Nude Men

scenario occurs when she sees people about to get into line ahead of us. She’ll run to beat them to it. When she visits me in the city, she runs to make the lights before the Don’t Walk signs stop blinking. But the city doesn’t offer as many opportunities to run as Disney World does, and running to make the lights is not as much fun as running to get in line before someone else does. There are so many lines to run to!
    And yet, when we walk, she leans on my arm with all her weight. When we climb stairs, I practically have to carry her. It’s all an act. Sometimes she gets bored with hanging on to me. She lets me go and walks by my side with a spring in her step. And at the first glimpse of someone heading toward our line, she bolts away to get there first.
    When she has won her place in line, she tries to regain her composure. She organizes herself, straightens her shirt and skirt, smooths her hair, feels herself all over, and clears her throat.
    My mother looks like an older me. Which is to say that she looks like a man. She has a huge complex about this, has a mortal fear of one day being mistaken for a man. Her face looks like a man’s when she smiles, and also when she doesn’t smile. She has long, deep lines running from the wings of her nose down to the corners of her mouth. However, certain aspects of her face look less like a man’s than like a toad’s—let’s say a male toad’s. She has moles and no lips, just a slit. But since there could be no greater insult, in her mind, than being taken for a man, she does things to herself, wears signposts, to guarantee that no one will be confused. Most women her age try to look as young as possible. My mother’s concern is merely to look like a woman. In itself, this is such a hard thing for her to accomplish that it would be ridiculous to expect her to try also to look like a younger woman, or a pretty woman, or even not a toad. And she doesn’t worry about those things. (Good for her.) She doesn’t dye her hair. She wears it gray, but she puts pink bows in it: signposts of womanhood. And she wears frilly things, and perfume, and lots of jewelry: not the expensive kind, which she can’t afford, but pastel plastic. She says it’s more classy than fake gold. She never fails to wear bright-red lipstick, but without much success, due to her lack of lip. She does this not to look pretty, just to look not masculine. And blush on her cheeks. She doesn’t bother with eye stuff anymore, because she doesn’t have the patience. Anyway, her eyes are her best feature: “best” as in “impressive,” or even “intimidating,” not as in “attractive.” They are black, wide open and alert, flashing here and there like lightning. She never looks sleepy but always wears a frown.
    One day (I don’t know what possessed me) I remarked, “If you didn’t always frown, you wouldn’t look so much like a man.” Although I didn’t believe a word of this, I picked on her complex to eliminate the frown more efficiently. Well, she seemed so hurt, and was in such a bad mood for days afterward, that I never said anything of the sort again.
     
    M y mother’s behavior with the porter surprised me. I’d never seen her act that way before, and I wondered what brought it on. I did not want to ask her about it when Sara was with us, because my mother might have felt too inhibited to answer me sincerely. But now is the perfect time. We are alone, standing in line for Journey into Imagination, which the guidebook describes as “an imaginative ride through the creative process.” Sara has left us to go to the bathroom and buy a snack.
    I know I must formulate my question in the shape of a compliment. It would be a mistake to simply ask, “Why did you treat the porter that way?” My mother would automatically take it as a criticism, get angry, and scream at me.
    “That was wonderful, the way you treated the porter,” I remark. Anyway, I did think it was wonderful.
    “Thank you,” she says, and does not say more, even though I give her a good full minute to do so.
    “Sometimes you surprise me by doing the most wonderful things,” I tell her.
    “Well, I would hope that my wonderful things don’t come as such a great surprise. They’re not that rare, after all. Why do you have to be so surprised?”
    I sense that this will be one of our convoluted conversations. In the past, I’ve tried every method imaginable to get out of them, but nothing ever works. My best