In those days, Mama wore paper dresses. She hung them on wire hangers so the folds would fall out. She liked the blues and reds best. I heard Mama tell her friend Thelma that it was cheaper in the long run to buy those paper dresses. “Sure are handy little things,” Mama said, “No washing, no ironing, no nothing. Get a full day’s wear out of them and out they go with the trash.
“Where’d you pick up a thing like that?” Thelma asked, moving her hand over Mama’s paper shoulder.
“Mail-order,” Mama said, “Come six to a pack. Not a stitch of clothe on them. Here, feel of it. It ain’t even sewed. Some sort of glue. Supposed to be worn to clean the house, so as you can just throw it away when you’re done. Seems a waste to me. I keep it longer.”
“Pretty,” Thelma said, rubbing the paper between her fingers. Paper lace cuffs and everything. Looks like you got you something there. Don’t know if I could wear paper. Just the thought of it makes me feel all naked and stuff. Couldn’t milk a cow in a paper dress, I don’t suppose. I couldn’t get used to it.”
“I figure I can get used to about anything if it happens to me long enough,” Mama said. She dabbed at her forehead with the sleeve of her dress, wiping away the sweat. “Saves on money, besides. Gives you the feeling of wearing something new without all the cost. You should get you a couple. Try them out. Purple would suit you.”
Thelma laughed. “Honey, I ain’t wore a dress since I don’t know when. Cringe to think that I ever did.” She took a long drink from her beer bottle and wiped her wrist across her lips.
“Wouldn’t hurt you to pretty up a bit,” Mama said.
“Never did get no pleasure from being pretty. Just can’t see it for me.”
“I wish I had your ways,” Mama said.
They toasted each other, clicking their bottles together, Mama and her friend Thelma.
That was when I was a boy.
It was when Mama wore paper dresses.
It was when everything around me was a fascination, and Mama was as big as the world is to me, now.
Mama got herself all dolled-up, nearly every night. I remember watching her paint her face and fluff her hair up. She made faces in the mirror, pulling the skin on her cheeks and eyes toward her ears, trying to smooth the wrinkles. “Your momma spent all her good years,” she’d say, gripping two or three bobby pins between her lips, “but I sure was something in my time. You should’ve seen all the boys that come around. Every one of them, sweet as a little puppy.” She showed her teeth in the mirror and brushed her finger across them. “It was long thought I had the prettiest hair in Midnight County.” She reached for her comb on the side of the sink, gripped a few strands of hair between her fingers, and teased until it all stood a foot in the air. “Took my momma an hour just to braid it back then. Was all I could do to keep from sitting on it. Hung all the way down to here.” She pointed to the top of her calf. “Well, not really, but close to it.” She rustled my red hair with her hand and laughed. “Black as coal, it was. Not like this salt-and-pepper mess I got now.” She poked at the sides of her hair with the pointed end of the comb, lifting and
separating.
Mama worked on herself for a good while, not saying a word, like an artist meticulously painting the fine veins of a leaf. When she was happy with her look, she’d step back and admire herself. “You should’ve seen all them boys who’d come ’round.” With both eyes still in the mirror, she’d search for her paper dress from the back of the door. “Oh, them boys would come and line up on the porch, wishing they could touch me. I’d just sit there on the rail and pretend I didn’t give a hoot.” She’d laugh and spray her hair, spraying as if there were a pesky fly buzzing around her head. “All them boys acted like little puppies. Nothing like the big, nasty dogs they all turned out to be.” She’d paint her lips with bright red lipstick and pucker, spreading the color. “Men should stay puppies, instead of turning into big, mangy dogs,” she said to herself, fitting the cap on her lipstick tube of the stem. “That would be nice. Sure would.” She took one final look in the mirror, checking from side to side.
Mama would be in bed when I got up for school in the morning. The pink ballerina lamp beside her bed didn’t have a shade and it lit up the room, exposing her wrapped in a sheet with her legs hanging over the edge. I’d study her for a minute or two, wishing it would all just disappear and one of them TV moms would come and take me away and fix me some bacon and eggs. Instead, I’d go over and cover her shoulders with the blanket, give her a kiss on the cheek, and throw her torn paper dress in the trashcan beside the refrigerator.
Mama had a big black Buick with bullet holes in the doors, holes big enough for me to put my fingers through. There were holes in the trunk, too. The radio was missing, and the stuffing in the seats was puffing out like brown cotton candy. The left rear window was shattered, and every now and then a piece of window glass would appear on the back seat, like some long lost diamond from a ring. Mama hung a red transistor radio from the rearview mirror and laid a beach towel across the seat, “To make it pretty.” She could barely see over the dashboard, so she sat on a couch pillow.
Mama told me she had met a man at Bubbles Cat Club and jailed him in the trunk of that car. “He was a nasty old thing,” she said, “so I coaxed him into the trunk with a ham bone and slammed the lid on him.” (She had swallowed the key and kept him alive by feeding him Coca-Cola through a straw and passing him cigarettes through the holes, but only when he was good. According to Mama, that was none too often.)
