by Lee Matalone
Your turn, my mother said. Daddy pointed at the box, my box.
The wrapping paper featured women with platinum and fire-engine-red coiffures, permed and pressed and dyed to perfection, their hourglass waists cinched into air. These ladies were what my mother and Jean aspired to, the women they identified as the apotheosis of beauty, faces powdered and lightened and lightened to resemble marble. Whiteness, above all else. Then (as now, certainly, too), pigment stood for something dirtied, something foreign, something certainly not American. Jap. Nip. Tojo.
From the TV, a gray and white rabbit in a clean white uniform says, handing out popsicles prepared maliciously, contents containing grenades, “Here, one for you, Monkeyface. Here you are, Slant Eyes!”
I tore at these women, severing their bodices from their skirts, guillotining the made-up alabaster faces from swan necks.
And there, beneath the wrapping paper, a black face. This baby doll, with a belly bubbling out of a gingham nappy, arms akimbo in some ambiguous state (Was she reaching out for Mommy or recoiling in fear?). The baby wore black pin-curls shorn tight around her ink-black face. Her eyes and cherry-red lips glinted with shock.
My mother, watching from her own chair, fully made up, dressed in a dress to match my sister’s.
You have the same eyes.
We didn’t, but we were both shades of brown she registered as Other. We were no Grace, no beauty to cut out of a magazine and paste on the wall.
Jap. Nip. Tojo. Slant Eyes.
What I remember: the cruelty of a cigarette, white against her lips.
When I worked, when I could not leave Chloe alone in her crib in the middle of the night to rush off to help a soon-to-be mother, a could-be mother, another person filled in my gaps. A nanny. An au pair. But we never called her that. We did not use that word. It was understood that she would be a part of our family (au pair = at equal, not a daughter, not a wife, but something else). When Chloe turned three, my husband decided we were not the family he wanted, so what was I to do? Au pair, my answer.
They were Rita and Lisa and Cecilia. From age three to thirteen, Chloe was in their partial care.
Rita: A forty-eight-year-old woman from Jackson, Mississippi, whose life was Chloe. She had grown children who no longer needed her. As a child, her own mother called her Pig Nose and cut her hair short under a mixing bowl, locking her in a closet if she resisted. One of her three brothers, a long-haul truck driver, was now in prison for dragging an elderly woman into a field behind a convenience store and raping her with a pipe. She coveted Chloe, guarded her like her own.
Lisa: A twenty-eight-year-old English woman who wore jeans from the men’s section of Kohl’s. She was fond of taking Chloe to the pool in the summers and driving with her foot hanging out the window. She was a born-again Christian, but I asked her to keep her religious beliefs to herself.
Cecilia: A thirty-three-year-old woman from Accra fond of leggings and Ellen. In the era of dial-up Internet, Chloe and her friend, pre-teens, used the basement’s phone line to call the upstairs phone line, adopting the voice of Kiefer Sutherland in the movie Phone Booth, which was about a sniper targeting a man trapped in a phone booth. As I recall, Cecilia chased Chloe around the house with a wooden spoon. She was concerned about this sniper.
These women did the work I couldn’t. They were surrogate face wipers, shoe-tying instructors, snack makers, TV guides, reading tutors, soccer coaches, good-night kisses.
They were many things, all those things, but they were never Mother. That was the title I chose, the life I committed to. That role was mine.
Ten-year-old Chloe wants to run the tap, her girlish foot tapping on the bathroom tile.
“Hot as can be,” I say.
The water coming out of the bathtub faucet steams. Her eyes fixate on the steam, as if witnessing a gorge hissing to life, some great environmental occurrence.
“Are you getting in?” she asks.
Yes. I nod. I will be the first to step on the moon.
She watches the rolls of my body, how the water fills in around each fold. She will always feel safe in the water.
“Would you bring me the newspaper, please?”
