KIT REED

MOMMY NEAREST

Don't hit my hand away!"

"Mo-o-m!" She is tying a fucking ribbon in my hair.

"Tammy, dammit, smile!" In spite of the bonding, Mom's teeth are turning yellow.
After all, she's practically ninety which sucks, because I'm only sixteen. But
hey, she looks all buff in the string bikini, tan as a Moroccan camel saddle,
your aggressive size four, check out the Universal Trainer biceps and gleaming
six pack abs. The woman is oiled like a piece of antique furniture, which is
what she is, while I bob along the beach in pink like a captive balloon.

Smile? "No way!"

She keeps running at me with the bow ribbon. "Shh, they're watching. Hold
still!" Welcome to my morn. Regard the tummy tucks, butt lifts, herbal body
wraps, hair weave, botulism shots to chill the wrinkles, laser peels, the woman
is a miracle of technology. Older than the Aztec gods and she hits the beach
like Baywatch is in its first season and she is the new star. You know those
prom corsages you smoosh into books and a hundred years later they're still
there but they're all shriveled and flat? Well that's my mom. It is obscene.

I hiss back at her. "I don't care." I am yet another miracle of technology,
about which more when I am feeling stronger. Right now I'm battling the hair
ribbon. She keeps coming at me, moving her mouth like you do when you're trying
to get a baby to swallow something it doesn't want. "Leave me alone!"

She wails, "After everything I've done for you!"

"You mean fucking done to me!" These clothes! Pink jellies and this fucking
ruffled playsuit, way gross, and she is all, it's slenderizing, whatever that's
supposed to mean. What it means is, I'm supposed to look twelve, which in pink
candy stripes, I do. You know, one more magic appliance, like the lipo and
implants and collagen. She's all, Accessorize. Like, check out your look --
sequined headband, mylar bikini, fat kid.... The woman looks like Barbie on
Ultra Slim Fast in the bikini, while I could be Mr. Poppin' Fresh on steroids.
Or Mrs. Poppin' Fresh, if there is a Mrs. Poppin' Fresh, one more part of her
total look. "I hate these clothes!"

Her Sicilian Sunset mouth begins to tremble. "You look lovely."

"I look fat."

"Pleasingly plump."
"Fat!" I look like an albino watermelon, and she knows it too. I am clawing at
the ruffles on my front. The ugly truth is Evelyn locks me in my room a lot,
along with my old buddies Mrs. Fields and Ben&Jerry's and SaraLee to keep me
fat, like if you don't have a waist you'll never grow up. See, if I do grow up,
she has to get old. "I feel like fucking Gretel." I do not have to add that she
looks like the witch.

"Shh," she says, because we are going by the Caribe Zanzibar Resort and there is
a party going on, you know, audience. She wants them all pointing at us and
smiling. Oh look, young mama. doesn't she dress the little girl nice. She is
hissing, "They'll hear."

I get louder. "This is a sick playsuit. Only a sick mother would make a daughter
wear a sick playsuit like this." I thwap the back of her thong bikini; any fool
could see she is wearing Shape Shifters taped to her butt.

"Don't use that tone with me, not after ..."

"Everything you did." I cut her off at the pass. "Don't start."

She starts anyway. "Doctors, clinics, pain. Everything I went through ..." Well,
what she went through was ... Look, you know. It was in all the papers. On TV.
M.O.W. "A Mother's Pride." These days geriatric moms are no big deal. Some babe
my mother's age just popped triplets, but it was a very. big deal at the time. I
have the clipping laminated in my bedroom, to keep me straight.

SEVENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD WOMAN BECOMES OLDEST FIRSTTIME MOM

No wonder she's always tired. Don't bother me Tammy, I'm tired. Say you're bored
and she goes, Shh Tammy, I'm lying down. Or she sighs. Tammy, why don't you go
out and play? By this she does not mean: go out and ride around in cars plus I'm
maybe too weird for guys to want to ride me around in cars, I mean, nobody else
dresses like this. Nobody else's more is, like, a hundred years old. Kids go
"Are you adopted?" When I'm like, "No," they back off fast, like, the light bulb
goes on. "Oh, you're that Tammy." Like it's creepy, which is what it is. "Test
tube Tammy Ohhhhh." Can you guess what they call me at school? "Turkey Baster
Tammy" is another one. Oh right, ironic. The Sexy Sixties name. God, we haven't
even had the Sixties in History. Our books don't go back that far.

