Unmasking Mom

Megan Schindler

December 2005

Silently, I toss her my wallet, which she pilfers for cash. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t let her near it, but there’s only a hundred bucks in there–a fact which she notices with a frown.

She doesn’t say anything, though. Just takes it and gives the wallet back.

"Have you seen my other sock?"

With a smile, Pam pulls it out of her back pocket. "I was planning on holding it for ransom."

I put it on. "Here’s a tip," I tell her. "Next time, steal something a little more valuable."

"Like your watch?"

I feel my naked wrist. "Yes, for example."

She smiles and drops it into my palm.

"You got anything else?"

"I guess you’ll find out eventually."

Great. I don’t care much about the stuff, of course; it’s the thought of seeing Pam again soon that bothers me. But it’s my fault for not running her over when I had the chance tonight.

"Just get out before I spank you," I say–but she has already sidled out the door.

Thank goodness she’s gone. I go to check my reflection in the bathroom mirror, run some gel through my hair, and head back downstairs and out. Things to do. First things first: I have to talk to Freddy.

Around 10:30, I show up at his place, and it’s already packed. Since before I was born, Freddy’s been throwing three parties a week, minimum, at his house in the hills. It’s Hollywood history; he’s probably in all the guidebooks by now. My mom and he met at one of the first ones, back when she was still a starlet. I guess that’s all history now, too.

Of the hundreds of stars and innumerable wannabes who’ve partied in this house, about half are probably dead. Freddy, however–despite the odds of overdosing, drinking oneself to death, or going broke–has endured. Sometimes I hope I have his longevity gene; most times I don’t.

I leave my car with the valet and climb the pebblestone drive to the house. There are about half a dozen people smoking weed outside; someone tries to pass to me, but I decline. I’m starting to feel guilty about lost time, and guilt always puts me in a bad mood. Pushing through the circle, I open the door and go in.

Dim red light, music, and smoke pour into the doorway, their combined effect nearly choking me before I can take off my coat. There are a hundred bodies in the foyer, dancing, drinking, gabbing, smoking–doing all the things I like to do sometimes, when I’m in the mood–but I’m not right now. So when Sam and Marty call me from across the room, I ignore them. In a room stuffed with ninety-five women, I feel sure they won’t mind.

And the women–they’re stifling. White ones, black ones, gold ones, brown ones. Tall, short, curvy, skinny, long-legged, big-breasted, classy, trashy, anything a guy could ever want. Even at seventy, Freddy can’t get enough of them. I’m only thirty-five, but I’ve had enough. To me, they’re like a bunch of tropical flowers as I fight my way through the jungle.

"Derek!" Somebody grabs my arm and jerks me aside. "Haven’t seen you around in a while."

I have no idea who he is, but I smile and clap him on the shoulder.

"Hey, man! How’ve you been?"

"You been hiding from us or what?" He leans closer to my face and exhales a pungent chortle.

"Are you kidding me, man? No, look, you know how it is."

"Can I buy you a drink?"

After a second, I realize he’s kidding. We laugh at the idea of him buying a drink for the son of the host. He knows I’m Freddy’s son, then. Must be somebody I’ve known for a while. Or maybe he knows Freddy and we’ve only met once. Staring at him a little harder, I have to admit I just can’t remember.

"Freddy around?" I ask him.

"Haven’t seen him."

It’s a convenient way to excuse myself. Having shaken his hand and promised to stop back by for a shot, I head for the back room, where Freddy usually entertains the invited guests.

Down a short staircase, a door with a blue light hanging over it stands partially open. Phil, who I’ve come to believe is Freddy’s bodyguard, though I’ve never actually seen them together, is standing in the hallway. He takes up so much space that I can hardly get by, which I suspect is the point.

"Hey, kid," Freddy greets me when I finally squeeze in. I have trouble finding him in the dark. Once my eyes adjust, I see him sitting with three other men at a table in the corner.

"No girls tonight, Dad?"

"I wasn’t in the mood."