I’d peek through the bullet holes, trying to catch a glimpse of the man. I’d whisper, “Hey mister, you in there? You hungry? You got a name?”
It was on one of those days that I was trying to talk to the man that Mama and Thelma came walking by. Mama said, “Noah, honey, there ain’t no man in that there trunk, honey. I was just fooling with you.” She pushed at Thelma’s shoulder. “Ain’t he something?”
Thelma sat down in her folding lawn chair. Mama went into the house and came back with two beers. “I never thought he’d take me serious,” she said, passing a bottle to Thelma. “Imagine him thinking there was really a man in that there trunk. Ha!”
“Boys will be boys,” Thelma said, taking a drink from her bottle.
“I might not know everything,” I thought, but I knew right well where Mama got that car. I just wasn’t sure how she come to own it out right. And I knew where the man went who owned it.
Mama came home earlier than was her custom, and I heard her and a man out in the living room, talking. The man was talking about a car he wanted to sell. Mama went out to the kitchen to get some refreshments and she called in to the man, “Larry, honey, I ain’t got that kind of money. ‘Sides, I ain’t even got a license.”
“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” he called back. “The price can come down. It ain’t fixed in stone. All depends on you.”
Mama popped the caps off the beer bottles, on her way past my bedroom door. “Now, ain’t this just like home?” I heard her say. “Have a Frito.”
I sat up in the bed and put my ear to the wall. I listened while the man told Mama things about himself. Seems he was passing through Midnight on his way to Louisville. He was going to try to patch things up with his wife. They had an anniversary coming up, and he wanted to use the money from the car to help with the smoothing and the patching. “Besides,” he said, “she’s got her a car. We don’t need two.”
“You don’t say,” Mama said.
“I need to put a few bucks back to get her something really nice,” he said, chewing on a chip.
“Well, I got a few buck tucked away,” Mama said. “A hundred bucks off would sure make the deal a lot sweeter.”
“Give us a kiss,” he said.
“I can put on some Roy Orbison.”
“I might just stick around and teach you how to drive it. Catch up on old times.”
“That would be nice,” Mama said.
After a while they stopped talking all together and the light in the living room went out. Mama giggled a little, and I heard the man’s shoes hit the floor. I heard paper tearing, and the man say, “Hey, now this makes things a lot easier.” I heard Mama say, “Now be careful. Why don’t we listen to records for a while? Remember how we used to dance? Remember how you loved to sing?”
“Where’d you find a dress like this?”
“Can’t you just put your arm over my shoulder? Let’s just sit a while?”
Mama got up earlier than she was accustomed. There was coffee brewing and bacon sizzling in a skillet on the stove. I thought it was Christmas, the way everything smelled. I lay in my bed with my arms crossed behind my head, listening to the transistor radio and taking it all in. Mama called, “Noah, c’mon and eat,” as if she had said it to me every morning for my whole life.
“How many of these little rascals you got around here, Lil?” the man said. He was sitting at the table with a towel wrapped around his waist, playing with the baby, when I came out. His hair was red. He had freckles on his shoulders and a tattoo on his arm. Mama poured coffee into his mug. She looked over and smiled at me. “C’mon over here and meet Larry,” she said, motioning me with her hand. “Larry, this here is Noah.”
The man looked at me. His smile went away, and he cleared his throat.
Mama said, “C’mon honey, come meet Larry. Shake hands like a gentleman.”
I approached, to shake the man’s hand.
“And how old might you be?” he asked, reaching his hand out to mine.
“Eleven,” I said.
“Noah is the man of the house, for now,” Mama said, “If you know what I mean.”
“Is that right?” the man said.
“Larry might be staying with us for a while,” Mama said.
“No, Lil,” Larry said, “I better be heading out.” He picked up his mug and sipped from it, looking at me over the brim, “Soon as I clean up.”
Larry took Mama in the car, and an hour later she came back in it, alone. She parked the car in the front yard, sat in her lawn chair, and sipped from her beer bottle. She stared at the car. Thelma came up the road, carrying a folding chair and a six-pack. She opened her chair and sat down next to Mama. They didn’t say much. They just stared at the car. Finally Thelma said, “You get you a car, Lilly?”
“Looks that way,” Mama said.
“She’s an old plow horse,” Thelma said.
“She’s got some life left in her.”
“How much you pay, anyway?”
“Too much.”
“You can’t drive no car.” Thelma said. “You want me to teach you how to drive her?”
“Couldn’t be much different from driving a tractor,” Mama said. She drank from her bottle and wiped her forearm across her lips.
Mama and Thelma stayed out there in the yard all day, drinking beer from the bottle and talking. The sun settled into a distant pocket of trees, and autumn sky turned red.
