Unmasking Mom

Megan Schindler

December 2005

The first time I saw my mother without makeup on, I thought she had died in the night. Stopped cold in the middle of the kitchen holding my cereal bowl; then I dropped the bowl and made a run for it. Took the nanny more than two hours to convince me that what I’d seen wasn’t a ghost, and by that time Mom was already on set, being made into somebody else.

That’s the nature of the business. If you have a self, you have to cover it up for the camera; and if you don’t, they give you one easily enough. Either way, the result is the same: a mask of plastic products designed to look like a face, whether it be a living or dead one.

Which is what flipped me out about Mom that day. She didn’t even look like she had a dead face; she looked naked up there, like she had been erased. In a split second, I imagined her as a pastel sketch on a life-sized canvas–that was it, somebody had replaced our kitchen with a canvas, a set piece, during the night–that had recently been rubbed out with putty. Like she didn’t look right, the image wasn’t quite what they wanted, and they’d have to do it again.

Later, with the nanny, I kept insisting that the person who’d been standing in our kitchen was a woman made up to look like Mom. They’d done a pretty rotten job of it, I said, and if they thought I was going to fall for a trick like that they had another think coming. I was a tough little kid, but dumb.

Now, though, things have changed some. Sitting beside her bed in the hospital, I don’t feel tough at all. But I don’t feel dumb either. I feel like an old man who’s wasted his life trying to build a staircase to the sun, only to reach the top on his last day and realize he’s barely left the ground.

The nurse comes in to check something. She bends around the bed and flips a switch on the wall.

"Thank you," I say. I hadn’t noticed the sun was setting.

"Got to be able to see her pretty face," she says cheerily.

In the fluorescent light, Mom looks like a bump in the sheets. The only thing that gives her any color is her mouth, which hangs open: a spot of black on white marble. If I take my glasses off, I can almost imagine her whole face as a cartoon eye, a round white ball with a black dot near the bottom. My mom’s face is Bugs Bunny looking down as he winks. Her shoulders could almost be his puffy cheeks.

It’s night now. All over the hospital lights are being flicked on by nurses who don’t notice dying people anymore. Bugs Bunny eyes are staring in a hundred directions. At least I can make Mom different. I reach up to her chin and close her mouth. Then I turn off the light.

I’m barely pulling into the driveway when a face like a harpy’s flashes in front of the headlights.

"Where have you been?"

"Shit, Pam. You scared me," I tell her. "Can you give me a second to park the car?"

Evidently, I’m putting her out; she peels off and stands next to the walkway, smoking a cigarette and tapping her foot.

"Come on, Derek, it’s freezing out here."

"Haste makes waste." I take my time parking and making my way to the door. Oops–can’t find my key. Is it in this pocket? No. Maybe my back pocket? Not there either. Did I leave it in the car?

"This is not funny."

The truth is, I’m not doing it to be funny. I was in a different mode until the moment when she attacked my windshield like a bat, and I’m actually having trouble moving out of it. I don’t know what to say to her and am acting like a fool to buy time.

"Thank God," she sighs, seeing that I’ve found my key.

I open the door. She barges in. Maybe she just wants to have a drink and watch some TV, I’m thinking. I’ll tell her I need a shower, and by the time I come back down she’ll be passed out on the sofa. Hoping for the best, I excuse myself and head upstairs to my room.

No such luck. She follows me. Flipping on the light before I’m even in the room–what is it with women and light?–she sashays across the carpet and flops onto the bed.

"I’m a mess," she announces.

Great. Here we go again. Resigned to a night of playing psychiatrist, I sit on the bed beside her and start taking my shoes off. It takes a few moments for me to realize she hasn’t said anything. Can’t she just say what she needs to and get out? I think, but again, no such luck. She’s waiting for her cue tonight.

"Oh, really?" I offer.

And she’s off. "I’m telling you, Derek, I just can’t take it anymore. I mean, if the customers changed every now and then, it’d be something. But it’s always the same old guys, night after night, staring like they never saw it before. And this after five nights in a row–five nights I worked this week, five nights I saw the same fucking guys. It’s not like they tip me anything–they just stare, not even wide-eyed, but more like my dad used to stare at me when I was a kid, like I’m a bug and they want to squash me. I swear, I think they’re stalkers, Derek. Every one of them."

"Have you ever seen one of them following you?"

