‘cute’
applies in a weird way to my mom, even as she’s fighting lung cancer with chemotherapy treatments in Portland. one day before her 77th birthday she tugs at the edge of her wig. the tendrils of what’s left of her hair peek out. i snip some off. we laugh, but i notice that fear shades her eyes from time to time, or a far away, inward look as she drifts off from our conversation. her trembling hands look up a number in the yellow pages. her green-rimmed eyeglasses tuck under the wig like a pencil stuck into a rubber bathing cap. her eyebrows (one bent and lonely stalk here, another there) are more sparse than ever. she walks steadfastly away from the waiting room in her regulation robin’s egg blue hospital robe for an x-ray. she does not look back. her wig is on right, but to her it feels as if it bubbles up on top of her head, leaving an itchy cavity between her balding skull and the nap of the wig. she applies herself to this assault of lethal chemicals with what-else-am-I- going-to-do-about-it-I-hope-this-works matter-of-fact Yankee courage, dread, hope and helplessness. all this is transparent in her wrinkled face, the face which she finds ‘so old’ when she looks in the mirror. tonight I catch a glimpse of her in her underpants and sunset boulevard turban. she says goodnight all over again as she sees me seeing her, but she does not start. she is not ashamed of her body, of her mottled skin, the testament to her ongoing battle with pre-melanoma. she is girlish undressing for bed, caught like a snapshot in the soft light.
This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press
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