Mama Makes Up Her Mind by Bailey White

Author:Bailey White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press

The Lips of a Stranger

We should have known things were not going well when Mama found a tick doing isometrics under her panty hose. Nothing along the tick’s trudge up the evolutionary ladder had prepared him for panty hose, and he was exhausting himself scrambling and heaving against the nylon. Every now and then one of his knees would punch through the mesh. Mama and Louise and I were on our way to a cousin’s wedding. It was a big wedding. She was marrying someone from “outside,” and we had been told to look sharp.

“I’ve got to get him out of there,” Mama said. “I have to go in from the top, and I can’t do it sitting down. Besides, I’ve got to pull this panty hose up one more time before we go into church.” Mama doesn’t wear panty hose often, and she had bought queen size by mistake—she thought it meant the size of the average queen. The panty hose drooped around her legs in swags, and after she walked a few steps, the crotch would work its way down and appear below the hem of her dress, like a spectral pudendum. She started to pull off the road.

“You can’t stop,” my sister said. “We’re late already.” Nobody spoke. We were late because Louise had decided at the last minute that her knit dress made her look like a zipper. “It didn’t look like this in the catalog!” she had wailed, eyeing herself sideways. Finally, after striking pose after pose in front of the mirror, she had discovered one rigid posture that was satisfactory, and with the fierce concentration of a tightrope walker she had maintained it since we left the house. Now she looked something like a ruler, the kind with the metal edge.

I was sitting in the backseat, admiring my lips in the rearview mirror. My cousin had given me some lipstick—not the ordinary kind but some beautiful iridescent goo in a little plastic tub with a screw-off top. Pot o’ Gloss it was called; you rubbed it on with your finger. Now my lips looked and felt like the lips of someone I had never known. I had to keep them slightly parted, because when they touched, they were so slick they would skate across each other and leave little pearly smears of Pot o’ Gloss all around the edges.

We came to the intersection of Highway 319 and Butter and Egg Road. The cars on 319 were whizzing along, passing each other and honking their horns. Butter and Egg Road is dirt. Mama is a careful driver. She doesn’t take risks. She always takes Butter and Egg Road.

“You’re not going on Butter and Egg Road!” my sister commanded. “We’ll get stuck. Look how muddy it is.”

“Better to be stuck on Butter and Egg Road than killed on 319,” Mama pronounced. “Besides, look at that set of tire tracks. Somebody made it through.”

Louise allowed herself one huge sigh, then snatched herself upright again. We sloughed out onto Butter and Egg Road.

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