Cease to Blush

by Billie Livingston

  “What’s a lesbian?”

  She put the last apple on the pile. “It’s a—the nerve of her.” She yanked me by the hand and wheeled us down the aisle, glaring ahead, putting nothing in our shopping cart.

  “Don’t we need pickles? You said we needed pickles.”

  “Stop dawdling.”

  “I’m not! You’re running like we’re doing Sports Day or something.”

  “I’m not running! Pick up your feet.”

  That night, over dinner, Mum told Sally she thought that it was silly to spoil her trip to New York by cutting it short. “This is a real opportunity for you. Why rush back here when you’ve got an opportunity to, to—there are a million artists who would give their eye teeth for an opportunity like this.”

  Sally cocked her head. “I don’t really like New York. It’s loud. And dirty.”

  “You’re just nervous. It would break my heart to see you fritter away your, your—”

  “Opportunity?” Sally suggested flatly.

  “Talent, I was going to say.”

  Sally’s eyes narrowed and she seemed to grind each mouthful three times longer than necessary. My mother had her supermarket voice on. I watched her hands as they searched for a relaxed pose.

  After dinner, they had brandy and I had hot chocolate, but it struck me as though my mother had wanted to leave since we’d arrived. “I think maybe we should get going,” she finally said. “I have a ton of homework and I haven’t been sleeping well, so I think we’ll just make an early night of it.”

  Sally nodded. “As you wish, Josephine.”

  As we crossed the front lawns back to our own house I looked across to Spy Biddy’s. She was watching. Her lights were out but I could see her white nightie and spectral face. My mother threw her hand up, waving with a grin more terrifying than neighbourly. The woman jumped back, letting the curtains swing together.

  “That’s right, you old bat, go tell the others.”

  In the morning, the doorbell rang. As I finished breakfast, my mother, who’d been reading across the table from me, looked up, frowning. She glanced at her watch, rose and strode toward the front hall.

  I heard the door open, then Sally’s voice: “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “I’m trying to get Vivian off to school and get this reading done before—”

  Sally’s voice was soft, indistinguishable. Then my mother’s “Nothing!”

  “How can it be nothing? Obviously it’s something.”

  I got up so I wouldn’t miss any more. Sally looked past my mother’s arm in the door frame and gave a nervous half wave. “Hey, Viv.”

  Mum’s head snapped around. “If you’re finished eating, go get dressed.”

  I couldn’t quite figure my mother’s sudden cold shoulder but I thought maybe she wanted some time for just the two of us again. I did, too. I started slowly upstairs. My mother glanced after me. “Go! I don’t want you late again.” Her voice lowered. “All right. My class ends at two. We can talk when I get home. Okay? I’m sorry, I just, I’ve got a child to think about.”

  Yeah, I thought, she’s got a child to think about, Sally. What kind of fish are you, Sally? A sel-fish, that’s what.

  At two I stared at the classroom clock, imagining my mother on her way home from the university. By two-thirty, I envisioned her in our living room. With Sally. Just them and their secret conversation. A minute later, I couldn’t stand it any longer and asked my teacher if I could go to the bathroom. When I detoured through the cloakroom, she followed and caught me as I grabbed my coat. “I’m cold,” I blurted. “I’ll put it back.”

  “Cold?” she repeated and came forward to feel my forehead.

  “It’s okay. It’s just because of fall-time and stuff and the halls get cold,” I explained. “I have to go pee,” I added and winced. She let me pass but watched from the door as I walked down the hall. I glanced over my shoulder and made a show of heading into the girls’ room. Waiting a couple minutes, I peered around the corner so see if she was still watching. Coast clear, I scuttled out a side door and headed for home.

  The car was there but she wasn’t in our house. I marched next door to Sally’s and eased open the front door in time for my mother’s exasperated “Are you deaf?”

  I crept down the hall as Sally shot back, “I just don’t see what it has to do with you.”

  “For godsake, it was an accusation!”

  “It was a story about what a bunch of idiot Mormons in Utah did. I read the article.”

  “You read it!?”

  “This isn’t about that story. This is about you running away from me. You just don’t want anyone getting close to you. You liked your closed unemotional world just the way it was.”

