All You Get Is Me by Yvonne Prinz

Author:Yvonne Prinz [Prinz, Yvonne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-05-23T21:20:38+00:00

Chapter 12

My mom always kept a tube of Chanel lipstick on a little table near the front door of our house. Her shade was Shanghai Red. A little tin mirror with a silver peacock attached to the top of it hung directly above the table. The last thing she would do as she was going out the door was expertly apply her lipstick. She had the kind of coloring that comes alive with red lipstick. It made her eyes dance and her skin look like porcelain. She also had a vast collection of vintage sunglasses, which she shopped for relentlessly in secondhand shops and at garage sales. She had every shape and color you could imagine, including plaid and leopard print. She also had a couple of cat’s-eye pairs with little rhinestones at the temples. One pair that I remember loving more than the rest had a large, squareish cream-colored frame and amber lenses. Whenever she wore those, she would tie a silk scarf around her black hair so that she looked like someone who lived on the Italian Riviera and drove around on a Vespa saying, “Ciao, bella!” Of course this was all before she changed into someone else.

Back then my mom and I always delighted in dressing up. Every time we stepped outside the house we saw it as another opportunity to be someone else. My mom never edited my outfits. If I showed up at the breakfast table in a bathing suit, knee-high vinyl boots, and a gorilla mask, she would smile and ask me what I’d like to eat.

My mom was a great playmate. Nothing was too messy or too hard or too silly for her. If we made anything to eat, no matter how simple, we always pretended that we were taping a cooking show and we’d look up and address our studio audience as we tutored them in the fine art of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. If we got on an elevator, we’d pretend to be spies, and a trip to the playground was an important archaeological dig. A nature walk was always an Andean or an Arctic expedition narrated by me or my mother, in a British accent.

For reasons I never understood, my mom refused to buy me any dolls. She told me that she didn’t like the gender roles imposed on little girls by encouraging them to “play house” or take care of fake babies. I did own a few dolls, though. I bought them myself with my allowance at garage sales and secondhand stores, the same places my mom found her sunglasses. I treated them as though they were little mannequins. Instead of playing with them I would dress them up in outfits designed from scraps of fabric and costume jewelry and toilet paper. I would pose them around a little table piled high with food and plastic farm animals on little platters, as if they were posing for a Dutch master to paint.

Before I started school, my mom would take me out

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.