Lipstick

Mama’s old dresser was shoved against a lavender wall. At least it was lavender once. Now the wall was stained by cigarette smoke – dingy and drab like the rest of the house. Ashtrays shared space with tattered paperback novels, empty beer bottles and a homemade birthday card. They overflowed with butts –Chesterfields. There are no lipstick stains on them. Mama didn’t put on lipstick unless she was going out. Then she daubed on color and doused herself with cologne. Her smeared red mouth made her look alien and angry and unfamiliar. I wanted to yell “Your mouth looks like a chicken’s ass” but I didn’t.

After Mama left, I went back into the bedroom, sat on Mama’s unmade bed and looked at myself through the dust on the mirror and promised myself I would never wear lipstick. I opened the top drawer. There was nothing in there but an assortment of undergarments. There were a few dingy cotton brassieres and some cotton underpants with stretched elastic and stained crotches. I absent-mindedly began folding the drawer’s contents. Then I opened another drawer. This one smelled sweet and musty. It contained a rectangular wooden chest, a heart shaped box and cardboard box. I opened the chest first. Inside I found an assortment of brooches, necklaces, hat pins and ribbons. Odd, I thought, because I couldn’t remember ever seeing Mama wear jewelry or other finery. Just her wedding ring. She never took that off. I picked out one of the brooches at random and pinned it onto my blouse. Then I pulled back my hair back and tied it up with a red grosgrain ribbon. I examined herself in the dusty mirror. Did I look like my Mama? I returned the chest to the drawer and took out the heart shaped box. I was disappointed to find it was empty. I brought the box to my nose and sniffed. I could detect the faintest hint of chocolate. I wondered why Mama had saved an empty box. The cardboard container was heavy. I took it over to the unmade bed and removed the lid. It was full of photographs. I recognized myself in some of them. In one I was sitting on the front porch of our house on South Woodlawn Avenue holding an Easter basket. In another I was sitting on a vinyl sofa with my arm around Ivy. We were wearing matching dresses. Most of the photographs were of people I didn’t recognize. In one of the old picture two tired looking woman stood in front of a wagon surrounded by three children – an older boy and two young girls. No one in the picture was smiling. Odd, I thought. Wasn’t it a rule that you were supposed to smile when someone pointed a camera at you? Whenever Aunt Pearl had pointed her brownie camera at me, I’d always smiled even when I didn’t feel like it. There was a picture of a young man rowing an odd looking boat. It looked something like a skiff but not as wide and it came to a point in the front and back. The young man was smiling. He looked relaxed and carefree and like he was having a very good time in his strange little boat. I turned the picture over. On the back someone had written “Virgil – California – 1939”. The happy boy in the picture was my Daddy. I put all the other pictures back in the box but I slipped the picture of Daddy into my pocket. I put the box back in the drawer and closed it. Before I left Mama’s room I re-opened the top drawer and unfolded and re-jumbled the contents I forgot to take off the ribbon and brooch.

I never knew what to expect out of Mama. Things would be going along sweet as pie and then in the blink of an eye she’d just knock the living daylights out of me for no reason at all. Other times she treated me real nice- more like a grown up than a child. “You’re a big girl. You’ve got to be my strength. You and me have to look out for the rest of them. Ain’t nobody but us now, Clara.”
During those times it was almost as if she liked me.

Like the time the REA cut off our electric. Mama came in one night to find Aunt Sarah, Ivy and me sitting in the dark staring at a blank television.

“Why are you idiots sitting here in the dark?”

Aunt Sarah didn’t move her eyes from the screen.” They came out this morning and turned off the electric, Rose. Said we were three months behind.”

“Shit!” Mama went into the front room and got two kerosene lanterns. She put one on top of the television and one on Aunt Sarah’s Bible table. Aunt Sarah pointed at the television. “Well at least we ain’t sitting in the dark, but how do we get the television to work?” Mama looked at me as she spoke like she expected me to answer her.

Lucky for me I’d been trying to figure out what to do. “Well, we could run extension cords to Uncle Benjamin’s house and plug them in to the back of the television set.”

Mama lit her cigarette and stood there for a minute like she was thinking about my plan. She took a long drag on her Chesterfield and blew the smoke out before she said anything. “Where are we going to get an extension cord long enough to stretch all the way to Benjamin’s?”

I’d thought about that too. “There’s lots of them out in the brooder house.” We used them to run electricity out to the biddy heaters in the winter.

“Well I’ll be damned. I like it. It just might work. Let’s give it a shot. Come on and help me, Clara. This was your idea.”

I think the thing that appealed the most to Mama was the notion of stealing electricity from Uncle Benjamin. We piled all the cords into the skiff and rowed over to Uncle Benjamin’s boathouse where we plugged them in. Then we rowed back, stretching the cords along his dock and through the cattails. “I think we are just going to make it, Mama.”

“That’s my girl. I swear and be damned. This is something your Daddy would have dreamed up. He would have been proud of you.”