  I moved right into the kitchen where I could see their faces. Idiot Sally. I felt like punching her in the throat for talking to my mother like that—that, and for being so greedy.

  My mother snorted. “Please! You have no idea how the real world operates, what it means to take on responsibility. I am trying to raise a child and I do not need a bunch of nosy bitches destroying what I have worked very hard to build.”

  “Must blend in with the other Stepford Wives.” Sally glared away and looked me straight in the eye.

  “Don’t give me that shit—” my mother blurted.

  “Vivian,” Sally said flatly.

  Mum’s face whipped round to me. “Oh for godsake. What are you doing here?” She looked at her watch. “It’s not even three.”

  “She’s eavesdropping is what she’s doing. Viv, this is private, okay. We’re having a—”

  “I’m sick,” I snapped with all the venom I could muster.

  “You’re sick? Oh Jesus.” My mother jumped up.

  Sally gave me a look that said she knew damn well what I was up to. We stared each other down as Mum rushed to feel my forehead.

  “I can’t talk about this anymore,” my mother told her and we went home.

  If they had another conversation before Sally left town I didn’t catch it.

  My mother decided it was time to move. Maybe the Kitsilano area would be nicer, she said. Shaughnessy was too expensive anyway. Kitsilano was full of freethinkers and artists. She called a Realtor. I had thought she didn’t care for artists anymore.

  “You found it,” Sally said now, coming down the basement steps.

  I looked up, a little dazed. “Huh?” I was sitting on the trunk. “Oh. Yeah. Oh shit,” I added when I realized I hadn’t done anything about the smashed Christmas ball. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to break it—”

  She crouched and picked up the chunk with the metal crown and hook attached.

  “I was admiring it and it slipped. I’m such an idiot.” I rubbed my hands on my thighs.

  “We broke a few over the years. It’s okay.” She handed a little key to me. “She’s all yours.” She glanced to the trunk.

  “Oh.” I got up. “Should I open it right now?”

  “If you want to.”

  Christ. I twirled the key on its string and knelt, picking up the old padlock. Self-conscious and clumsy, I wiggled the key in and popped the lock, slipped it out of the hasp. I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling it was a trap: a Jack would pop out of the box.

  Slowly, I lifted the lid and came face to face with fur. A thick layer of it ran from corner to corner as if the chest were pregnant with mink. I stroked it a moment and looked over at Sally. She took a deep breath and went back to sit on the steps.

  Easing the coat out, I shook it as I stood, held it by the collar and let it hang heavy off my hand. “Mink?” I asked over my shoulder, just to be sure. She didn’t speak. Sure as hell felt like it. The label at the collar read, Maximilian. It must have been beautiful once but the skins were dry now and permanently kinked where it had been folded. Why would she leave a mink coat down here in a trunk like this, let it fade and turn brittle? “This was Mum’s?” Sally nodded, folded her arms across her knees and dropped her chin
against her arm.

  I shook out the sleeves and slipped it on. Surely, the touch of this fur would have been burned into my memory if I had ever seen it on her. Brittle or not, I could hardly take my hands off it, or keep my cheek from dipping sideways against the lush soft collar. I traced the tawny black stripes in the rich brown until my hands found the pockets and slipped inside. In one was a rock-hard package of Dentyne. I sniffed it. God knows how many years had passed and it still had that sugary pepper smell of fake cinnamon.

  Back into the trunk: a pair of black pumps sat on top of gold-and-blue fabric. I picked up the shoes. The heels were high and slim. The gold-tipped toes were long and pointed. Holding one in each hand, I let the basement light dazzle them like something stolen and brought to the Wizard of Oz. “These are amazing. I can’t picture her wearing them though.” Sally was mute.

  Setting the shoes on the floor, I pulled out the fabric they’d been resting on. Big brilliant flowers mingled over the dress’s slim gold hourglass shape. A bra was built into its low-cut bust. Standing up, I took it by the thin shoulder straps and let it fall to its full length, holding it against my body. Cut to about midcalf, where it flared, it looked like a number Sophia Loren would have worn for a night on the town. The mother I knew tended toward quiet conservative classics, things that made her look like a politician’s wife. “This dress is so cool! Jesus, what’s it doing down here?” My mind flashed again to that night at the beach: my mother’s hips sliding beneath a borrowed evening dress, the way it had infuriated me to see her transform like that, roll out some secret self like a red carpet. And all for Sally.

