When that episode ended, my mother grabbed my face between her hands as I cleared the plates. “We’ve always been a lot alike, the two of us. In fact, you got both Dorothys in you, Theodore. Me and Bea. And don’t you live your whole life alone like I have. Die surrounded by friends like them Golden Girls. Surrounded by love. Real love, not pretend love.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a big difference between pretend love and real love. I pretended to love your daddy, but I never did. Grew up in a time when I didn’t have a chance to do anything else but survive: I wasn’t rich, I wasn’t smart, I wasn’t pretty, but, my God, I did love you, Teddy. I’m sorry I grew up in a time when we didn’t know how to show it.”
“And Trudy?” I asked.
“Don’t know if she’s capable of being loved.”
“I am loved, Mama,” I finally said. “Even though I’ve never felt like I deserved it.”
Every week whenThe Golden Girlswould end, my mama would always say, “Now I gotta wait another week. What if I’m not around to see a new episode?”
“They got TVs in heaven, Mama,” I’d say, “although I’m not sure that’s exactly where you’re headed. Elevator goes both ways. But just in case,” I’d add, “I’d better work my magic. You don’t want to wear those ratty old pajamas and nasty housecoat forever in the afterlife.”
“Do your magic,” she’d say to me.
Before I came home to look after Mama, I had been working the Lancôme counter at the mall in Rancho Mirage, down valley from Palm Springs, trying to make corpses look like MTV stars. But I was getting really good with makeup and hair. So good a fine-boned man asked me one afternoon if I did drag. I didn’t really know what that was at the time.
I learned fast and started doing the wigs and makeup of drag queens all over the desert. Then I started dressing them. I had a real eye for glamour, it turned out. You can make a black eye go away with concealer and fake lashes. You can become a different person with the right hair and makeup.
“A little hair, a little paint, makes a lady what she ain’t.”
I just hope God thought Mama was someone else when He greeted her. My handiwork might have been the only thing that gave her a shot with the Big Guy.
John always told me before we went out on a date that I had to put on something extra nice just in case we got in an accident and died. He was serious, too.
“If you die today, that’s going to be your ghost outfit,” John said. “You’ll wear it forever in the afterlife. So plan accordingly.”
So, the last night of Mama’s life, I dressed her up real pretty like the ladies she loved on TV and made her some Jeno’s Pizza Rolls. I worked my magic on Mama while she just watched me: Despite her pain, I got Mama out of her ratty old gown and intoa fabulous caftan, a bold cat eye, fake eyelashes, red lipstick and a red wig I teased within an inch of its life. A sweet hospice nurse had been bringing me wigs from the American Cancer Society.
“You can die in peace now, knowing you look like an angel,” I told Mama when I was done, not expecting it to be a premonition.
“Or a whore,” she said when I held up a mirror.
An hour later, Mama went to heaven or hell looking like Ann-Margret.
Bye Bye Birdie.
Man, Mama hated to miss an episode, so I curled up next to her in that bed, put my head on her shoulder, and we watched it together, like we’d done every Saturday the past few months.
This was our finale.
And if you don’t think God has a sense of humor, the last episode ofThe Golden Girlswe watched was about a funeral. The show was entitled “It’s a Miserable Life.” How’s that for irony?
In the show, Sophia attends a funeral service for a woman she never liked.
“Pay your respects?” Dorothy asks her mother, stunned by her attendance. “You hated her.”
“I did,” Sophia says. “But when a person dies, you go to their funeral to show the man above you have respect for human life, no matter how wretched it was. Any idiot knows that.”
God, Mama’s life was wretched.
Why did I go home again? To pay my damn respects.
I quit my job and moved home to take care of a woman who didn’t take care of me. I even left John and all my friends. I left a man who was too good for me. Too good for this world. Good people are like butterflies: beautiful, fragile, but short-lived. But John reminded me what was possible when you believe in the good in life and others. And you want to know the strangest thing? When someone believes in you, loves you so much, fills you with so much warmth that you can actually hear your heartcrack like the frozen earth on the first spring day in Michigan, it changes how you see the world and yourself.
You see light, not dark.