“I’m getting in,” she announces but she’s already undressing. It is January and her body is white, topped off with an unruly, coffee-colored coiffure. She is not good at brushing her hair, though I’m teaching her, slowly. Stomach. There, her baby fat is shedding, puberty chiseling away belly. Still, no hips. But they’re coming. Then we will have things to talk about.
She dips the toes of her right foot first, shrinks back.
“Too hot?” I turn on the cold, just for a minute. “Better? See? Feel?”
She manages to stick one whole skinny leg into the bath, perching like a flamingo. She has been taking ballet classes for six months. We still have sixteen months before she exchanges slippers for softball cleats.
“Get in,” I say. “It feels nice.”
“What’s thirty-four across?” she asks.
“Italian cheese city.”
“Parmesan,” she says, smirking, a sweet smirk.
Already, she is too much of a smart ass. This will get her in trouble. She will never be satisfied. I’m trying to teach her to forego criticism in the pursuit of contentment. If not happiness, contentment.
“Want a sip of this?”
She floats over to me. The tub is deep. She’s a minnow. She perches her lip on the edge of my glass.
“Take it,” I say, handing her the wine.
Her pale lips stain crimson. Her face crinkles like a peony. We are alone, together.
“What do you think?” I ask. “Is it what you thought it would be like?”
Her hands pull her body away from me along the edge of the tub. “Not quite.”
Not yuck! Not ew! Not more more more! Just not quite. My daughter.
“Another sip? Take it.”
Swimming back toward me, she reaches out to take the glass. Her soapy fingers slip on the porcelain, sending drops of wine floating on the bathwater.
We watch the red float among mountains of bubbles. Underwater her knees squeeze toward one another. She fingers the spots of blood, disappearing them into the water. Goodbye, wine, goodbye, blood, for now, for a few years, yet.
“Look it up when we get out of the tub,” I say. “Parmesan.”
“It could be a place,” she says.
I do not disagree.
In the bay window, her packed pink weekender on her lap, eleven-year-old Chloe sits, ankles crossed. Her back’s turned toward the furniture, toward the television, though it does not play. She’s shut her eyes. She refuses to watch the street for her father’s big black SUV.
“You haven’t seen him in two months. Don’t you want to go see where your father lives now?”
“I don’t,” she says, like she has a choice.
From her bag she takes out a book and begins to fake read. Her eyes are moving too fast for comprehension. This is her safe space, so I never call her out on this trick. I simply say, Chloe, in that way, in that voice, so she knows I know she’s trying to hide and that I’m trying to find her.
“I refuse,” she says.
A black SUV, as if he had kids to cart around, some young ones to protect.
“Your hands are so greasy,” she says, taking my hands in hers, holding them on top of her palms, her thumbs forming a bind around my hands.
“It’s just lotion,” I say. “For work I have to wash my hands so much, you know.”
“Can I have some?”
We leave the window, go to my bedroom. From my bedside table she takes the large plastic dispenser and sits on the edge of my bed. She pats the space next to her.
“Here,” she says, rubbing the lotion into the tops of my hands.
“I’ll be here when you get back,” I say.
“Good.”
“Good?” I repeat.
The heaving of the SUV in the drive as the engine shuts.
; “Time to go.”
“Promise you’ll be here.”
“I swear.” I swore, I swore.
“I can’t do it. I can’t put it in.”
“Don’t push it in at an angle. Just push it straight in.”
In the living room, Chloe holds the tampon in the air, unwrapped and exposed, its cotton string dangling along her wrist.
“Do you need help?”
Nods, yes, that’s a yes.
“Okay,” I say. “Go and lay down.”
In her bedroom, she lies on the green shag rug, the rug she said she wanted because she wanted to be able to feel the earth against her skin whenever she wanted. While she was stuck in her room studying, she wanted to be able to lie on the rug and imagine the grass between her toes, the sun warming the skin of her forehead. Her idea. She has always been a daydreamer.
I kneel down beside her.
She lets her legs fall open, slightly.