  Pulling the fur coat across my legs, I came down on the floor again, and draped the dress across my lap. A large manila envelope was the next layer.

  I opened it up and pulled out the contents: black-and-white eight-by-tens, publicity photos. The first of them was a full-length shot of a busty woman, standing in a three-quarter pose, wearing nothing but fishnets and a gun belt turned so that the holster covered up what her fishnets didn’t. A cowboy hat was on her head and a loosely coiled rope dangled from around her neck, just covering her nipples. Annie West was printed across the bottom. And there in black scrawl the incantation I’d heard my mother quote whenever she became resigned to something: Ain’t life grand when you got the guts for it! xox, Lifers, Annie. “Hey, this is that chick she met in New York!” I said. “The one she wait-ressed with or whatever. Jeez. Mother must’ve been a little more open-minded in the old days, because this babe looks like a stripper.” I glanced back. “I take it they never kept in touch.”

  “Apparently not,” Sally said.

  Next was a headshot of a thin man in a suit jacket, his forehead crinkled as he glanced into the lens. His face was a little craggy, his hairline receding. My mouth formed his name and I said it out loud: “Frank Sinatra? Holy shit. Is this really his handwriting? She said she’d seen him sing, but she didn’t say she got his autograph.” Out loud I read, “‘Celia, You’re cruel, baby! But when you’re right, you’re right. Frank.’ Who’s Celia?”

  Sally shrugged and shook her head. I sighed and shuffled the pictures to look at the shot underneath. I was paralyzed a moment by the next face: the long lashes, big limpid eyes, the mouth smiling coquettishly. Her hair was white blonde and her nose a little on the Roman side. I let my eyes fall past the nose to her mouth again. I stared at her mouth for close to a minute, a voice squawking at me from the recesses of my mind. Printed at the bottom was Celia. Dare. “This looks like my mother,” I finally said. No sound from behind me. “This is her, isn’t it?” I finally pulled my eyes away to get an answer. “Her hair’s all Marilyn Monroe-y. Is this, like, a stage name? Was this when she was singing?”

  “Yup.” Sally’s voice was small and distant.

  I shuffled to the next picture: My mother—again with platinum hair and a nose more like mine than the one I knew her to have—lying across a piano, languid and feline in a full-length satin gown, long matching gloves. She gazed up toward a hot light that brought her cheekbones into such relief she didn’t look real.

  An ache started up behind my eyeballs. “Why didn’t she tell me she had a nose job? She went ape on me when I was talking about getting one. And let’s not even talk about the shit she gave me over my hair.”

  Sally’s voice scratched into motion. “Her nose got broken somehow. They had to reset it.”

  I set the envelope aside, tucked the mink under my butt and sat down on the floor. Reaching into the trunk, I snatched up a miniature photo album. On the cover, in pink glitter, were the words You Oughtta Be in Pictures! I flipped it open to a black and white of my mother, still with that bleach-blonde hair, and two other women sitting in a plush velvet banquette, each lit up with jewelry and a cocktail. Looked like it was taken sometime in the early sixties. On the next page she stood with a sleazy-looking silver-haired man in a sharkskin suit. Both of them leaning against the side of a white convertible. She clutched her purse, waving a hand and laughing as though the man had just said something ridiculous but endearing.

  Then came a shot of Annie West sitting on a countertop. She was spilling out of a skin-tight low-cut shiny dress, with her head back and what looked like cake and icing stuck in her open mouth, and falling off her chin onto her boobs. Two sharply dressed men mugged for the camera on either side of her, licking cake off her face, each with a smooshed-up piece in his hand. One man was short and black with his hair in slicked finger-waves. The other was tall and white and elegantly handsome.

  Across the album was my mother standing stageside in a nightclub, reaching up to let a skinny guy in a suit kiss her hand, the blur of other patrons clapping and laughing in the foreground.

