My Mother, King Tut

When my mother dyes her hair orange again, I will not invite Judith Glimmer over for iced teas and play make-believe alcoholic in the back shed, something we learned by watching Judith’s dad, who has since moved out. “Let’s play at your place,” I’ll say after Brownies, even though Judith has a Bouvier that won’t shut up. Her Bouvier is a black sheepdog called Bum-Bum that barks as loud as a car horn. But my mother is far worse. For the past three years, my mother says she’s been going through menopause; she says she’s just like Mommy Dearest only without all that money; she says she’s still getting over my father’s death, which was over eight years ago. He died of meningitis. I don’t remember him. But my mother says she remembers everything, and that’s what keeps her from going out. She will not answer the telephone after dark. She saves newspapers in the front room. She shaves her toe hair with a disposable razor. When my mother doesn’t know what to say in certain company, she says “Oh Lord have mercy on us all,” in a voice like a rattle, and that’s what’s worse than a Bouvier.

My mother warns me every weekend, “Maggie May, stay in the shade or your face will bubble.” She reads stories in the paper about skin cancer and sunstroke. She cuts them out and leaves them in my room. She worries that her own skin will fall right off. She thinks old age will not creep up slowly on her like everyone else, but instead suddenly appear on her face, like a big zit. “There is nothing graceful about growing old!” My mother laughs at the TV ads. “Ha! Graceful as a dried grape!” Still, my mother has taken cosmetic precautions.

She rubs her skin with organic preservatives, yellow gels and waxy tubes of hazel cream and nondairy astringent, because my mother is lactose intolerant. She smoothes passion flower in the creases of her neck. She straightens her hair with a comb soaked in aloe vera. “This will make your mother look like a famous model,” she says to me before I leave for Brownies.

But I know about models from Judith, who has an April issue of Seventeen magazine, which she stole from the bait shop. These models are skinny and fit and outgoing. They volunteer. They go out to parties. They are informed about current affairs. They are “liberal minded.”

This is not my mother. She voted for Reagan, and her great uncle was in the Michigan militia. My mother won’t even leave the screen porch, where she keeps herself cool with ice cubes tied in a dish rag, reading the Psalms from her NIV, or parts of Zechariah. Models aren’t supposed to be religious. They aren’t supposed to memorize the Book of James and rattle it off while baking boxed muffins. They aren’t supposed to go to a church that meets in the gym of a school.

My mom goes on Wednesday and Sunday, but I don’t have to go if I don’t want to because she doesn’t want religion shoved down my throat. She says when I’m ready I’ll go on my own. She says when I’m ready to be a Christian woman, I can wear makeup. She says I’ll be a matron, like Queen Esther. Maybe I’ll be a Christian wife. Until then, I have free will, like everyone else, and I can make my own decisions and suffer the consequences.

My friend Judith thinks this is unfair, since her mom makes her go to mass, which doesn’t sound half bad. Judith says they have Nilla waters and wine for communion. She says sometimes her mom gets drunk. I say “no way!” and she says “yeah way.” They are Catholic, and my mother says they are idol worshippers. My mothcr says you can’t pray to all those saints and still pray to God. There’s not enough love to go around, she says.

But my mother loves Sally Fields more than God. She has all her movies taped from Lifetime. My mother also loves Shirley Maclaine. She loves junk food too: Ring Dings, Ding Dongs, and Little Debbie’s. On bad days, she eats too much and gets sick. On worse days, my mother doesn’t say a word at all. She takes out her photo album with pictures of my father. Sometimes she looks at the pages and starts crying. I pretend not to hear. I stay in my room and listen to Casey Kasem. I am not allowed to see these pictures in my mom’s photo book. My mom says a woman’s things are private and shouldn’t be touched by dirty fingers. She says a picture is worth a thousand words. She says, “And that isn’t very many words at all if you think about it.” But once, when my mother left her photo album on the counter after dinner, I flipped through it real fast, while she fussed with her hair in the bathroom. This was the only time I ever saw pictures of my father.