Mama came into the house to get her ballerina lamp out of her bedroom. She took an extension cord out of the drawer and told me to fix myself a bowl of cereal for supper — “and would you mind getting a bottle for the baby?” She gave me a kiss on the top of my head and stood looking down at me with her hands on her hips. She was studying me. Her eyes wandered from my face to my feet and back again. She said, “I love you special, Noah.” She plugged the cord into the outlet under the window and handed the lamp out to Thelma. Thelma set the lamp on the cooler, between the two lawn chairs, and turned it on. “Let there be light!” Thelma shouted, raising her hands to the darkened sky.
I fixed the baby a bottle and myself a bowl of cereal and sat in the kitchen window, behind the screen. I heard Mama tell Thelma that I was growing like a potato bug. “I seen a man in Noah’s eyes just then,” Mama said. “I know that look better than I know my own face. Plain as day, he’s growing up.”
“Was there ever any doubt?” Thelma asked. “He can’t stay a boy forever, you know. He’s gonna be a looker, like his daddy.”
“His daddy, nothing. I don’t even want to think of that man. Besides, he looks more like me than I do.”
“Thelma said, “Come to think of it, you just might be right. I ain’t one to argue.”
“I got two of the best lookin’ young’un’s in the world laying asleep in that house, and they both look like me!” Mama said, laughing a little. She took a long look at the Buick sitting in the yard. “None of their daddies around to prove me wrong, anyways.”
“A blessing too,” Thelma added. “It is a blessing now, ain’t it?”
“That it is,” Mama said, “I got a new one on the way.”
Thelma burped, moving her jaw to exaggerate the sound. “You don’t say? How long?”
“Figure it must be two, three months now. It’s these paper dresses keeps it under wraps. If I don’t wear the ribbon around the waist, I can hide it as long as I want to. You know how I carry small, and all.” Mama spread her hands across her belly, smoothing the paper, exposing a small swell. “There it is.” Mama sniffled, like she was crying, but I couldn’t see to know.
Thelma leaned over to toast Mama, but Mama didn’t raise her bottle. Thelma patted Mama’s shoulder, instead. “You shouldn’t be that way, Lilly. You do the best you can. Can’t fault anyone for that. You’re doing better than most women floating in your same boat. I don’t blame you one bit. It’s these goddamn men. The bastards, you can have every last one of them.”
“Just wish my Noah had a man around, is all,” Mama said. “I can take care of my girl myself. But a boy needs a man to talk boy-talk with. I don’t want him learning all that stuff in the streets. It ain’t right.”
“Well, he’s getting at that age,” Thelma said, “Not a thing you can do to stop a boy from growing into a man. Maybe you can talk to him about that stuff. You know how men are. You talk to him.”
“I was thinking about it.”
“No sense waiting.”
Mama sat back in her lawn chair and stretched her legs. Thelma lifted the ballerina lamp and pulled two more beers out of the cooler. She flipped the caps off and handed one to Mama. Every now and then they would take long drags off their cigarettes and talk softly about the color of the leaves on the trees or how the black birds seemed to be leaving their dropping on everything. Thelma farted, and Mama laughed, and the crickets in the woods sometimes buzzed louder than the radio.
Around nine, Mama came in and tossed her jacket on the couch. Her paper dress was dissolving under both arms from where she was sweating. She straddled the furnace vent on the floor and the hot air filled her dress, making her look like she was pregnant with a million babies at once. “I’m the momma and the daddy,” she whispered to herself, while trying to light a cigarette. “It’s settled. There will be no more talk of it.”
“You’d better start getting dolled-up, Mama,” I said. “It’s almost that time.”
“Hell, Noah, I had enough of that. Things are gonna start changing around here.” She bent over and picked up the baby. Her dress ripped in the back. “No two ways about it, Noah, I’m finished with it all. That’s the way things are gonna be from now on. I gotta raise you to be a man now. That’s my job.” She hugged and rocked the baby. She put her beer bottle to her lips and sat the baby on her hip. She slapped herself on the thigh a couple of times, “Come here, Noah. Come here. Come sit by your old momma.”
I sat down beside Mama’s leg, and she said, “Jesus, you must grow a mile a minute. Look up here at me.” She knelt down and gripped my chin between her fingers. “Now ain’t he something?” she said, turning my face toward the baby. “Look at your big brother. He’ll be a man before long. It’s in his eyes.” She moved my face to look at hers. “It all come to me, tonight, Noah. Like a message from God. I’m your daddy. Always have been. Just as I’m your momma.”
I sat looking up at her, the kitchen light shining across her face. Her eyes were determined, like she wanted to say something, but couldn’t quite find the words.
“Do you know about men and ladies, Noah?” she asked in a whisper. “I’m prepared to tell you everything you want to know.”
“I don’t know,” I whispered back. I stared back at her, as if she had asked me if I had stolen from her purse.
She whispered, “Wanna talk about anything special?” She sat down on the floor beside me. “You are getting to be a man, Noah, and at your age, you should know what men and ladies do. I’m prepared to tell you whatever it is you have on your mind. Fire away.” She reached for her beer and took a swig.
I looked at my knees.
“Don’t be ‘shamed, honey” she said. “There ain’t nothing to be ‘shamed of.”
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