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Show face, not allowing me to touch my vagina where pin worms scratched the sensitive folds of skin in their effort to avoid the scotch tape the doctor told her to place across the entrance as a way to ensnare them. Both bait and trap, I tried to keep my body still, please my mother with my ability not to scratch, all the while wanting to tear the tape away, free the worms, itch my private parts. The golden angel that she wound and placed beside my head remains on my dresser still, and every now and then I wind the key and listen to "Braham's Lullaby," music that reminds me of worms and pain and my mother's piano-long fingers tracing the contour of my face. Nor am I telling you about my mother when I recall the warmth of the bathroom, steam from the shower still clinging to the walls and the edges of the mirror, my mother with a half slip pulled over her chest, leaning against the military-regulation porcelain sink, the eyelash curler holding captive both her eyelash and my gaze. I sit on the toilet, knees pulled to chest, watching my mother get dressed for the evening-the Navy's Birthday Ball, a Hail and Farewell, New Year's Eve. Blue Grass powder fills the room as she draws the sky-blue puff across arms, legs, and stomach, careful to avoid the places she has already applied lotion. Eye shadow the color of a bruise, blush that makes her cheekbones even more pronounced, waiting on lipstick until the moment she walks out the door on my father's arm, stopping for a second to apply red to her lips with a little brush that emerges from a thin gold container only to vanish again when she is done. We talk, our words mingling with steam and powder, lotion, and warmth from the blow dryer, of my friends, my day, the way I want to cut my hair. But mostly I just sit, skinny twelve-year-old arms wrapped about my knees, watching as my mother moves with make up and a mirror in a way I associate with gin and tonics, cigarettes, and dresses that drag 184 |