"Not me. Somebody else, though. For sure they’re stalking somebody else." She punctuates the statement with one dramatic drag off her cigarette.

The woman makes me laugh. I can’t help it. Pam’s fun to be around sometimes; you just have to be in the mood for her. Ninety-nine percent of the time you’re not, but she can get you there. She has a talent for manipulating men’s moods.

We’ve dated every now and then, I’m ashamed to admit. Like I said, sometimes I just can’t help it. But I can only take so much of her, so usually we last a week or two before I kick her out. She, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be able to get enough of me.

"Wanna have sex?" she says.

I shake my head. "I’m not really in the mood for it."

"Well, I am." After lighting another cigarette, she rolls over onto her belly to face me. She pushes her tits together in that way girls do when they know what they’re after and tells me this: "I’ve been horny all night. Watching the other girls dance turns me on, baby. Is that weird?"

"Um... I don’t think so."

Pam giggles and inches closer. "You remember Tiana? The redhead?" I nod.

"Well, there was this guy there tonight–and I’m telling you, he was hot, baby. Young, tall, a rod about as thick as my arm–"

"How could you possibly know that?" Pam. She’s a great girl and all, but she does have a tendency to exaggerate.

"I could see it through his pants. Cause she was all up on him–Tiana. Had her stuff right in his face, rubbing it up and down like he was giving her head. And I swear, that boy was about to shove his face in it. You should have him."

She rambles on. For the moment, I’m stuck on the thought of Tiana, whose dance style I remember very well. She was the first girl I laid eyes on when I first went into the place–it was either for a bachelor or a bachelorette party, I can’t remember–and I thought, yeah, this is the one I’ve been looking for all my life.

She was about five foot ten, with all the typical trimmings of a Hollywood stripper, and she danced like she was made out of rubber. But that wasn’t what got me. It was her face: she had the sweetest, most innocent face I’d ever seen. Like Shirley Temple Barbie or something.

Pam and I first got together when I paid her to spy for me, to find out if Tiana was available. If I’d known back then how tricky Pam was, I would never have asked her to do it. But at the time she just seemed like a friendly old-timer, a woman who’d been stripping for so long she’d seen her tips peak and fall and was now just hanging on because she didn’t know what else to do.

When I look at her now, I see a totally different person. Deceitful. Vengeful. Bitter. A pretty good lay when the chips are down, and not so scrupulous that sex has to mean something. I’m wishing she were Tiana; she’s most likely wishing I were the guy she saw in the bar. Anyway, I start to touch her just to shut her up and pretty soon we’re going at it. It’s worth the trouble, for a change.

I wake up and reach for my cell phone to check the time. It’s almost ten o’ clock. I have seven new messages, which I ignore.

"Wake up, Pam." She snuggles deeper into the covers. Being here is a luxury for her, I know, like a kind of vacation from the grit of her real life. But at the moment, I don’t care.

"Come on." I shake her until she opens her eyes. "Time to get up. I got things to do."

She’s not happy about it, but she sits up. Apparently, she put her clothes back on after I fell asleep and before she crawled under the covers. Or did I just forget to take them off? Looking more like a harpy than ever, she yawns and lifts another cigarette to her lips.

"Let’s go, Pam," I say, pulling up my pants.

She exhales a stream of smoke under the covers. "Watch this." After a moment, she raises the blanket again; a thin puff of smoke rises into the air.

"That’s gross."

"Who cares? I know you were going to wash them tonight anyway."

The comment makes me wonder how perceptive she is while I finish getting dressed. Sure, she knows I’m not interested in dating her, but she couldn’t possibly know I’m repulsed by her. She wouldn’t sleep with me if she did. That’s the thing about Pam: being wanted gets her going. Her need for attention is what got her into stripping in the first place.

"I need some money, Derek. I didn’t make enough today."

"How much did you make?"

She eyes me for a moment. "Fifty."

"Yeah, right. I’ll bet a hundred and fifty at the very least," I say as I begin the search for my missing sock. It never fails: the only time you lose one is when you’re dying to get out in a hurry.

"Come on, baby. It’s the end of the month, I got bills coming up, and you know I got ripped off on the bus a couple weeks ago–oh, didn’t I tell you?–and I’ve already talked to my boss, he’s gonna let me work overtime next week, so I can pay you–"

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