The newspapers said my more made a million on the rights to our story, which she
did. The papers also said this scary thing. That these old bags had other
motives, like, birthing a nurse for The Final Days? Like when they've fallen and
their beeper doesn't beep us kids are screwed: Help, I've fallen, and tag.
You're it!

No way! My more isn't like that. She's the picture of fucking health!

You bet she is. Look, while we're standing here Evelyn has gone down the bill of
complaints in full voice and she is winding up, "I did everything for you, and
look!"
Something inside me snaps and I go, "No, you look. And then you can fucking go
to hell." I start unbuttoning the playsuit. It's time she found out this is only
padding and I'm skinny underneath. If I drop the playsuit the whole world will
know which of us is young and sexy here, and which is the rack of chicken bones.
But her face crumples up and I don't have the heart.

"Oh, Tammy." I expect her usual, but instead she sighs like she'll never take
another breath. "I didn't ask for this."

"Well I sure as hell didn't ask for you!" Like a high school junior needs a room
with orthotics plus Odor Eaters overflowing her beach shoes and Ensure folded up
in the Depends Adult Undergarments in her beach bag and a secret aluminum walker
that she keeps stashed by her bed.? I mean, having a baby at her age has gotta
be disgusting. Like a thousand-year-old mummy having sex. Right out here in the
open I go, "What were you thinking?"

"Shh," she says. "They'll hear." We are stalled in front of the Caribe Zanzibar.
There are a zillion people on the deck. I am not smiling. Instead I hit her
where she lives. Not to put too fine a point on it, she had me to stay young.
The LaMaze classes must have been a hoot. She says, for the audience, "Oh honey,
I wanted you?

I snap, "Yeah, like you want a face lift that sticks."

"Don't!" She pulls down the Raybans so I will see that she is glaring. But it
isn't quite the same. Things in her face are fighting with other things so the
parts don't match. It is too weird.

I am afraid to ask, Are you okay? so I growl fondly, to buck her up. "You think
you're so fucking cool." Which Evelyn isn't, you know? Especially not now. I am
beginning to itch all over. It's like having one of those things festering
underneath a Band-Aid that you're scared to peel it off and take a look at?

But I do. I step back. I study my too-tired go-out-and-play
don't-bother-me-I'm-resting mother. Except for the ankle bracelet, which does
not go with the antique jeweled Judith Leiber cockroach handbag or the retro
Rave rocket shoes with the toes cut out, she looks all right to me. I snarl, "Go
on, say you wish you'd never had me. Go ahead."

This is phase one of the ritual fight, where we get down and duke it out. Then
we can make up and go home and she will buy me things. First I have to get her
so pissed that she snarls, "I've failed."

Here's how it's supposed to go. She starts with, "On top of everything, you
mined my figure. Breast feeding, it made me flat!" Not! Truth is, you can forget
the silicone implants and the Breastalizers glued inside the top of the bikini.
My room will always look like a transsexual in the middle of the change. Then I
yell and she goes, "You murdered your father, you ungrateful bitch." Which is
not exactly true. He was a hundred when he died but she blames me )"You were too
heavy for him") I personally think it was the shock. Her pooping out a baby at
her age. Besides, who says that was my real dad in the test tube anyway? The
egg, she got from a surrogate baby ranch. Darling, I got knocked up. No wonder
he died.

Evelyn is supposed to be yelling these things and I'm supposed to be snapping
off witty rejoinders so we can finish and get home. Instead we're out here in
the sand and it isn't happening. "Mom?"

She is just standing there.

I yell, "Are we fighting, or what?"

Moms, I will never understand them. Evelyn starts blinking like a bird that just
ran into a power mower. Her mouth is going mwah. Mwah. Mway.

"I wasn't your baby," I tell her, trying to bring her back to planet earth. "I
was just your second career."

It is definitely her turn. Her line is, "And I'm doing a damn good job!"" Then
she's supposed to finish me: "You're acting like a child!"

What in God's name did she expect? It sure as hell wasn't me. Like, she thought
she would miraculously be forty, like the other morns in the tenth grade? We
have Civil War statues in front of our high school that are younger than her.
But she .is distracted. I hiss, "This is when you say, You're acting like a
child.... Mom ?"

Nothing. No way. Me and Evelyn are in stasis here. In front of the Caribe
Zanzibar and I can't get her going, not even with pumped old men watching from
the Tiki deck. I give her a little prod. You know, like, when you're in the
middle of the last act of a play and the star has lost their place? I go, "And I
made your life a living hell, right, Mom? Well, I"ll tell you whose life is a
living hell."

