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My Mother's Facelift

2022; Duke University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/0961754x-9809478

1538-4578

Belle Randall,

Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

Black Eyes say Love me or I kill you,Blue eyes say Love me or I die.My mother used to recite these lines for my entertainment when I was seven or eight, quoting some obscure source, in a Spanish accent thrillingly recognizable on the “ke-el” in “I keel you,” imbuing Black Eyes with considerably more drama than my own wishy-washy Blue. When I was nine, the sight of my mother in a strapless black cocktail dress caused me to burst into tears. But who else's mother ever wore cocktail dresses? Or applied for a job as a glamorous hostess in a cocktail lounge—the occasion of the dress—or posed for family snapshots in a black “Merry Widow,” her Christmas gift from my father in 1948? Throughout my youth, the difference between black eyes and blue seemed to confirm what I anyway suspected: my mother's beauty—her glossy brown-black hair, eyebrows swooping like the wings of a swallow in flight, high cheekbones, and large mischievous brown eyes—were thrilling accomplishments next to which my own less confident virtues dwindled and paled.These childhood images of my mother were hard to reconcile with the way she looked at sixty-seven, voluminous in a print housedress, her upper arms as big as hams. She bent above me with a stainless steel crochet hook, pulling strands of my hair through the perforations in the Clairol “frosting cap” in our little beauty parlor in the backyard, where we had set up shop, as we did annually, when I came from Seattle to visit. I bent my head obediently downward to receive these ministrations, my eyes on the ground at my feet, a carpet of almonds, their leaves and pods black and curled in the Modesto heat. It was Labor Day weekend, the end of summer. The chemical scent of Clairol Cream White Developer mingled with the smells of barbecue in an adjacent yard, where the voices of children, carried on an occasional breeze, sent a shiver through the branches overhead.My mother had just announced her intention to fly to Ensenada, Mexico, for a facelift, or, rather, a medley of cosmetic surgeries that would include a facelift and that more visceral incision euphemistically referred to as a “tummy tuck.” She balanced her cigarette on the webbing of the aluminum chaise lounge while wrapping my head in the clear plastic cap. Her double chins compressed as she surveyed her work. What did I think, she wanted to know, about the facelift?In retrospect, the facelift seems like a poor idea from the start, but at the time only one person opposed it—her son-in-law, my husband, Joe. Joe opposed cosmetic surgery on principle. The very generality of his argument may have robbed it of force in my mother's mind, or maybe she had never heard his argument. Joe and my mom almost never spoke. They would have declared war years before if that hadn't entailed speaking to one another. My arms and legs felt bruised by Joe's insults lobbed across our bedroom as we undressed for the night—“Your mother's an idiot. How could anybody be so dumb?”—sentiments I transmuted into the gentle, cautionary warnings I offered to Mama as tentatively as a plate of little cheeses, when we spoke on the phone. “No surgery is minor, Mama, and Joe says that in your present condition—Joe says—”“Joe says! What does that ass know about my present condition?” my mother would reply. Although I couldn't see her, I could imagine the vehemence of her hand squashing a cigarette butt in its dish. What did Joe know?“All she does is sit on her ass all day.”“Mama can't help it if she has insomnia.” Nor if, as a consequence, her mornings consisted mainly of afternoons sitting in her housedress reading old New Yorkers and watching what she regarded as compelling TV shows—behavior symptomatic, in Joe's opinion, of incipient Alzheimer's induced by the character flaw of willful laziness. No use to argue extenuating circumstances—an automobile accident (now historic) that had left her with a metal pin in one knee; years of hard work supporting me as a single parent; cancer of the cervix, bleeding ulcers, high blood pressure—all of which had depleted her strength; no use to conclude with one's strongest point: finally, it was not our place to judge.“She's fifty pounds overweight. She looks like a beached whale.”“I'm not doing this out of vanity,” my mother explained, “but out of consideration for Earl.” Earl, her husband, was twelve years her junior.I ought to mention that Joe was twelve years younger than me. There was a time, a few years before, when I had felt superior to my mother's marriage to a younger man, but falling in love had humbled me, and besides, by now—I was forty-seven—who could afford to be aloof? “I just don't want to embarrass him by looking a lot older,” she said. “Moi aussi,” I replied.Months went by and nothing more was said about the facelift. I concluded that Mama was too weak to make the journey to Mexico. Even excursions to the shopping mall often left her breathless, blacking out, collapsing into a chair in the shoe department, or—worse—the aisle. “Shop ’til you drop, I thought as I lay there, waiting for Earl.”