Before she got sick, Ma cleaned on weekends. Put on some manfriend’s old T-shirt and latex gloves and tied her hair up in a loop atop her head. It was the only time she went out without makeup on, her cleaning days. When she caught the flu, when she got dumped, when she got a demotion, when we both had the chicken pox, when there was an earthquake that shook the whole country, even when she was diagnosed with cancer, she uncapped her favorite shade, Miss Scarlet, and crayoned her lips in. If Ma’s mouth wasn’t red, she was either cleaning or she was dead.
She only cleaned for one family: the Hobbes, who owned the department store she worked at on weekdays. They had a twelve-bedroom mansion on the North Shore with an indoor pool and a basketball court and a patio whose lip pouted out over the ocean. Once I asked Ma if it was embarrassing, cleaning her boss’s house.
Nothing embarrassing about hard work, bunny, she told me as she struck a match to light her cigarette. She didn’t like lighters—something about the drama of a matchstick flickering aflame. Plus, these people live like there’s a plague. It’s spotless already. I usually just walk into a room with a vacuum and a duster, count to a hundred, and leave again. Sometimes I think that just by going in there I make it dirtier.
Some days I asked to go with her. I’d help clean, I insisted, but I mostly wanted to know if the rumors were true. If they really had a life-size replica of Michelangelo’s David in their foyer. She always shook her head. The grass is always greener, bunny, she said. Sometimes it’s better not to know how green someone’s grass can get. Sometimes we’re better off not knowing just how brown our own grass is.
On the days she wasn’t cleaning, she worked the beauty counter at Hobbes, the biggest department store in Auckland. She had the best sales in the cosmetics department, but she was never rewarded for it. Minimum wage, no benefits, no bonuses, she stuck with the job anyway. She was a high school dropout, and if she asked for a promotion, they’d just hire the next girl in line. And anyway, she got all expired makeup half off, and sometimes she nicked the samples brought in by cosmetic reps and we did makeover nights on Sundays.
Back when I was stupid and young, I asked her why she had to have two jobs while some girls’ mothers had no jobs at all.
Gotta save up, bunny, she told me, gotta save up for your new set of teeth.
* * *
I was a pretty kid. I knew that. Grandmas told me at bus stops and strangers stopped us in the streets to admire my face and shopkeepers gave me an extra stick of gum with a wink, and they’d say something like You’re going to be a heartbreaker, sweetheart.
I was pretty until I opened my mouth. In there, though, I had two long front teeth like a rabbit, a beaver, like a freak, and when I smiled, people’s eyes changed.
People look at pretty things and feel happier—it’s something chemical. They call it being attractive because beauty attracts your attention and you can’t look away. Looking at a beautiful person makes you feel in love. But ugly people? People prefer not to look at ugly people at all. I was both at once. I felt every onlooker fall in love with me and wish me gone in the same sentence, the hinge being the moment I opened my mouth.
You seen those American movie stars? is what Ma said. They’ve got white picket fences in their mouths. They’ve got piano keys, hold the flats and sharps. They’ve got teeth straighter and whiter than the whole cast of Friends. They’re realtor teeth, bunny. Flight attendant teeth. Infomercial teeth. We gotta get rid of those bunny teeth and get you some movie teeth if you’re ever gonna be a star.
The other girls at school, their mothers were boring. They’d stopped wearing makeup, started wearing beige sweaters. They made sandwiches for their kids’ lunches and went off to their boring jobs behind boring desks, plugging numbers into computers, shuffling papers and frowning. They wore pants. They wore sensible shoes, which means ugly shoes. They wanted their daughters to grow up to be mothers, to be lawyers, doctors, accountants. My ma only ever wanted me to be a star.
My ma wore skintight pencil skirts and bright blouses unbuttoned to her cleavage. She never left the house without her hyphen of red across her lips and a black frame around each eye. Her hair was platinum blond, and she dyed it herself over the kitchen sink, humming “Billie Jean” and saying, Smell that, bunny? She meant the bleach, gestured to the air. That’s the smell of youth. Inhale it, bunny, stay young forever.
* * *
She died at fifty-five. Breast cancer. We’re not there yet, we have a bunch of healthy years to cover before we get there. But it’s worth a warning: she died, and it wasn’t a quick and painless death. It was long and slow and she was hurting the whole time. When she got her diagnosis, she said, I’ll let it kill me before I’ll let you take my girls. She meant her tits.