  Next was a shot of my mother, Annie West and a slender swarthy woman with wooden-looking breasts and a boyish body, standing under a theatre marquee that read Celia Dare and Friends. All wore fur, with a hand on one hip and the other hand up presenting the marquee. On the opposite page they were standing in front of the theatre doors. I turned the page: a sandwich board reading, For the Love of Carmen, over a caricature of Carmen Miranda, bananas and strawberries spilling over her head. Starring Rosa Ramos.

  Next: a colour photograph of my mother and Annie lounging by the pool in bathing suits. They wore sunglasses and held martinis. Book in her lap, my mother glanced over her shades with a Mona Lisa smile. West blew a kiss.

  Last shot: my mother sitting on the edge of a stage, her legs dangling in capri pants, her feet in black low-heeled slip-ons. Another woman danced and clapped down on the floor, mouth open as though she was about to make a smart-ass remark.

  Tucked into the last page of the album was a folded piece of paper. Inside was written: “I’ll move. Write me at my mother’s,” along with an address in San Anselmo, California, and a phone number.

  Inside the trunk, I reached for a bulging silk handkerchief and almost dropped the heavy weight it held: a heart-shaped chunk of red crystal, veined with gold, about the size of a young girl’s palm. On the back it said Tiffany. On the front an inlaid gold heart with the inscription My heart is wax moulded as she pleases, but enduring as marble to retain. B. A book of matches blared The Silver Slipper’s Gaiety Theatre! on the front and on the flip side: The Beating Heart of Vegas! I remembered telling her, when Frank and I were first dating, that he wanted to take me to Vegas for the weekend. She got a look on her like she’d bitten something rotten. A gold lighter was the last thing left inside, two blue stones glinting on its lid like eyes, the back engraved with The Flames of Celia Dare. I flipped the album pages, fanning them off my fingers when the stairs creaked and I remembered Sally. “Who’s B.?” I said out loud.

  “A boyfriend.”

  “Well, are you going to elucidate any of this?”

  “Elucidate?” she repeated. Then a sigh. “You remember that night we did our talent show at Kits Showboat? Before I went to New York.”

  My chin bobbed.

  “By the time we got home, you w
ere sleeping. Josie was really exhilarated after singing—well, exhilarated’s maybe not the right word. She said she wanted to show me something but I had to swear on my life that I would never tell anyone.” Sally paused as if reconsidering. “Next thing you know, she’s got the silverware drawer out and she’s underneath pulling off a key taped to the bottom and we tiptoe to the basement like we’re about to steal the crown jewels. She yanked out this trunk and kept looking up at the door like she was scared you might catch us. And at first she was excited, you know, like these were her glory days, showing me this and that. But then she suddenly slapped the lid down, said she never should’ve shown me, that now she’d put me in a bad position because she needed me to swear I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  I closed my eyes, searching for words. “What did she even keep this shit for if it was such a life-or-death secret?”

  “To remind herself, she said—There but for the grace of god sort of thing.”

  “So what’s the big fucking deal anyway?”

  “What do you think, Vivian?”

  I hated it when Sally used my name. From her mouth it was always synonymous with moron. “She bleached her hair and partied a little. Oh dear! Not the feminist for all seasons. God forbid she used to be fun.” Sally’s face read the way her voice did when she said, Vivian. “What?” I stared at her then looked down at my lap, the eight-by-tens, Annie in her gear, my mother lazing across the piano. “Are you saying she was a stripper?”

  “She was a lot of things.”

  Again with the cryptic reply.

  Sally stood up on the step. “You got told what to think your whole upbringing. Never did you any good far as I can see. Probably time you figured it out yourself.” And she turned and went back upstairs.

  I slumped a few moments before I jammed the pictures back in the envelope, stuck the heart in the coat pocket and stuffed it all back in the trunk, which I lugged up the stairs.

  Sally stood in the kitchen pouring herself another coffee.

  “You really hate my guts, don’t you?” I said to her back.

  “Oh god.” She rubbed at her forehead, turning around. “I don’t hate you, Viv. I love you. I’ve always loved you.”