American Thighs (4 page)

You would smile if you saw her now because she is completely purple—head to toe—hair, skin, nails—all but her teeth and the whites of her eyes—she is purple. Not blotchy or patchy—she's a smooth, consistent, really quite lovely shade of purple. Like Blue Man Group—only just the one girl and purple. Like a Smurfette—only purple. The part in her hair is a bit vivid—kinda looks like maybe Girlene got after her with a neon purple Sharpie—but other than that, she is a perfect monochrome of purple.

It seems that Bailey went by to pick up Mary Katherine—who was still white at curbside but had some kind of goo on her
hair, which she said she would deal with when they got to our house. Bailey said fine but they had to pick up Jodie on the way. Mary Katherine was getting just a wee bit antsy about whatever it was that was on her hair. So much so that upon entering our house, she bee-lined it straight into MY bathroom and hopped in the shower. Fortunately for all concerned, neither The Cutest Boy in the World nor I were in the shower at the time.

Jodie went upstairs to shower in Bailey's bathroom and Bailey just flopped on MY bed—again, it was fortuitous that TCBITW and I were elsewhere that evening—turned on
Law & Order
and forgot about Mary Katherine for a time. Eventually, the sound of the continuously running shower registered in her brain and she realized that Mary Katherine had been in there for what seemed an inordinately long time. And about that time, the water stopped, the shower door opened, and the screaming began.

“BAILEY! BAILEY! BAILEY! OMIGOD! BAILEY!” And just as Jack McCoy was saying something really important to Lennie Briscoe, too. Bailey grudgingly hit the pause button and opened the door to the bathroom—and there before her stood a screaming, naked, purple girl. It was Mary Katherine—only purple and hysterical.

Mary Katherine learned—as did we all that night—that there is a most EXCELLENT reason why they have black shampoo sinks at beauty salons—and there is also a most EXCEL
LENT reason why they have you lean waaaay back and put your head over in there, and that same most EXCELLENT reason applies to how come they have you put on a smock over your clothes, and it's why they wear gloves when they fool with your hair while it's got the goo on it. That most EXCELLENT reason is that it's DYE.

No one knows, no one will ever know—probably including Mary Katherine—exactly why it was that she wanted to dye her hair purple that night. But no one will ever forget it. Certainly not her—I don't think anything in life will ever surprise her quite as much as realizing she had dyed her EN-tire body purple. Not Bailey—one is never really adequately prepared to segue with no preamble from a Jack McCoy monologue to a dripping purple screamer in your mother's bathroom. Not the folks at the Cherokee who called her “Oompa-Loompa” all night. And not me either—I've got the purple shower to remind me.

Hair Today, Gone Momentarily

If Mother Nature had wanted you to have hair (anywhere), She would have given it to you (and left it there), and apparently She doesn't take kindly to poseurs of any kind—given the wrack and ruin we see visited on those of us who have tried to convince the world that we are anything that we are not—from big
busted to blond (or purple, as the case may be). She also apparently does not care for us to pretend that we have hair—hoo-hoo or head—as we shall see from the following testimony.

Queen Martha once got herself a very fine head of on-again, off-again big blond hair in the form of a very fine wig. She did love prancing around, feeling so foxy and fine with that big-ass blond wig.

Speaking of “big ass,” let me pause for a moment here and explain something to folks in Other Parts of the Country who may have been baffled by the Southern Woman's undying devotion to Big Hair. Here's the deal: it's not so much that we necessarily love Big Hair for its own sake as we do what it does for our overall balance. Bottom line—Big Hair makes your butt look smaller.

I myownself am a proponent of not only Big Hair but also long jackets on account of my butt is so huge, if I were to put on hair big enough to balance the thing, I would not be able to fit in normal-sized automobiles, and forget about walking through standard-sized doorways. So, I will put on my travel hair, which, at the very least, quadruples the size of my own hair, and then completely cover my overly ample ass with a very long jacket. I feel so strongly about my personal need for long jackets that I will tell you flat-out, if I am ever found dead wearing a short jacket, you will know that I was dead before that jacket went on.