“Where was he?”“He'd wandered off looking for help.”“What happened then?”“They brought a wheelchair they keep folded up in the manager's office.”Adventures such as these were related to me almost weekly by phone. “What was the matter that you blacked out, Mama?”“I've been exhausted since this last bout of the flu. Just can't seem to get my wind back.”“Have you quit smoking?”“Not yet.”Then we would hear: “I've been getting in shape for the trip to Ensenada. Earl and I walk to McHenry [Modesto's main drag] almost every evening. I'm going to practice walking a little bit farther every time.” I was impressed. Mama hadn't walked that far in years. Should I mention that this was not my mother's first facelift? She had had one twenty years earlier and, I supposed, knew what to expect.“Jan says the weather will be perfect. Jan knows someone who had her face done at this clinic. Jan says it looks just great.” Jan ought to know if this clinic was reputable. Why not let Mama have her face done? The activity, the adventure, would be good for her.Jan was my mother's oldest friend, if not dearest. The truth was, outside of the immediate family, my mother had no dears. She seldom visited or telephoned anyone but me, though she was always home to callers and visitors. When I was twenty, her longtime lover—a professor at Berkeley—explained his reasons for leaving, on his way out the door: “You like only lame ducks, Mary. As soon as someone is really successful, you cease to be interested in them.” I remember thinking that this was true; my mother showed a preference for misfits, even in her work as a teacher of psychotic children.My mother herself had been a bastard child in a world that stigmatized illegitimacy, and—like some disputed heir to the crown in Shakespeare—she carried the wound with her, nurturing it, long after it had been a genuine liability, feeling alternately superior to and inferior to others. When I was twelve, she informed me that we were descendants of royalty. “The Queen of Romania stopped to visit your great-great-grandmother when she came to Seattle,” my mom said, adding that people like us, people who were of above-average intelligence, often felt lonely. Having royal blood meant that we were just inherently better.Our house at times had been a salon for Berkeley intellectuals; a sanctuary for misunderstood teenagers (when I was a teen); a meeting place for the Fellowship of the Clear Light, a group of early, brave, and innocent acidheads who had fallen under the influence of Harvard professors Leary and Alpert. Boyfriends in whom I had lost interest continued—sometimes to my dismay—to enjoy the warm welcome extended to drop-in house guests by my mother. With my mom, I had gone to hear B. B. King at Sweet's Ballroom in downtown Oakland, escorted by his cousin Bukka White, the Mississippi Delta blues singer. My mom had taken me to have our brain waves tested by Dr. Kamiya at UC Medical accompanied by Dick Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass). To complain of “the constant parade of visitors” was the prerogative of the queen bee at the center of her hive. Except for Earl (to whom she was intensely loyal), me, and a few oddballs who stumbled into the circumference of her sympathy, my mother viewed the world with a jaundiced eye, deriving more pleasure from deriding others behind their backs than from their presence. Occasional ardent friendships ended too often in bitter fallings-out whose causes and blames—mainly contractual—she would rehash on sleepless nights, her mind working over and over the old irritations like an ulcerous stomach digesting itself.It followed that, although Jan had taken the trouble to keep in touch with Mama over all the years of their adult lives, my mother's main contribution to the friendship—at least lately—had lately been to “badmouth” Jan both to her face and behind her back—badmouth being a verb that got a lot of play at our house. “She sees herself as such a victim, but I notice that she always lands on her feet,” my mother would complain. Or, again, “Her so-called interest is psychotherapy, what does it amount to but a way of having the last word in every situation?” Both my mother and Jan had been in therapy for years. At least it provided an audience for their woes, I thought, attempting to make an exit before it was my turn.Mama often referred to Jan as “that woman,” as in, “I don't know what's gotten into that woman” or “What will that woman think of next?” But Jan owned property in Ensenada. The plan was that she and my mom would vacation there for a few weeks while Mama healed and her new self emerged, trimmer and more beautiful than ever before. “I'm not expecting miracles,” my mother said, “And I'm certainly not looking forward to spending two weeks with Jan—Lord, that woman! But I think maybe I could stay on a diet if I just had this head start.” My mother was sitting across from me on the sofa in her billowing housedress, a stack of old New Yorkers doing a landslide off her lap, the afghan at her feet a puddle in which a toy poodle curled. “Losing weight might help me quit smoking, too. It's easy for me to quit”—to confirm which, she blew a series of smoke rings in my face—“but I don't want to put on more weight.” She bent to confide in the veined lining of her toy poodle's ear a stream of baby talk so sucky it was almost lascivious.As a child, I believed devoutly in my mother's fairness. She was the standard of justice against which all things were measured. As a young adult I was shocked to discern in her moral fiber tiny imperfections, little exaggerations and hypocrisies that, by this time in our lives, sometimes added up to glaring falsehoods, but I knew I couldn't make her see things my way any more than a pig can fly. I had adopted the philosophy that it was presumptuous to try and I had no further impulse, beyond a few cautionary remarks, to deflect her from her determined holiday.