Approaching the table, I see that they’re playing some kind of card game I don’t understand. There are only high cards on the table, sometimes more than one of them–two aces of spades, for example. After pretending to be interesting in the game for a polite minute or two, I say, "Well, that’s unusual."

Freddy looks up for the first time. "Give me a break, kid. I’m not that heartless."

He goes back to his cards. What was that supposed to mean? I wonder. Judging by the number of girls he’s plucked and dropped back off on Sunset Boulevard over the years–well, he may not be heartless, but his heart folds up into a convenient stowaway bag when necessary.

"Oh, come on," I challenge him at last. "You can’t pretend you’ve been living a monk’s life ever since Mom got diagnosed with cancer."

Freddy lays his cards on the table and looks up at me with a funny expression on his face. "No, I haven’t," he says.

"Then why start today?"

Suddenly, I realize that the other men are looking at me, too. I feel uncomfortable, like I’ve interrupted something much more serious than a card game.

"Why are you here, Derek?" he asks, a pinch of irritation in his voice.

"To tell you that she’s gotten really bad." Ignoring the expressions on their faces, I continue, "Look, I know you probably don’t care about her anymore, but I thought you might want to see her before she dies."

"She’s already dead, Derek."

I don’t believe him.

"Go turn on your radio, for Christ’s sake."

Whoever does makeup for funerals should get into the movie business. I haven’t seen Mom looking this good since she was in Leda and the Swan. Like her old self again, almost.

They’ve got pictures of her in every stage of her life–except the last one–lined up along the tables outside the visitation room. Friends and family only allowed inside. I hear a fight break out at one point and head outside just in time to see Pam sock the funeral home attendant.

"I didn’t think you’d show up," I tell her, pulling her in before the guy can think to fight back.

"Why?"

I shrug. Maybe I was wrong about her.

Afterwards, I take all the photos home and line them up along the bedroom wall. I’m playing a little game with myself to see if I can identify which one was my mom.

They’re all so different. This one was before I was born. She was a showgirl, like Marilyn Monroe only never as famous. One of the girls the men in Hollywood wait for. Some, like Mom, are lucky enough to grow into women; others, like Tiana and Pam, never make it. Thank God I don’t remember her this way.

In this one, she looks like my mother, only much more alive. Probably because this was from a film in which she played a seductive divorcee. It was the year I started school, I think, because I remember her picking me up with her hair styled like that–but she never had that look on her face. I know the look; I’ve seen it a thousand times on the screen. But if I try to recollect it on her living face, I can’t. Her look was more–more–

Here’s one of her Oscar performance. I hardly saw her that year, and times weren’t good when I did. In the photo she looks beautiful, proud; I remember her as a woman growing old, her nerves frayed to the point that she couldn’t stand to be with me in a well-lit room. The few times I was with her that year, she broke down crying after an hour or two.

And there are others. They seem to fade as she grows older. For a moment, I wonder what the reporters would have done if I’d placed a photo of her last day on the table. Or Pam–what would she have done? Would she have seen herself in the body of the dying woman and determined to change–asked me to marry her, or become a teacher?

What about Freddy–how would he have reacted? Would the photo have singed him with the fear of his own impending death–it couldn’t be long now–and made him hurl himself into the mass of dancing bodies at his parties, to see what hell was like before he got there? Or would it have reminded him of some little bit of humanity he saw in her thirty years ago–a spark of life, which he had then decided to take for himself?

One by one, I take the photos out of their frames and toss them in the trash. They’re worth nothing now; my mother’s face has been masked and photographed and copied so many millions of times that it hardly matters if she doesn’t have one anymore.

I take out a pen. I don’t know how to draw, but I don’t think it really matters. On a sheet of notebook paper, I begin to sketch the form of a face, the face of a woman smiling. I hold it up to the light. Yes. There’s something of her there. It doesn’t look anything like her pictures, but somehow more than any of them, it looks like Mom.

Megan Schindler is an emerging-- i.e., practically unpublished-- writer of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or anything else an editor will take. A graduate student at the University of Southern California, she suffers in Los Angeles with her 17-pound cat, Meatball.

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