Rolodex over my head through the open sliding doors and then scramble on all fours in the grass, gathering up the cards again.

  She was in tears by the time she got to Mildred Howard, a woman who had worked in Dad’s office when I was little. My parents had gone to Mildred’s daughter’s wedding, but I hadn’t heard her name in years. Now here was Mom crying into the phone, to this stranger, “Oh Mildred, Mildred, what am I going to do?”

  After a few minutes, the last tear was snuffled back, black raccoon eyes dabbed with the back of a sleeve. Mom walked the phone into the kitchen and stayed there through a whole episode of The Monkees.

  “So?” I said as the credits rolled.

  “So I guess I have a job,” Mom said. Mildred Howard ran the billing department at Golden General Hospital. Under her were half-a-dozen housewives who translated doctor scribble into neat rows of billing code. They were middle-aged women with empty nests and no interest in learning bridge. It was perfect. “It’s not as prestigious as blood donation,” she said, “but it’ll keep the lights on.”

  With that, Mom took out her new pink compact, peered into the small mirror, let out a long whoosh of breath, and snapped it shut again. She put down the compact and picked up the stack of bills. Every few minutes I heard the tear of an envelope, followed by the resigned scratch of pen on her chequebook.

  —

  Anencephaly. Giardiasis. Herpangina. Quadrantanopia. Ulcerative colitis. Xerostomia. Mildred Howard gave Mom a medical dictionary so she could look up the correct spellings. It was a stern, sober tome with tiny type and a black cover, the kind of book you’d expect to find on a doctor’s shelf. “It’s awful all the things that can go wrong with the human body,” Mom said as she leafed through its pages, an exclamation mark between her brows. She went to the hospital on Mondays and Wednesdays. The rest of the week she worked from home. Some nights she fell asleep at the table, dictionary open beside her, cradling someone’s alarmingly thick medical record like a pillow. I found her there at midnight once, collapsed and sobbing over a file. “This world breaks my heart,” she said, lifting her head, DECEASED stamped in reverse across her wet cheek.

  Mom had another dictionary for her college courses, which were far more mysterious than the records she transcribed. She’d signed up for Introduction to Economics and something called Gender Politics, which she said she clearly knew even less about. This dictionary, bought with her first paycheque from the hospital, had a faux-leather cover and gold lettering, like the one in my junior high in which certain entries—fellatio, cunnilingus—had been fingered to near transparency. “Well, there’s another word I’ll never use,” Mom would say. I’d felt the same way in junior high.

  Mom pressed on, made regular trips to the library, spent whole weekends reading, going through highlighter pens the way she used to go through hair spray. I rarely saw her without a book in her hand that January, and none were by Julia Child. There was Germaine Greer and her Female Eunuch, a word I was sorry I looked up. Betty Friedan and her Feminine Mystique, which was indeed a mystery, though not the kind I had expected. Kate Millett’s book came wrapped in brown paper the way we were made to wrap our textbooks at the beginning of each school year. Then came the women from Mom’s study group, the flesh-and-blood versions of her books, and no less mystifying. They had mythical names like Willow, Aurora, and Celeste. The Sisters.

  The Sisters were as strange as sea anemones, fluid and bright and infinitely beautiful in their thrift-store jeans and sandals bought at Mexican markets. They brought jugs of blackberry wine and drank, laughed, and ranted through purple-stained lips dangling clove cigarettes. They propped their elbows on the coffee table, slung their long, tanned legs over the sofa arms, or sat lotus on throw pillows on the floor. They spouted poetry and fifty-cent words and had opinions about everything. They overpowered with their funky tea bags and their enthusiastic anger. No matter how much bleach I used, the house always smelled of patchouli.

  Mom tidied around them, hovered with the coffee pot, put out plates of cookies. “They’re store-bought,” she said, apologizing for the white flour, the refined sugar. The Sisters told her domesticity was just another word for oppression. Whole generations of female power had been destroyed by the invention of floor wax. Mom would gaze down at the Pepperidge Farm and frown, as if discovering some long-silent enemy, one more insidious betrayal beneath her own roof.