So anyway, Queen Martha had her a big-ass blond wig. (I'm certain her ass was just as tiny as a little ole baby butter bean
and she really did not need any balancing for it a-tall.) She was in full party-prance across a crowded patio once, and she admits to being somewhat distracted—okay, she was completely mesmerized—by her own fetching reflection in the big sliding glass doors, when her prance carried her directly under a hanging basket full of ferns—which would have posed no clearance problem for her without her augmented hair situation, but as it was…Yes, she continued moving forward while her supplemental hair remained hanging right along with the basket, swaying slightly in the soft breeze.

Now, everybody's worn a hat or cap of some kind at some time or other, so you know either firsthand or by casual observation the devastating effects they have on hairdos. Hat hair is hideous—all flat and greasy-looking—which is probably why you had the hat on to begin with, to hide your already flat and greasy-looking hair—so when you take the hat off, that condition is significantly exacerbated.

If you've never personally had occasion to wear a wig, let's have a word about “wig head.” Multiply the Hideous Factor of Hat Hair by the biggest number you can think of—then double it. When you take a wig off, it makes your hair look like Girlene's pubes—or perhaps Trent Lott's hair—like it was drawn on with a Sharpie.

This was the vision of herself that Queen Martha viewed in the patio doors—that and the doubled-over figures of her fellow partygoers. She can't clearly recall which sound was
louder—her own shriek of horror or the hysterical hee-haws of the onlookers—they still echo like the howling of hellhounds in her memory.

Horribly Hairifying

But Queen Martha's wig woes were nothing compared to what happened to another Queen who will mercifully remain nameless. Well, we'll call her Tammy, just because it's a name we all know, love, and identify closely with.

Let me set the stage for you here. In the early sixties, when Big Hair was born, thanks to Jackie Kennedy and her enviable bouffant, many trade tricks were developed for hair enlargement. Singer Dusty Springfield had a truly amazing coiffure featuring big bouffs in several locations on her head—front, back, top, sides—an architectural wonder is all it was and the whole world of women was dead to copy it, and this included our Queen Tammy.

I have no idea how Dusty achieved her look—she had, after all, I'm sure, a team of hair professionals laboring night and day to maintain it—but the style inevitably trickled down to the aspiring fashion plates of a certain high school in Florence, Alabama—of which our Tammy was but one—however, a dedicated and very enthusiastically creative one.

Tammy found that by employing an ingenious combination
of tools readily available even in Florence, Alabama, she could erect an almost exact replica of the coveted Dusty Springfield Bouffant on her very own personal head. The first item she needed was a couple of wiglets. Wiglets were an early incarnation of Travel Hair—small handfuls of hair that one could secure at various points on one's head to supplement the supply of hair growing naturally. They came in about four colors and looked vaguely reminiscent of hair, and so if you stuck it underneath some of your actual hair and combed over it, satisfactory blending could be accomplished and a desirable pouf achieved.

But even with the addition of three or four wiglets' worth of hair, Tammy's hair could not be harassed into the desired height for the Dusty Springfield. Through what I'm sure was much trial and error—although after hearing this story, I'm wildly curious as to what all she REJECTED as an acceptable add-on—somehow Tammy made the unbelievable discovery that if she took an ordinary Kotex feminine napkin (I always loved that name) and pinned it TO THE TOP OF HER HEAD, she could then cover it with a combination of her own hair and her wiglets and VOYOLA—she could pass for Dusty Springfield anywhere, at least as far as hairstyles went.

A word about the Kotex thing. They were huge—like loaves of bread almost—minipads were decades away. I cannot personally imagine having enough hair growing on my head not only to attach three or four wiglets to—but then to also completely COVER a big giant Kotex with it? I'm thinking the head
of hair that could do all THAT was plenty big to start with, and by the time she got done, her head musta looked like a hot-air balloon.

But anyway, she got away with this bizarre subterfuge for many, many months, to the mystified envy of all her friends. To NO ONE would she reveal the foundation of her very bouffiest of bouffants—and I can certainly understand her need for secrecy. And everything was fine, as they say, UNTIL…Her secret would probably have been safe for all eternity if she had just stayed off that roller coaster.

