Glamour, Texas-style

I do not hail from a family of wise women.

My great-grandmother Maria Steenebeken had 14 children and on her way to America, she accidentally left two behind. I guess this was before they invented the head count and it must've been a lot like a field trip gone awry; the bus stops to gas up at a mini-mart, a couple of kids run to the bathroom and don't make it back in time. For my family, instead of a mini-mart, it was Poland.

One of the lucky ones to make it across was my grandmother, Annie. Despite Annie's ability to leap from shipyard dock to freighter bound for freedom, she was not fast on her feet intellectually. She was mild and without opinion so it at least showed spunk on her part when she later embraced bigotry and paranoia, turning suspicious of answering machines, Connie Chung, men in sandals and birth control. Which brings us to my mother. Emma Lee. Emma's advice to me growing up was not about guarding my dreams or that happiness was my birthright. I wish I could say it was something like Tennyson's 'Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.' No, her advice was "Stand up straight. It shows off your boobies."

My mother was a maniacal seller of Tupperware, a pusher of Avon, a dealer of Mary Kay cosmetics. She'd invest in starter kits -- $150 for a box of lipsticks, rouges, nail polishes, powders, and perfumes - perfumes that lingered in the shag carpet and plaid couch of our wood-paneled rec room. You know the room: brown, musty, just killing time until it would rock with Van Halen and become the teenage dry-humping den of every suburban home.

The Carpenters would sing about rainy days and Mondays while we helped Mom with her inventory. We were complicit in her dreams, my sisters and I. Here's what we were going to get for just $150 down: Glamour! Diamonds, caviar, pink Cadillacs, a pair of standard poodles named Henry & Orestes, martinis, a two-pack-a-day habit. Glamour spelled o-u-r. My mom did work up to two packs a day, Winstons, but we were a little shaky on the rest of it.

The truth is that she never made a dime. She was terrible with money. She'd miscalculate her orders or she’d loan out items, then be too embarrassed to ask the neighbors to pay up. "It's crass to talk about money," she'd whisper. If someone gave her five for a $20 order, she'd say, "No, no, it's no biggie, hon." She'd tally her orders on Sunday nights, sigh, and then ask my dad for money to pay the electricity and phone. Come Monday, she'd forget that the check was for the bills and look at it like she'd never seen it before. "Mad money!" she'd squeal, our cue to jump in the Ford Fairlane (a burnt orange Starsky & Hutch piece of shit), and head into town for a shopping spree at Sears. Toughskins and halter-tops. Oh, yes.

But for me, the highlight of Mom's business ventures was when I got to accompany her to her beauty parties. There's the legend of how Mary Kay Ash, divorced, broke, with kids, took a job as a bookkeeper for a man who tanned hides. People tan hides for a living. It happens. It's Texas. The ambitious divorcee noted how her boss made the skins of these dead animals so soft and supple. He'd hang them on a clothesline, scrape them, and then rub mineral oil into the skins. This Hannibal Lecter-like tableau became the Unique Selling Proposition of her billion-dollar cosmetic industry -- Mary Kay's, not my mom's. So Emma would be in the middle of her presentation about hides and how you work the oils up, up into your skin when she'd point to me across the room where I'd inevitably be trying to steal a Hummel figurine, one of those cute "windswept girl on skis." She'd point and say, "with the Mary Kay skincare regimen, you can turn back the hands of time and expect skin like that." The women would turn my way and I would blush, not for the attention but because I'd already pocketed the "little boy feeding ducks." Even with this genius selling tool of whoring her own daughters, my mother still lost money.

Mostly, she used the samples on herself and we three girls. The rec room was soon nothing but product. Product that was our ticket out, man. Suitcases full of plastic burpable storage canisters and vacuum cleaners and Amway and greeting cards and more makeup. Saleswomen were encouraged to buy as much as possible. Many ended up with maxed-out credit cards but there were always incentives that required buying more products. Mom would buy more, reach a prize level and "win" a scarf, a brooch or a small mirrored compact that she would snap shut with the authority of an Austrian spy. These little trinkets promised a life straight from the pages of Vogue -- the life of Coco Chanel, of the Left Bank, carafes of wine and inevitably, when she was an 80-year-old grande dame, a biography would be written about her called Scandal! I hated these pyramid schemes that sucked an entire desperate subculture into their empty promises.

I was a dark and angry child because of this. I longed for a mother who was sharp, maybe Jewish, wild-eyed with intellectual rage. This mythical mother-goddess would hold salon evenings where Philip Roth would feel her up in the kitchen when no one was looking and Saul Bellow would fall asleep listening to Kerouac scat before shooting up. Joyce Carol Oates would bring brownies and they would all roll up their sleeves and talk Derridian / post-modernism while I knelt by my mother, Gloria Steinem, as she absent-mindedly braided my hair. I wanted Emma Goldman or the wan and dispirited Joan Didion. I wanted Ayn Rand, a mother who'd teach me about Objectivism then slap me hard when I forgot to brush my teeth.

As these girlhood dreams raced through my head, Mom would say, "You're such a Capricorn. Lighten up!" She knew I was a fall, not a spring, that corals and mauves would bring out my complexion. Then she'd add that Gloria Steinem was no lady. Anyone who left the house without pantyhose and a bra was asking for it. "You know who's a lady? Lady Bird Johnson," she'd say with the intensity of a thousand trapped, anorgasmic, chain-smoking housewives. Women who married young and rashly, only to find themselves encumbered by domesticity at the age of 32. It was with this confused, unspoken anger that she'd once again come at us with an eyelash curler.

My older sister did not protest but later in life she joined the Southern Baptists, moved to Tokyo, became a missionary and made it her life's work to tell the Japanese that Shintoism - the religion their very culture and country was founded on -- was wrong and that Christ could kick their gods' ass. All of their gods.

My younger sister hid behind coke-bottle glasses and a show cat named Honey. They traveled from Waco to Houston to Plano, and she would brush that calico to within an inch of its life, the two winning best of show year after year. She eventually moved to Los Angeles and became an actress, choosing a catastrophic career, I think out of loyalty to our mom.

And me, I'm good. I've tried therapy (decades, maybe), and more therapy (Wellbutrin, Zoloft, Prozac, Celexa, Xanax) and things are okay (single working mother in El Segundo). I've been on a journey that's taken me from villas in Tuscany to VIP clubs in London, private jets and 60-foot yachts to the backlot at Warner Brothers. But those were just prize levels to a bigger dream that still eludes. There are similarities between my mother and me. She is terrible with money. I am terrible with men. We have trouble seeing the true worth of these things so we hungrily consume and then scramble for more. I'm trying to change and these days I've even toned down that slutty look that worked so well for me as a ten-year-old.

So. Emma. Sometimes blonde, sometimes a redhead -- always unhinged and wickedly beautiful - would load us up and head off to her next party. We'd careen down the highway at 80 mph, no seatbelts, no airbags, just my sisters and I pinned down by a thick sediment of lady makeup. We'd sing to John Denver while gripping the armrests of the Fairlane in fear for our lives, choking on the fumes of White Hawaiian perfume and cigarettes. There was never a pink Cadillac. Never a poodle.

My mother was often downright foolish. But holy hell, she was fun. And she was there for us, taking us along for the ride and that beats Tennyson any day. I am grateful for the adventures because the best ones always begin with a complete and utter lack of good judgment.

... I wonder if my ex-boyfriend feels like staying over tonight.

Originally published in Fresh Yarn, 2006