“It’ll feel like a lot of pressure,” I say. “But just relax. Tensing up doesn’t help.” The cotton begins to disappear, it does, but glacially.
“Owww,” she eeks.
“Almost there.”
“Too much pressure. Stop. Stop.” Tears are moving across her cheeks. The pressure isn’t all that much. It’s more about the fear of being entered, a legitimate fear.
“Just breathe,” I say.
“I can’t I can’t just stop.” She is crying, her lips trembling. She throws her arms over her face, nodding her head back and forth to wipe her eyes.
“It’s in,” I say.
We stand up together.
“How long?” she asks. “Will I know how long?”
“Check in a few hours. You’ll learn your flow.”
“Just pull the string and it’ll come out easy?” she says.
“Easy. Don’t worry. It’ll come out just fine.”
She returns to her room, I to my crossword puzzle on the couch.
“A rat’s nest?” ten-year-old Chloe asks.
“The back of your head looks like one.” I extend the brush toward her.
“I don’t care what other people think. Let them think I’m a rat.” She tugs at a knot at the side of her crown. Her eyes are fixated on the knot in the mirror, her untamed eyebrows knit in concentration. In her nude training bra she looks naked. Hips, not yet.
“It’s not about what other people think, not entirely. It’s about self-respect. And you’re a woman, so to a certain extent, it will always be a little bit about what other people think.”
She taps her head with the paddle and hands me the brush. In my hand, the knots slip away easier. We have no choice. I’m sorry.
“One day all neighborhoods will look just like this one,” my mother says. “Look at all of this.”
1962. We are driving around Catalina Vista, looking at houses. She and I are out on one of our rare occasions alone together. My brothers and sister are still asleep, but if they were awake they would be off doing teenage things, not spending time with Mom the Realtor and little sis. It is summer and I am out of school. It is very early morning, the sun new over the Rincon. The heat has not yet arrived. By nine, we will be back inside, back in the air-conditioning, back in front of the TV. I am rubbing sleep from my eyes, trying to be as awake as her.
“Everything is in the place it should be. See how all of these houses are one story?” Circling the roundabout, she puts the cigarette between her lips. “That’s so you can see the mountains.”
Still, the neighborhood is free of human noise, human hustle and bustle. Cottontails are out eating their breakfasts, nibbling on mesquite leaves and cacti and scraps of lettuce left out by the odd beneficent homeowner. The mourning doves coo, enjoying their stage while they have it.
Slowly, though, we see lights go on in windows. The neighborhood is waking up to its sedated wife, its stranger husband, its hungry children, its soiled laundry, its unwashed dishes, a new day of familiar problems and excitements, though at this age, I am only familiar with the disappointments of a child, which are many.
She stops the car on the edge of a small park. Across the street a still-dark house sits hidden behind a row of hairy mountain mahogany. From behind the house, the erect stem of a saguaro seems to protrude right out of its flat white roof. “You want to try?” She holds the cigarette out to me. “Your sister isn’t allowed but why the hell not.”
Our interactions have the force of an audition. One childish remark and it will give her a reason to love me less. I am eleven and I take the cigarette, put it to my girlish lips, press the cigarette against my skin just enough to taste the nicotine. It is not quite smoking, but I hope that she sees I am trying. I will not smoke, really, until high school, when I date a boy named Peter so that when he goes outside I will not be alone with his friends, people who look at me and do not talk to me, who walk around me like I’m one of those cigar store Indians forced to inhale the smoke. I hand the cigarette back to her, taking care not to upset the balance of ash on the tip, to avoid sending soot onto her white pants. “Do you have any houses here?”
She takes a long drag, her eyes soft, sleepy without makeup. Her thin sun-yellow blond hair is hidden under a blue scarf, yet to be blow dried, curled, Aqua Netted—the possessor of vinyl chloride, the chemical that will seep into her body and grow in her liver as cancer. She will die when I am back home for medical school but she will die in the night while I am sleeping a rare night of sleep. This day, when we are alone, together, is as vulnerable as I will ever see her. “No. Not selling any here. Let’s walk a bit.”