Uphill was fine but she lost one wiglet on the first downhill and one on nearly every subsequent scream-filled swoosh and turn. Of course, she and everybody else on the ride remained oblivious to the happenings on her head until they coasted back in to the starting point—where she arrived, bouffless, wearing nothing on her head but a big fluffy white Kotex pinned VERY SECURELY to the top of her head.

She got a pixie cut the very next day.

V
ivid Memory: I am fourteen and therefore infinitely wise—and supremely confident in that wisdom. This wisdom renders me totally without patience where any Mere Ordinary Mortals might be concerned. (The Mere Ordinary Mortals group—MOM—being comprised primarily of My Mother, whose every communication with me is met with heaving sighs and rolling eyeballs.) I cannot—and really have no desire to—comprehend that any MOM may have, in fact, had an Actual Life before I and my contemporaries arrived on the scene. I cannot call up any vision of them, say, dancing with abandon, trying out the latest fashion, laughing over cocktails with girlfriends—and just forget about ANYTHING with BOYfriends.

No, in my fourteen-year-old mind's eye, the MOM have al
ways done what my own personal MOM unit is doing right now—standing at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes from the supper they just cooked for and served to me. The MOM have always been here, serving me—in an endless cycle of cooking, cleaning, toting, and fetching—all centered, in my mind deservedly, around me. They did not exist before Me—because there was no Reason for them to do so. I Am—and therefore, So Are They. It is, and ever will be, ALL about ME.

Suddenly, the MOM at the kitchen sink speaks, no doubt in response to some insufferable teenage remark I have made in her direction. What she says will echo in my mind for decades to come. And with the passing of each consecutive decade, I will be reminded of what a complete and total asshole I was as a teenager and I will also become less and less confident that I have improved much in that time.

What the MOM says is this: “I don't really FEEL any different inside today—than I did when I was YOUR age.” If she had picked up a pair of giant cymbals and crashed them together with my pinhead in between them, I don't think I could have been any more stupefied than I was by those words.

I turned slowly in my chair and looked at her back, saw that she was stooping slightly as she washed the dishes because at five feet eleven inches, the countertop was too low for her. I saw her gray hair—that had never in my memory been any other color. I saw her old lady clothes, covering her old lady body, her old lady feet splayed out in her old lady shoes. She was, after all,
OVER forty, and therefore, in my mind, as good as dead—and yet she had just said out loud to me that SHE still felt exactly the same TODAY as she did when she was MY AGE.

My first thought, of course, was that she meant she had always FELT the way she LOOKED to me. I visualized her going to her high school pep rallies in her “old lady comfort” (that is what she called 'em) shoes and her old lady dresses with her old lady gray hair maybe pulled back in a pathetic attempt at a perky ponytail. I could just see her standing there, perhaps with some clothes for the dry cleaners under one arm, a pile of discarded newspapers under the other, looking preoccupied—not cheering for the team but rather, perhaps, wondering if she'd remembered to take anything out of the freezer to cook for supper—and impatiently waiting for all these people to clear out so she could get her vacuuming done, and didn't anybody EVER think to wipe their feet—what, were they born in a barn? And did they have to be so LOUD? Don't be making all that racket in here—go out in the yard if you want to act like wild animals—and DON'T SLAM THE DOOR! And don't be jumping around like that, you're gonna put somebody's eye out—don't come crying to ME when you break your neck! Go back and change clothes, miss priss, you're gonna freeze your japonica
*
in that skirt.
Don't leave all this mess for ME to clean up—I KNOW y'all don't leave this kinda mess at DARLENE'S house—I am NOT your MAID!

Of course, in my imagination, all her contemporaries (the Mere Ordinary Mortals/mothers of my friends)—THEY all appeared to be young and vital, like so many puppies cavorting happily in the sunshine. My own mother is the only one in my mind who was born Old. From the vantage point afforded me by my staggering teenage conceit, I simply could not conceive of HER EVER having been young.

And yet here she is—telling me not only WAS she young—but she STILL FEELS THAT WAY. I could scarcely breathe—it gave me an attack of claustrophobia. Now I saw her as a young person trapped in the body of an old woman and she seemed to me to be like someone sentenced to life in prison without parole—life was going on as usual all around her, but she could not get out of that wrecked cage of a body to which she'd been consigned forever.