“Belle, dear, why don't you come with us? You look very young, except for those dark circles under your eyes. Just a tiny tuck in the lower lids, you could have them taken care of. I'd be glad to give you the money. You could have it done next time you come to Modesto. Joe might not even notice. He doesn't seem to be very aware of your looks.”I declined her repeated offers (“Not a face-lift, dear, just a tiny snip beneath the eyes”). Still, if not for Joe, I might have done it. “Well, I'm putting aside the money in my will, just in case,” replied my mother, whose savings were not much larger than the amount in question.“Your mother's not here. She's in Ensenada,” said Earl one Saturday when I phoned.“When is she going to have it done?”“Already done it. Tummy tuck too. Called about six hours ago. Everything went Jim Dandy. She's feeling great. Can't wait to get out of the clinic and back to Jan's place.”“Mama's gone and done it—had the facelift,” I shouted at Joe, who had just climbed down a ladder from the roof and paused outside the kitchen window, his mouth full of nails. He shook his head gravely but made no reply.It was not long before the phone rang again. It was Earl. There were complications: Mary's acting funny. Something's wrong. “Jan says she's hallucinating. Mistaking Jan for her mother—.” This was ominous—my maternal grandmother remained in family legend the archetype of the villainous controlling woman. Earl continued, “She's acting crazy, seeing things that aren't there.” She refused to eat the food offered at the clinic. When Jan brought her yogurt in a wax cup, Mama spooned it into her drinking glass and then stuffed in the paper napkin. “Apparently, she's acting real weird,” Earl concluded. “They don't know if it's an allergic response to the anesthetic or what.”Earl wondered what to do. The doctors had asked if Mama had previous psychiatric problems. Jan said yes. “Lord knows that's true,” Earl mused.But not like this. My mother had been in psychoanalysis for years, but that was because it was her field. Her behavior had never been a problem. She was a common, garden-variety neurotic. She didn't see things that weren't there. Earl dubiously agreed. In his mind, there was no such thing as a “common, garden-variety” neurotic. There were normals like him and there were wackos.There were normals like him—a former rodeo rider, a man with as many fissures in his face as a Chinese potter's glaze, mistaken more than once for Willie Nelson; an engraver of rifle stocks and pistol grips, who once rode his Honda Gold Wing to the state courthouse amid a swarm of cyclists protesting the helmet law—and there were wackos.Psychoanalysis had been my mother's salvation, not because she was crazy but because she was introspective. I didn't know how to explain this to Earl. He hadn't known her during the introspective years—years that, for him, were euphemistically referred to as time spent “away at college.” How did she meet him? He had, for one brief season, been my boyfriend, much to my mother's disapproval.All afternoon messages were relayed from Ensenada to Modesto to my home in Seattle. Earl tried to reach her local doctor, but it was Saturday afternoon, and he wasn't in. Earl hemmed and hawed. This didn't seem like an emergency, exactly: Mama was already receiving medical attention. Jan was there. She could see firsthand what was going on. Jan trusted these doctors in Ensenada and, besides, as it turned out, my mother's surgeon was a gringo from the States. What was the point of involving more doctors?“Get her back into the States,” Joe said loudly into the mouthpiece. The next day (Sunday), Earl called to say that Mary was worse. She was mute. She sat very still, according to Jan, a finger to her lips. She had struggled long with a pad and pencil to write Jan a note, which turned out to be only “I went.” This detail especially filled me with dread. What could it mean? “Sounds like an infection,” said Joe, wresting the phone from my hand. “Get her back into the States,” he said into the mouthpiece.In the middle of the night, an ambulance sped my mother across the border to San Diego's Kaiser Hospital, where she was admitted, comatose. It was too early for a diagnosis. Her whole system was “toxified,” they said. Apparently her heart was damaged, no one was sure why. Earl, the person telling me this, was himself on the way out the door, headed for San Diego—for him, an eight-hour drive. I called a close friend whose husband is a doctor. “Prepare yourself,” she said, “for the fact that your mother may die.” The plane to San Diego seemed to rise on giddy undercurrents of the