Things I'm Seeing Without You by Peter Bognanni

Author:Peter Bognanni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

22

I went back to Sunrise the next day.

I worried about what to tell my dad, but when I woke up he wasn’t there. I’d heard him talking on the phone the night before, giggling like an idiot, but that was the only thing out of the ordinary. So I drove back to the commons and showed up during visiting hours. When I got back to the Memory Care Unit, I immediately saw two men get into a screaming match over a game of Connect Four. They had to be sent to their rooms like children. I started to wonder if I had it in me to hang around this place.

This all changed when I found Mamie.

“Tilly!” she called to me, when I showed up.

“Hi, Mamie,” I said.

I didn’t correct her about my name. Though, what my dad said about her lucidity flashed through my brain.

“Come with me,” she said. “It’s my day in the salon. I’ve got to get my hair set!”

She took me down to the on-site hair salon, and soon her head was full of pink curlers. I wasn’t sure how to start talking to her about her funeral. But she jumped right in. Before we could move forward with the planning, she said, I needed to know something about burlesque. So Mamie Lee started to tell her story.

“I left Minnesota for Hollywood first,” she said. “But after doing some work in the chorus lines, a promoter saw me and thought I’d be good for his club in New York. He told me I could have top billing if I didn’t mind showing a little more.”

She blushed, but just for a second.

“You have to understand, though, Tilly. It’s not like it is now with girls showing everything down there and working on greasy poles. It was glamorous! A show. And it was about the tease. At Minsky’s, I once took two whole minutes to remove a glove! The guys went crazy for it. They jumped out of their seats! What do you think happened when they saw my bazooms?!”

I started recording Mamie on my cell phone camera, so I could remember some of this. I focused on the little flip of her white hair with her manicured hand. If she noticed my recording, she didn’t seem to care.

“There were a lot of men,” she went on. “But I never went in for the comedians. I was into the sax players myself. They wailed on the stuff that got us going crazy. And there was this one player who was so nervous around me. I used to look him in the eye while he was playing and wait for him to miss a note. Once I left my pasties on his dressing room door. He was just a boy, really. I missed him when I quit performing, but I never did talk to him again.”

“Why’d you give it up?” I asked.

For a moment, Mamie looked like a statue of herself, sitting there, completely still. Then she spoke out of the corner of her mouth.

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