Like
The Man in the Iron Mask
—only she was The Woman in the Flabby Body—just as horrifying a fate, in my opinion. Actually worse. At least nobody but the prison staff ever SAW the Man in the Iron Mask—my Mother, on the other hand, had to go out every day in public and be SEEN—IN THAT TERRIBLE BODY—IN THOSE AWFUL OLD LADY CLOTHES—and here she is telling me that she still FEELS like she's a teenager. Oh, the horror!

I imagine if I myself had to even walk out in the front YARD in that housedress, with those shoes and that hair—in that BODY—well, I would just rather be dead and by the quickest, most private means possible—and then, if you would, please, just cremate the wretched remains on the spot.

Self-satisfied in my all-consuming Teenage Smug, I somehow subconsciously believed that I personally would not EVER age, that MY skin would remain sleek and taut around my ever-lean frame, that MY muscles would always promptly obey whatever command my ever-sharp brain issued and that MY perky tits and ass would ever BE perky. I didn't imagine that the MOM felt any sense of grief or loss at her own condition because, in my mind, it had not changed. It wasn't like she ever once HAD anything like my own exquisite perfection and had somehow allowed it to deteriorate—to me, she'd always BEEN just as she was NOW. “When you got nothin', you got nothin' to lose”—seemed apropos.

On the other hand, I had another parent—my in-house representative of the Doting and Delightfuls (DAD), who always seemed handsome and dashing to me—and so that got me to thinking—how did this old lady snag such a PRIZE? He didn't strike me as having a Granny Complex, and yet here he was, blissfully wedded to the hag I saw at the sink. Hmmmm.

And so to the old family albums I went, and for the first time, I actually SAW the people in the photos that did not contain ME. At any past perusals, any photos lacking my gracious
presence were thumbed past quickly—blah, blah, blah, crowd noise, crowd noise, crowd noise—ahhh—here we are now—ME, ME, ME!

Suddenly, the young GIRL playing with her dog, trying on a funny hat, making faces for the camera, skiing, sailing, riding horses, smiling ear-to-ear—that young GIRL became real to me. And she was followed closely by the young WOMAN—dressed to kill, makeup and hair perfect, posing with one handsome young man after another, until finally there was just One Handsome Young Man over and over in the photos—and I easily recognized HIM as my very own darlin' Daddy. And there he was, in the Stork Club in New York City—grinning, with his arm around that beautiful young woman. And there he was, bundled up in his Navy peacoat and watch cap, playing in the blinding snow with that same radiant young woman. And there he was, beaming an impossibly broad grin, with his new bride—that same gorgeous young woman—the MOM.

Oh. My. God. I now KNEW how she got him…MOM was HOT.

Mom was hot. Mom was hot. MOM! WAS! HOT! Holy shit! Ho-ly SHIT! I'm talking MOM here—do you understand me? MOM! My MOM—THAT one over there—frump woman, the cook, the housekeeper, the rule-maker, killer-of-all-teenage-joy—MOM—was NOT ALWAYS a Mere Ordinary Mortal—she USED TO BE HOT!

And that's kinda sorta when I knew—if it happened to
her—it could happen to me. And isn't Karma just the biggest bitch in the Universe?

Of COURSE, it IS happening to ME—I can only pitifully pray at this point that I DON'T get all that I so richly DESERVE, Karmically speaking. I look in the mirror and I feel a Mr. Bill moment coming on—“Oooooooohhhh, noooooooo!” And I realize as I write this—there are MILLIONS of people out there who are TOO FUCKING YOUNG to even KNOW WHO MR. BILL IS…was…OOOOOOOHHHH, NOOOOOOO!

It always felt like I was, oh, like, sort of IT, y'know? The Universe just more or less culminated with me and my generation and we couldn't really see any NEED—let alone likelihood—that there would actually BE more generations after us and we certainly never foresaw that WE would move inexorably into the slot FORMERLY occupied by our MOMS and DADS—that WE would become the inhabitants of Geezerville. And yet here we are—the train has screeched to a halt and we have all been herded off onto the platform in the freezing rain and the sign on the station clearly reads, welcome to geezerville—now let's see how you like it, you snotty little shits! And we can hear our parents snickering from the shadows.