He was never alone in these pictures, the broad man in the front with his hair combed back, his shirttails loose, his sleeves rolled over his elbows, surrounded by friends. But my mother was not in any of the pictures; some of them were ripped in half, where I figured she’d torn herself out, leaving bits of my father on the other side. He looked like a dignified man always doing something difficult, working on a shed with Uncle Joe, posing with a handsaw, or hammering a fencepost, his cowlick coming loose over his forehead.

I don’t know much else about him. He wasn’t so good-looking; he had a big nose; he had too much hair. I don’t look anything like him. I told my mother all of this once, but she gave me a fierce look and said, “Never mind. When you are a woman you will think differently and speak differently, and you will have more consideration for the dead!” I want to tell her to have more considerarion for the living, myself included, but I don’t.

Now I just stare at her while she sifts through her bangs, putting her hair up in an ornamental bun. When she lets it out of the ribbon, her hair falls halfway to the floor. Sometimes she sprays the back with lemon to preserve its natural shine, weaing it down with coconut oil and translucent conditioners, rubbing in chamomile paste and beeswax, getting a new color every other weekend.

She first ordered orange when my dad died. I don’t remember anything about it, except what Aunty Maine told me. She said my mom came down to the wake with her head like a big clementine wrapped in fishnet. Aunty Maine sent us the picture a few years ago, but my mother ripped it right up before I ever saw it.

The color my mother has ordered from the Amway lady Mrs. Speck is called Egyptian Gold, but I can tell from the photo on the box that it’s just plain orange. My mother will look like a pumpkin head.

“I’m not coming home after Brownies,” I tell my mom when she’s rubbing in the color. I tell her I’ll be at Judith’s, painting our nails.

“Don’t let that Bouvier pinch your bottom,” she hollers back, her head in the sink. “And tell Mrs. Glimmer she’s in my prayers.” My mother says this because Mr. Glimmer left Mrs. Glimmer last year for a lady half his age from Ponshewang, where all they have is a boat dock and a snow cone stand. “Why don’t you have Judith come over for some muffins when your nails are dry?” my mother adds.

“Not unless your head’s in a bandanna,” I say when I’m halfway out the door, so I’m certain she won’t hear. Sometimes I feel like I’m the mother and she’s the daughter.

Judith can’t get away with half of what I can at home, because her mom uses a hand broom as a paddle. My mom isn’t a pushover, but since I’m all she has, she lets me alone. She says I’m her little ball of beeswax. She gives me fennel seed when I drink too much soda and upset my stomach. When I have a fever, she prays over my forehead: “Holy Father,” she says, “help my little ball of beeswax get better.” This is the only time I let her rub her gels into my hair: peppermint oil for my pores, or a cabbage leaf soaked in gin, which she massages over my chest when I have a cough. But I don’t let her put one drop of cod liver oil behind my ears, which she says will make your hair curl under when you blow it dry.

I meet Judith at Brownies and she has fake earrings on: big plastic rubies in silver frames clipped to her lobes like tree ornaments. She is wearing turtle shorts and a tank top. We don’t have to wear our uniforms because of the heat, thank God.

“Hey Maggie,” Judith says, showing off her earrings. “Look what I got.”

“That’s the ugliest thing I ever saw,” I say.

“I know it,” Judith laughs, and we go inside with the other girls.

Brownies meets at the Pickerel Lake community center, which is a cinderblock building attached to the fire hall. They have Bingo and Boy Scouts in the same building, on different days. Mrs. Jakeway is in charge of world history and home ec lessons at Brownies, where we learn to whisk eggs with our wrists and put on clothes properly. There are twelve of us, not counting Malkie Tompkins, who got kicked out for stealing money from the candy sale last month.