Then Evelyn whirls with this bizarre little kiss-me mouth that the collagen
injections have plumped it up so you can hardly see the witch-wrinkles except
where the lipstick bleeds up into the grooves and she spreads her hands like a
child. "I know. Oh Mommy, I was bad."

You bet I am scared. "Mom!"

She sounds younger than me. "Mommy says it's against God."

She is definitely getting weird. If we're going to survive here, we need to keep
this fight on track. I go into attack mode. "You never had a mother, you were
too old."

But instead of hitting me or throwing herself down on the redwood chaise with
the black mattress emblazoned with Caribe Zanzibar in silver letters and going
"I've failed" so we can quit and go home, Evelyn just sort of sinks down on her
Shape. Shifters)(TM) there m the sand and pulls her knees up under her chin and
pats the sand and keeps patting the sand until I give in to something a lot
scarier than gravity and sit down next to her. For a long time she doesn't
speak. She has gone back inside herself like the witch on the weather house and
what comes back out in the next revolution is somebody I don't know. She says,
"Mama."

I try not to let her see that I am staring. Her face is sinking into her skull
in spite of the lipo and the laser touchups, dermabrasion, chemical peel. Her
legs look like naked chicken skin and her knees are jittering. I say, "What's
the matter?"

Then my mother scares me shitless. She gives this silly little-girl giggle. "I
lost my place."

My belly is bunching up in the horrible playsuit, or I think it is. Truth to
tell, I'm a size eight under all this padding, but given the way things are
going with my mom in this week before her eighty-ninth birthday, it seems safer
to let her dream. I try, "So do you want to have our fight here, or go home or
what?"

"Oh," she says. "Mother?"

Should I grab somebody's flip phone and dial 911 or what? "I'm not your mother!"

But she just goes, "Mama, have I been out in the sun too long? I know it's bad
for my head. Should we go home now and can I have a lolly after my bath?"

Oh fuck, I think. She is having an attack of Alzheimers. What am I going to do?
"Wuow, More, you're sorry you ever had me. Remember?" Look, we can't go on like
this. We are miles from the car. "Mother-daughter conflict, RIGHT?"

"I know you're scared I'll fall in love and go All the Way with some terrible
boy." Her eyes are silvered over, burnt-out lightbulbs in some other continuum.
She grabs my hand. '"I promise, he won't touch me. I promise I'll be home by
ten."

"Whoa," I say, but I am already wondering how I would look in her bikini, in
case we keep regressing like this. Is this going to end up with us changing
clothes and my mother going home in the ruffles, with me leading her by the
hand? I bark, "Shape up! I am definitely not your mother. Evelyn! Do you know
who I am?"

"Mama," she says in that girly voice, "I promise not to Do It until I'm married.
And we won't have babies until after graduate school."

My God, I think:. We're going through the Seven Ages of Mom. "Graduate school!
You're a fucking full professor." Which she is. Retired.
"No, you're right, we should wait until I get tenure."

"Mom, you got the gold watch twenty years ago!"

"Tick," she says. "Tock. There goes the biological clock. Forget about Men with
Paws,. I'm having menopause!" She folds up and starts to c~.

"Oh, Mom!" I give her a little buck-up poke in the rib. "Hey look, you really
showed them. You never had menopause, you had a kid!"

"My tubes are all twisted and dried."

"Baby? Remember?" I wiggle my fingers in front of her face but she won't focus.
"Evelyn, you're a phenom! Name in all the papers, right? Natural childbirth,,
play group. You wrote a book!" I am so worried that I start to sing, "'Tammy,
Tammy, Tammy my lo-ho-hove."

Evelyn mumbles, "Medical breakthrough or medical mess?" I don't know if her head
is back there in then or here in now. Are we in some odd transitional phase?
Should I give into this and wipe her mouth, or smack her face to bring her back
to now? She quavers. "Oh yes mother is embarrassed, my poor Mama is soooo mad at
me!" Sand is getting in the Maalox circle inside those collagen lips.

"Would you please just quit regressing please? Mom?"

But she is sliding a different way. All of a sudden she turns into her room.
"Pregnant, Evelyn. At your age. It is disgusting."

Then she morphs back into the Little girl. "Oh Mama, I made a big mistake!"