unexpected. The day had been made to step aside for something. At sunset, gazing out across the Georgia O'Keeffe clouds, I was filled with the knowledge—crucial to a creative writing major who had been unable to write fiction because she could not make anything “happen”—that something was happening at last.Images of my mother were jumbled in my mind like notions in a drawer, twisted ropes of faux pearls entangled with rosary beads, a strange seaweed dragging its treasures of brooches, buttons, matchbooks, and tortoiseshell combs, and beneath it all, shiny snapshots, flattened faces on the seafloor, a grinning GI and his brunette girl, with shame-drenched lips and a pompadour, a style of beauty favored by the black-and-white photography in which adults played out their noir dramas when I was a child. Writing now, I recognize this drawer as one I was not supposed to rummage in, the drawer of my mother's vanity. I remember the particular stillness of the house on afternoons when, after school with no one home, I would stand before the oval mirror and lift to my throat the collar of faux pearls.That a facelift is a particularly ignoble cause of death was an irony that did not escape me. I rehearsed in my mind the most ignominious deaths I could remember: Ivan Ilych, injured in a fall while hanging some new drapes; Isadora Duncan, out for a drive in her sportscar, strangled by her own long white scarf; Tennessee Williams, inhaling the cap of an atomizer. I could think of no form of death more trivializing than that which now threatened the goddess of my childhood. Had she undergone the surgeon's knife only to make a good-looking corpse?I could remember a lifelong procession of beauty aids: in 1947, a wooden slant-topped box from “Richard Hudnut,” “containing everything needed for your 40-day beauty make-over.” The box itself, sturdier and more substantial than the products of today's cosmetic packaging, was designed to serve as a laptop writing desk on which one might pursue a daily “beauty diary” in the twenty minutes required for the eerie green facial “masque” to harden. In the early 1950s, I remember my mother bringing home a heavy piece of equipment, the size of a car battery, for “toning your figure” by applying electric shocks to the muscles. Sprinkling water on the rubber pads provided intensified the effects of this device, a machine that demanded total surrender. I speak as one who has lain strapped like Frankenstein's monster to its array of coils, dials, and switches, pitching and heaving as if in the throes of a Hollywood orgasm—an experience one might liken to multiple simultaneous charley horses—which should have left me free, according to the instructions, to knit, read, or watch television as my calf muscles clenched and unclenched. No doubt I had the voltage turned up too high. In our quest for beauty, we tended to excess. The perm, the henna, the streaking and bleaching—who had not gone overboard in search of self-improvement? When I was twenty, my mother shelled out good money to have our hairlines redefined by electrolysis—a painful procedure I abandoned after the first session, long before acquiring the widow's peak that, according to my mom, had transformed Rita Hayworth from a lowbrow dancer into the bride of the Aga Khan. As the plane circled above the lights of San Diego, I remembered Lady Gregory's comment to Yeats: “We women know what work it is to be beautiful.”It was 2:00 a.m. when I was admitted to the semidark hospital room in intensive care where my mother's bloated comatose body lay on a bed connected to various tubes and wires, a ventilator, and an intravenous feeding device. Poor Mama! Her face was swollen and bruised beyond recognition. I'd failed to anticipate the patchwork of stitches, like a close-up from The Bride of Frankenstein, piecing it together with rows of black X's. Her belly was wrapped in bandages as wide as a cummerbund. It would be a day or two before I was permitted to see the wound beneath, a deep gouge, as if she had been impaled on a broom handle. Encouraged by the night nurse to talk, I remember entreating my mother to wake. I held her hand, her fingers laced in mine. After an hour or so, she stirred. Her swollen eyelids parted. Her eyes had a wild, frightened look.“Was it worth it to be beautiful?” I asked. She shook her head no, disturbing the apparatus that kept her breathing. A tear welled at the outer corner of one eye.Earl and I were staying at the same motel and arrived at her bedside together the following morning. We found her surprisingly active. Unable to speak, she gestured for a pen and paper.Earl stood by, twirling his cap in his hands while her bed was raised to a sitting position. “I sure wish I coulda brung the dogs!” he greeted her. Fondness made him folksy. Mama hoisted herself up on one elbow and, with some difficulty, wrote: “I don't care about the dogs. Am very uncomfortable. Get me some morphine.”Cleopatra was herself again! Nevertheless, I was stung by the next message that emerged in her wobbly hand: “Could you please go away and come back on my birthday?”The nurse explained that non sequitur was to be expected, at least for a while, after a trauma. “I'm not going to die,” Mama squeezed my hand as she wrote. “I thought I might. I felt so comatose. I