  While Mom bused their empty mugs and glasses, the Sisters talked about their own mothers, how empty their lives were, how they just didn’t get it. They admired Mom for working, they said. They told her she gave them hope.

  “I’m not saving the world,” Mom said. “It’s nice to feel useful, I guess.”

  Don’t do that, they said. Don’t put yourself down. Don’t minimize your contribution. She was an extraordinary woman. Look at their mothers—not a paycheque in the bunch.

  You are saving the world, they said.

  “It must be wonderful to have your life ahead of you,” Mom said later, as we watched them pull out of the driveway, someone’s bare feet jutting out the back window of a dusty white Beetle.

  “Everyone has their life ahead of them,” I reminded her.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” she said, which was true.

  —

  Mom found a natural food store on the other side of town and brought home hard, dry things made of spelt. She stopped shaving her legs. She missed a salon appointment, then another, until her hair brushed the tops of her breasts. The part was an ever-expanding strip of brown. Her Canadian roots, we dubbed them. One day she came home with a box of brown hair dye and a pair of rubber gloves. “It’ll be easier,” she said. “Less fuss.” For the first time I could remember, our hair was the same middling brown, but she’d never looked less like my mother. Staring at herself in the mirror, she said, “I remember you.”

  It was a Pandora’s box of hair dye. Suddenly, Mom despised all her clothes. She took away a garbage bag full of skirts and dresses and brought it back filled with plain cotton blouses and wide-legged pants that smelled of mothballs and garages. She abandoned Chanel No. 5 for a small, oily bottle of sweet almond and cherry blossom. She bought a silk caftan at a campus market and wore it instead of her housecoat, floating from room to room in swirls of indigo and green. “It’s so freeing,” she said. “I feel light as air.” As if she’d been suffering in corsets and petticoats all those years.

  On weekends, the Sisters left their books behind and brought their own garbage bags full of clothes. The houses they shared near campus had Japanese futons on hardwood floors and French philosophy on second-hand bookshelves, but no washing machines. While our Maytag did its magic, they’d strip down to their panties and plunge into the pool. Their tans were deep and seamless. Their long hair gathered around them in amber swirls. Mom would fish it out of the drain for days.

  She didn’t swim herse
lf when the Sisters were there. Embarrassed by their bobbing naked breasts, she buried her face behind a book. I barricaded myself in my room. But the Sisters were determined. They would stop me outside the bathroom, ask where I was in my cycle, if I was eating wheat. I shouldn’t use bleach, they said. I shouldn’t bathe so often. I shouldn’t watch network television or listen to AM radio or eat processed foods or anything with a face.

  They pulled me into living room one afternoon. What’s your take? they asked. How do you feel? We want to know what young people are feeling.

  “About what?”

  Everything.

  “I guess I think—”

  Don’t think. Feel. What are your feelings? Do you feel powerless? Let down? Abandoned? Pissed off? Dig down into your solar plexus. How do you feeeeel?

  Mom sat mutely on the sofa during this exchange, crumbling the brownie in her hands back into cocoa powder. There were more in tin foil on the coffee table. How the Sisters managed to bake without stepping foot in a kitchen was a mystery to me. I reached for one.

  “No!” Mom shouted, knocking it out of my hand. “These are special brownies. They’re only for the grown-ups.”

  The Sisters’ giggles stalked me to my room, as if “special brownies” was some genius code a fifteen-year-old couldn’t crack. How do they expect you to feel, I wondered, when everyone’s convinced you’re a moron?

  My teachers found kinder synonyms. Unfocused. Distracted. Lacklustre was my favourite—it made me think of old pearls forgotten at the bottom of a jewellery box. Miss Blumberg said I was a bright girl and there was no reason I shouldn’t be getting at least a B, but it’s hard to trust someone who’s wearing a feathered headdress. Mrs. Maxwell continued to dole out generous C’s. “You’ve earned it,” she said. “Lord knows.” Mr. Galpin told me that his office door was always open, which is probably the most worrisome thing anyone in a sweater vest can tell a person.