If she keeps on this way I'll never get her back. I've got to think fast. I
roar: "You made a mistake. 'What about me? You think I wanted a hundred-year-old
mom?" I rattle her shoulders, gotta try. I have to get her good and mad or she
will sink into the sand here and fucking die. People have drifted over from
other beach hotels to watch. "Mom. Mom."

She just goes on in her mother's voice. "A baby, and at your age! You should be
ashamed." Then she steps back into Evelyn, all girlish and embarrassed. "Oh
Mommy, it was an accident."

"I'm not your mom!" Yes I am getting desperate. I shake her harder. I turn her
so she'll see that there is an audience, "You're the fucking mother here, so
chill."

Then she blinks a little and comes back to herself. Thank God. "Don't you dare
use that tone with me," she says. "Shh, they're watching. After everything I've
done for you."

Right on. I've got her going now. "Damn straight."
Her eyes flash, but only a little bit. She tries to get up, and can't. "They
said I was crazy, wanting a baby."

That's more like it. Fine, More. Stay mad. "And they were right? But she isn't
moving so I rasp, "Now you're supposed to say you're sorry you had me, right?
Right, More, right?"

"What? Sorry? Oh no!" Oh my gosh she looks at me and her eyes have cleared but I
would swear to you that the middles have started spinning around. Then, it is so
sweet and so scary, instead of going into the old I've failed routine she says,
"I went ahead and had you and I'm glad."

And something inside me goes, squish. This woman's present is my future and it
is huge and terrifying. Mother. Daughter. God.

"Oh, honey." She is fixing to collapse into my arms. If I lose her now, this far
from the car, I will never get her home. Adrenaline. We are going to do this on
adrenaline. So I hiss, "Stand up. Don't faint or they'll think you're old."

That gets her, you bet. "Who, me? Old? I'm not old!"

"Shh. They're watching."

She whips her head around. They are. The clientele of the Caribe Zanzibar plus
the Hilton and Fluorescent Gulls. Audience! "Oh," she says like a gift. "Oh.
Oh!" She touches her hair.

Bingo. They are watching and she knows. I play her very carefully, like a fish
you're scared to land. I bang on my ruffled front as if we have been arguing
like normal. "Plus, I hate my fucking clothes!"

"Don't use that tone with me." She is getting mad.

I goad her a little bit more. "Why?"

"Because I said so." Spoken like a true mother. Cool.

"Because you said so?" I give her a push. "Like you're God?"

"No!" she says, and it does my heart good. She gets to her feet and she will
stay on her feet as long as I can keep her fighting with me. "Like I'm the
mother, and you're only a little girl?"

Way to go, More. "Like hell I am," I yell at her. Relief makes me incoherent.
"This outfit sucks and you can go to hell!"

"Okay, missy, I'm warning you." Evelyn grabs my arm. It hurts. I go, "Mom!" She
is marching now, thump thump in the rocket shoes. Rage is making her loud. The
whole beach has come out to see. She throws back her shoulders and shouts, for
the audience. "Okay, Missy. Watch out," Louder. Spotlight, music. I'm ready for
my closeup, Mr, DeMille. Applause. Applause! Her wig bobs in the sunlight and
striding along like that in the bikini with the Breastalizer inserts and Shape
Shifters(TM) bobbing every whichway, she is magnificent. "Or I'll unplug you
from the Internet. And no dessert!"

I squint at her, to be sure the cure takes. Yup, she's up and running. Fine, I
think, but I slip in the needle once more, in case. "Your dessert. You know
'what you can do with your dessert!"

"Shut up," she hisses because she knows what is comings. "They're watching."

Cool! I give her the finger and lay on one last infusion like rocket fuel. "You
can take your dessert and shove it up your ass!"

So we are cool. On the strength of this one fight, we're good for at least a
year. When we get home I'll let Evelyn spank me. After that we'll both cry and
she'll make me sit on her lap. My little girl. Then she'll send me to bed. And I
can go down the garage roof with my backpack and hitchhike over to the malt. By
this time I've boosted enough cool clothes that I can just segue in and, like,
mingle, I look so different that even the cute guys don't know it's me and if I
slip up with one of these guys when we're rolling around in his car in the
parking lot and I end up pregnant, hey, what'll we do? Evelyn won't even be mad.
I'll have it but we'll say she did it and it will get her in all the papers, and
hey, what retired professor about to be retired as a more wouldn't want to start
a third career?