Mrs. Jakeway is a big old woman with hair as white as the mai fun noodles we made during Chinese New Year last year. Mrs. Jakeway has a B.A. in Christian Living from a community college down south. She knows how to fold a fitted sheet and what to wear to a dinner party. Mrs. Jakeway has been married three times because all her husbands die. One of them had cancer of the you-know-what, and one of them had a heart attack while draining a swimming pool. At the moment, Mrs. Jakeway is married to Papa Benny, who runs the hardware store. Mrs. Jakeway says a widowed woman shouldn’t stay that way, if she can help it. She says most liberal women are widowed or divorced, and that they never remarry because they like to think they can handle it on their own. But she says that marriage is a God-ordained institution so deal with it.

Today, Mrs. Jakeway has brought a diorama of King Tut’s tomb. There are paper camels, a pyramid, a carton of gold chips made of particleboard. She has set it all up on a card table, with army men dressed as Egyptians, painted with nail polish and wrapped in cheesecloth. This is Mrs. Jakeway’s hobby. She makes dioramas.

“King Tut was only nine years old when he became a pharaoh,” Mrs. Jakeway says, looking at us like we haven’t amounted to half as much, and some of us are eleven. “Today, he is one of the most famous Egyptian pharaohs because his tomb was found filled with many riches.” Here, she lists them off while pointing at her paper treasures: jewel earrings, a gold coffin, a fancy funeral mask.

“King Tut’s tomb was never raided because it was hidden so well,” she says. “It was found in 1922 by Howard Carter.” Mrs. Jakeway says the next part slowly: “And right when the tomb was opened, a snake killed Carter’s canary, one of the archeologists died from a mosquito bite, and all the lights in Cairo went dim.” Mrs. Jakeway widens her eyes, waiting for us to be scared, but we aren’t.

She has made a replica of King Tut’s funeral mask, in painted papier-mache. She says the mask was said to have held a terrible curse. She passes it around so we can try it on.

Judith puts the mask on upside down and does her best witch cackle. But when I put it on, I can smell the pasty powder Mrs. Jakeway has used to piece it together. The paint smells mildewed. There are no holes for your eyes, and when I press the papier-mache over my face I can see nothing but black. For a moment, I imagine what it would be like to be dead, wrapped in strips of cotton and preservatives, stored away under the earth for thousands of years.

Mrs. Jakeway says that King Tut died very young, but his body was preserved for thousands of years, embalmed in tree oils and glycerin. She says that if you were to look at his body today, it would be shriveled and brown, but still soft to the touch.

“I’ve made my own mummified person,” Mrs. Jakeway says, blushing a little. She pulls something out of her handbag: it is made of Kleenex and wax leaves doused in peanut oil, tied together with some orange acrylic string. It is the shape of a little man, with arms and legs like pieces of black licorice. It has the face of a skeleton, with albino raisins glued for the eyes.

“I call him Michael the Mummy,” Mrs. Jakeway says, shaking the thing in her hands. Some of the girls shriek with delight, but Judith just rolls her eyes.

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever saw,” Judith whispers to me, and I couldn’t agree more.

After Brownies, I say to Judith, “Let’s play over at your house,” and Judith and I bike over to her house and try to get away from Bum-Bum, who chases us around the yard and nips our ankles. We dash inside and Judith pours two cherry pops and we sit on the couch and paint our nails green.

After a half-hour giggling over how Mrs. Jakeway had toilet paper stuck to her shoe the whole time, I break down and tell Judith about my mom’s new color. I roll my eyes and say: “She’s going to look like those girls on Solid Gold.” This is a show Judith’s dad let us watch once, when he was still around. Everyone was a black person in their underpants, with silver glitter on their skin.

Judith blows on her pinkies and says, “I’d like to see that! Your mom with orange hair.”

“I’m not going over there until she’s out of sight from the street,” I say, raising my left eyebrow, because I’ve just learned how. Judith has seen my mom with every color of the rainbow on her head, but I’m still embarrassed whenever she comes over. I’m beginning to think that mothers should have brown hair, or silver bands down their parts, which Mrs. Jakeway says is sophisticated for a modern woman today. Sometimes I think Mrs. Jakeway knows it all, and sometimes I think she doesn’t know crap.

“Let’s go over and take a picture of your mom,” Judith says. She drags a chair to her mother’s cupboard and pulls down a Polaroid with a pack of flashbulbs.