had a sand baby on my stomach. Where did my purse go? Leave my toothbrush, denture powder, hair spray. Where's my Kaiser card?”She filled a yellow legal pad with such requests. At first her writing was wobbly, childlike, and consisted mostly of requests for ice, with many underlinings and exclamation points (“I can have ice. Doctor said”). Gradually a more characteristic voice emerged. “The nurses couldn't get the buzzer to shut off, so they had the therapist in here trying to fathom what I wanted. It was just a mechanical failure. I only wanted some ice. They think the doctor might not approve. Cluck! Cluck! I just know I feel better when I have ice.”Sometimes our talk would return to Jan. “Oh Lord,” Mama labored to write, “that woman.”In the next few days, I did a lot of walking on the streets surrounding San Diego's Kaiser, most of them freeways with few accommodations for foot traffic, so that, although the motel was only six blocks away, it was actually twice that far if you included the various detours you had to make, maneuvering complicated cloverleafs, scurrying across six lanes in the ticking seconds allotted before the WALK signal turned to WAIT and left you stranded on an island in the midst of the traffic. The heat, idleness, and tension of the occasion made me feel like Joan Didion, whose White Album I was reading at the time. “Why don't you go and have your hair done,” said my mother, no doubt sensing my Didionesque mood. She nodded in the direction of the shopping mall adjacent to the hospital, where I had already whiled away many an hour when she was being seen by doctors, lingering over a frozen yogurt in a stylish San Diego shop called Penguin.So I paced the air-conditioned mall and discussed my mother's case with Earl over Styrofoam cups of coffee, and every day my mother grew more beautiful. Her features did not appear younger exactly, but ennobled, as if she were a wise elder on Star Trek. A new brow emerged, smoother and whiter than before. Her graying temples now suggested serenity and integrity. One evening while she slept, I admired this new face, swathed in bandages, like a plaster-of-Paris death mask, floating before me in the semidarkness of the intensive care unit where she lay, pinstriped with light the Levolor blinds cast on the bias across the bed. I recalled Isak Dinesen's “It is the skeleton, the skull beneath the skin, that makes us beautiful.”Hunting through Mama's purse for her medical card, I came upon the message she had written to Jan in Ensenada: a pencil line that looked like it was made by a seismograph crowded on top of itself and then dispersed into a faint cursive “I went.” “What did you mean, ‘I went’?” I asked the next time I came for a visit. I was sitting at the dining table watching Earl on his knees, cleaning her infected flesh and applying clean bandages. “Musta thought she was a goner,” he answered for her.I admit to having sometimes wondered privately why Mama had married Earl. Of course she had married for love, but in my mind Earl the ex-con was a step down from the celebrated Berkeley professor who had courted her for so many years. Now another reason occurred to me. Maybe she had anticipated needing someone to care for her. If not for Earl, on his hands and knees at my mother's feet, that someone would have been me.In the weeks after I got home, many things reminded me of my mother. On our coffee table at home was an art book on the work of Joseph Cornell. Looking through the bibliography, I found a small photo of Hedy Lamarr, a postage-stamp-sized photo, as impressionistic as a painting, of her enigmatic gaze—a gaze that had haunted my childhood, although I had never seen Hedy Lamarr on film, because she was the star of Ecstasy, and Ecstasy was forbidden. I had discovered this one Sunday morning when I slipped out for a walk while the grown-ups were still asleep. I paused in the alcove surrounding the dark ticket booth outside the Campus Theater, as I often did, on Sunday mornings, to look at the posters advertising the movie “now playing” until Wednesday that week. This particular Sunday featured a poster of Lamarr, her scandalous nudity a mere white streak rubber-stamped with a huge “X-rated,” meaning that children were not allowed. This image of expulsion shocked and troubled me.The bibliography contained an essay by Cornell celebrating the beauty of Hedy Lamarr. I read the whole article, but whereas her image had loomed large in my childhood, here it was small and faint. I reached for my glasses, feeling as if I were deciphering a foreign language: “Among the barren wastes of talking film are passages to remind one again of the profound power of silent film to evoke an ideal world of beauty.”At times Cornell's essay lapsed into poetry: “She will walk only when not bid to. Arising from her bed of nothing, her hair of time falling to the shoulder of space. If she speaks, and she will only speak if not spoken to, she will have learned her words yesterday and will forget them tomorrow, if tomorrow comes, for it may not.”The aluminum chaise lounge still sits in my mother's backyard, on the patio beneath the almond tree, but our beauty parlor is closed for business now. Although she may ride her wheelchair as far as the laundry room, my mother seldom goes outside.