We are all wailing, “OOOOOOOOHHHH, NOOOOOOO!” and laughing hysterically at this joke for the ten-thousandth time—and the young folks riding away on the train have no earthly idea what is so fucking funny about “Oooooohhhh, noooooo!”—or how we could find ANYTHING
to even SMILE about at this point in our lives, since we all look pretty well done-for in their opinion.

Okay, so I have come face-to-face with proof positive that my own personal mama was, in truth, once a young and vibrant being and there is also a fair pile of pretty convincing evidence that one of the two persons largely responsible for any loss of said youth and vibrancy would most definitely be memyownself. (By the way, for the record, somewhere along the way Mama stopped being a Mere Ordinary Mortal in my estimation and became an almost godlike creature of infinite wisdom and valuable experience. I'm pretty sure her elevation probably coincided not surprisingly with the birth of my OWN daughter and the stunning realization that I was myownself soon to become someone else's Mere Ordinary Mortal and the object of all HER scorn and derision. Experience is the best source of Empathy, is it not?)

So, from gazing in gape-mouthed disbelief at the photographic proof of Mama's former fabulosity, the natural progression took me to my OWN photo albums containing substantiation for the possibility that what went around had indeed come around and that Mama wasn't the ONLY old gray mare that ain't what she used to be, many long years ago.

There I was in photo after photo taken at beaches and pools, local and worldwide, wearing as little as possible—and looking pretty good in it (or out of it, as the case may have been), fairly flawless thighs included—but what was the source of that mys
terious total body sheen, glimmering in the sun? My über-tan body did not appear to be so much WET as it did, well, GREASY.

Oh, yes. I remember now. Wherever we were, we baked in the sun for HOURS on end, day after day, all summer long, every summer. We didn't even actually wait for summer to officially arrive. If we got a chance to go to the beach and it was only 60 degrees but sunny—we would dig a body-sized hole in the sand and stretch out in it, out of the wind, and toastily roast ourselves in the pit.

We not only worshipped the sun—we offered our bodies up as greased sacrifices to it by covering our exposed skin—which was mostly all the skin we individually possessed—with BABY OIL. Ever put butter on a chicken before you bake it? Gives you that delicious golden-brown CRISPY skin—mmm-hmmm—that's what we did to our very own skin that we knew full well we were gonna have to live in for the REST of our lives. But did we pay any attention to what all that broiling was doing to us? Beyond the fact that it made us look golden brown and delicious? Nah. We paid no attention at all to the CRISPY part, and tha-a-a-at's the part that's taught us the true meaning of the words “rue the day.” We are rueing all those days Big Time. Every time I look in the mirror, it is rue-time again for sure. And while it is still possible for me—should I discard caution completely—to achieve that golden-brown part, I'm pretty sure my delicious days are done. Sigh.

As I reminisce about both the baby oil and the thin thighs of my youth—I preach and carp and rant without ceasing on both subjects to my own daughter, Bailey, who at twenty still possesses those perfect thighs and that crease-free skin. In a version of “scared straight” tactics, I regularly show her my own thighs as a terrifyingly dire warning of what COULD lie ahead for her if she is less than vigilant in both her exercise regimen and eating habits as well as her SPF selection.

She and her friends will be putting on their teeny-tiny bikinis—oh! It is one of the heartbreaks of my old age that I can no longer in good conscience put on a teeny-tiny bikini and go outside in it—and I'll hear them clumping and giggling down the stairs in their sandals and sunglasses, all set to sun themselves by the lake. I jump out in front of them, lifting my calf-length old-lady-version-of-a-sundress high above my crinkly, wrinkly, baggy, saggy knees—and higher still, exposing a great expanse of enormous, quivering, gelatinous THIGHS, and I say, “THIS, little girls, is what YOU'RE gonna GET if you don't start paying attention NOW!” (in my best “I'll-get-you-my-pretty-and-your-little-dog-too voice)—and when they stop retching and resume normal breathing, I drop my skirt and repeat my eat-right-work-out-and-always-ALWAYS-ALWAYS-wear-sunscreen spiel. If I can save even one young woman from those THIGHS, I will not have lived in vain.