“Will we get in trouble?” I say.

“My mom won’t care if we take just one,” Judith says, holding the camera like a hamburger. But I wonder what my mom will think. She hates to get her picture taken, not even for the church directory. She threw out all her school pictures and wedding photos years ago. If Aunty Maine happens to send a card with an old shot of them when they were young, my mother says, “Oh God, look how thin I used to be!” and she tears herself out of the photograph before I can see, saving the side with Aunty Maine, dressed in a tube top or a bikini, all by herself.

“My mom’s not in a good mood today,” I say, but Judith isn’t listening. She pops a box of film in the Polaroid and straps the camera around her neck like a noose.

“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Judith says. “Just one shot.”

“Only if you let me borrow your take earrings,” I say.

“Deal,” she says, and we forget about our nails and pull on plastic flip-flops, smearing paint on our ankles.

We bike to my yard, and when we get there, we find my mom on the porch sleeping in her robe. Sometimes I don’t like it that Judith knows so much about my mother. She knows my mom makes only microwave dinners. She knows my mom hangs her underclothes on a wire over the tub.

We drop our bikes at the foot of the porch because Kevin Keyswater stole our kickstands last summer. We stand at the first step staring at my mother’s hair. It is hanging over the back of the chair like a slack orange afghan crocheted with a J-hook. It is the ugliest color I have ever seen. Parts of it are wrapped around her neck, like snakes that ate too many carrots. My mother’s face has a fresh covering of aloe vera. Her arms glisten with suntan oil. She looks dead, but I know she is not because she is snoring very loudly. But her face is as unchanged as a stone. Sleeping, she looks like an angel, a celestial thing free from all the anxieties of menopause and Mommy Dearest. She is surrounded by her favorite things: last month’s McCall’s, a Christian romance novel called Georgian by Blood, and the Bible, open to Song of Songs. I pick out the part she has underlined in red: Your hair is like a flock of goats descending from Mount Gilead. You teeth are like a flock of sheep just shorn, coming up from the washing.

Then I notice my mother has an old photo album open on her lap. I know this is not a good thing. I look around for candy bars, Charleston Chews or Snickers, some of her favorites. If she’s had them, she’s already hidden the wrappers under the cushion of her rocker, where they will stay for days, unless I sweep them out when she’s not looking.

Judith stays on the steps and takes a quick picture with the Polaroid. That’s when I notice my mother has taken photos out of the album. She’s put them on the wood railing. They are wet. They’ve been dipped in orange dye. They are drying in the sun, like new prints from a dark room.

There is one of my father with Uncle Joe and Aunty Maine, all of them with their arms hooked around each other’s shoulders, as if they are best friends. Their faces are blurred with orange, and where the sun reflects their hair oil, the dye shows through like watercolor. The shed in the background is the color of a gourd. The leaves on the trees are fall colors. All of the black in the picture is dulled by the dye. The other photographs – my father in uniform, my father as Santa Claus, my father at my baptism when I was three months old – have orange highlights, their edges curling in the sun, the fiber paper bulging in the middle. These are all sitting out as obvious and embarrassing as my mother’s underwear on the clothesline.

Then I see a picture of my mother. She is by herself, posing by the apple tree in the back yard. Half of her face is hidden in a shadow, where she has shied away from the camera. She is thin, wearing church clothes, a carnation for a corsage on her chest. Her hair is pulled back behind her neck in nylon ribbons. She is holding an apple blossom. I imagine my father has taken the photograph. He has put her in front of the tree, pulling off a branch for decoration, pausing behind the camera for a moment, admiring what he sees. I imagine he says something: “You look so pretty,” or “That’s a fancy dress you have on,” and she blushes. All of this is in one frame: my mother’s modest smile at the very center. For the first time I think to myself: I want to look like her when I grow up. I want to be as pretty as my mother.