I do not mention that we are blocking nearly half the road with her car. I get out and follow her across the freshly planted grass of the park. Beneath the towering palm trees, strangers to this desert, we also look like strangers. Our bodies do not enter the other’s orbit. We do not hold hands. I do not lean into her skirt when a feeling of affection arises. My hair is black and my skin is brown and her hair is golden and her skin is white. In her cigarette pants she looks like an angel performing an act of charity, outfitting a poor Navajo in a nice dress and showing her what it is like to be a normal child, a loved child, for a day.
In the center of the park there is a bench but we do not sit on it. A single slide has been placed here for children. No monkey bars. No seesaw. Just a block of gravel with a slide. She does not ask if I want to slide down it because I am too old for such fun and, besides, I don’t want to slide down it either. I want to stand by her side, two strangers that happen to be mother and daughter. We walk separately but at the same pace, straight through the park.
It is a small park, so it does not take more than five minutes to get to the other side, to where grass meets pavement. “I’m not ready to go home yet, are you?” she asks, and I say no, I’d like to stay a bit longer. She places her hand on my head, tucking my thick, coarse hair behind my ear, leaving her hand there for a moment longer than I ever thought possible. A mourning dove coos somewhere above our heads.
We begin walking in the direction of the car. My mother stops at the bench. She sits, crossing one leg over the other and taking the pack of cigarettes from her pants pocket, signaling that we are pausing here for a moment. I go to the slide. I am nearly tall enough to reach halfway up the ladder to the top, and I place my hand on each rung, moving my girlish, not-quite-child, not-quite-woman’s body up to the top. The slide slides down and out in front of me, a tongue licking the ground, tasting what is to come. I tuck my head to fit under the mouth of the slide and unfold my skinny legs onto the metal. I no longer need to close my eyes like I did when I was younger, when I was too afraid to acknowledge the potential dangers ahead. Now I keep my eyes open, looking not down but out across the green of the park, past the car my mother and I rode here in together, past the armless saguaro and the flat white roof, over the Catalina foothills, past the peak of Mount Lemmon, over the Pacific to an island I know from the space of a crib in the arms of another white angel with yellow socks. I am falling and sh
e is clapping for me.
Dining Room
Tito, what do you think of this wallpaper? I have been looking at a lot of decorating websites lately and even buying those home and garden magazines with the happy white people on the cover, and they seem to be telling me that wallpaper is a thing again. I remember stripping it with my mother in our dining room as a child, the smell of old glue oozing back to life. Back then, no one wanted wallpaper. This was the late nineties, and we were stripping off what the women in the eighties did to their dining rooms, which was to paper it all over with ugly floral bouquets tied off with ribbon.
“No one else is going to do this but you and me,” my mother said. “It has to be done. Don’t look at me like that. You know I have allergies and I won’t survive with all this goldenrod.”
Burnt fingertips. After a day of scraping wallpaper we would sit in front of the TV while I held a bag of frozen peas between my hands. Here, she’d say, and I would lean over, opening my mouth to grab the spoon of ice cream that we shared from a tub that sat between us.
Bachelard said we have both palace moments and cottage moments. It all depends on the day and the temperature outside and one’s mood and the quality of light. Today, I am having a palace moment. I want a chandelier with many crystals that hang over a big Henredon table, a Poliform sofa, an armchair upholstered in pink velvet. I want to stripe the walls in gold. Better yet, I will hire the most expensive painters in town to use the most expensive paints infused with flakes of gold. A queen doesn’t lay the marble tiles in her own foyer.
Of course, my palace moments are impossible. I will never be able to afford the one-hundred-dollar-a-gallon paint, the four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar dog bed. I’ve been dreaming about this ideal home that will never be since I was a child. But, Bachelard says, that’s probably for the best. A daydream of elsewhere should be left open at all times.
“For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”