I take the picture in my hand. I shuffle the others together even while they are wet, putting them facedown on the doormat. I am afraid they will get damaged. I am afraid they will fade and crack in the sun. They should be stored away somewhere inside, under the couch, on a bookshelf, hidden in a bedroom, where they will be safe.

Judith is giggling the whole time, snapping shots with the camera, one foot on the top step, trying to get the best angle. She has taken more than one picture, even though she promised just one. I want to tell her to get away. I want to take her camera and throw it in the gravel. I want to tell her that my mother is not a spectacle. She is regular. Like gasoline and boys’ haircuts and coftee with milk and sugar.

I put my mother’s pictures in a neat pile. I pick up her magazines. I gather her empty cups of lemonade and Lipton tea. I pull at the cushion until I find the wrappers: two flat packs of Milk Duds. I fold them into my hands. I will put everything in order. I will throw things away. I will take out the garbage. I will organize her cosmetics in the bathroom. I will clean the hair out of the shower drain. I will brush my teeth after every meal.

“Can you get the door?” I glare at Judith, my hands full. “Can you give me a hand, please?”

Judith says, “Just one more picture – a close-up.” She tiptoes to my mother’s rocker and points the Polaroid at her face, hardly a foot away.

“It’ll wake her up, you dummy,” I try to tell her, but she stoops over my mother’s face and snaps. The flash goes off and the camera spits out a picture.

My mother shuffles in her chair; she rubs her face and yawns. She opens her eyes and sees me and Judith. She doesn’t look happy at all.

“What in the hell is going on?” she says, pulling herself up. I swallow hard because I’ve never heard my mother cuss before. There are cookie crumbs and tissues on her lap, and when my mother stands up, she gives her dress a quick jerk to shake everything off.

“I thought you were painting your nails!” she says, looking us over.

“I’m cleaning up,” I say firmly. “Everything’s a mess.” I want to give a good reason. I want to sound responsible, but my mother looks at me like I’m doing something I shouldn’t.

She looks around and sees Judith with her camera. She spots the Polaroids on the porch floor.

“Did you take a picture of me?” she says, putting her hands on her hips. She loks at Judith, then at me. She sees what I have in my hand: her pictures, her wrappers, her plastic cups and tea bags, all of her garbage. She sees that I’m cleaning up after her. Her face has a terrible glow, a furious expression I’ve never seen before.

I hold up the picture of her at the apple tree. “Look what I found,” I say as quiet as I can. “You look so pretty.”

My mother bites down hard on her lower lip and hits me in the face. This is first time she has ever hit me. I am confused. I am like some little mouse cornered behind the refrigerator.

Without wanting to, I begin to cry. My eyes swell with hot water. I cannot help it. Everything gets warm and blurry. I look at Judith. Her face is pulled back in surprise. I know she has never seen my mother so angry.

“Go home,” I tell Judith, and she dashes down the stairs, straddles her bike, and pedals away.

I am left alone with my mother.

“You have no business taking my picture!” she says. Her face is a flurry of oils and lotion, bunched to a tight frown. “You have no business looking through my things.” She makes a great effort bending over, pulling up the Polaroids, folding them in half in her hands.

“You have no business sneaking up on me like that,” she says.

I hold everything to my chest, gripping the old photograph of my mother in my hand. I don’t even try to get away. I cannot move. I am dumb with surprise.

“What kind of a daughter are you?” my mother shrieks, and I am a dumb little girl, a dumb little daughter. I look at my feet, my plastic sandals, my baby toes with sand between them. My legs are shivering.

My mother steps back, and I spot the last Polaroid that Judith has taken. It is lying face up, at the foot of the porch. It was shot too close, I can tell, because there is nothing on it: an ugly blur of skin, the contour of something shapeless and white lost in a smudge of sudden movement. This is my mother, all of her skin and hair blurred into one unrecognizable thing.

My mother grabs my wrists. She tugs at my arms. She pulls at all the things in my hand.

“These are my things!” she is saying. “Let me have them.”

I let them go – the candy wrappers, the sour tea bags, the paper cups, the photograph of mother by the apple tree – all of her precious things. She can have them. They are hers.