Dysons Make the Best Dance Partners

Fifteen years ago the flashbulbs would have been blinding and the results would have remained mysterious, but in the age of instant gratification and digital cameras, my mother was able to have her photo taken over and over. And over. And make immediate demands for deletion.

No, it wasn’t her surprise birthday party; it was my sister’s. While Mandy was having a day at the spa, her husband transformed their home into a cocktail lounge, suited with candle light, high-boy tables, waitresses, hors devours, and a bartender serving pear martinis. There a was gusto of surprise, a toast in her honor, a cake of fondant frosting shaped like something I cannot exactly recall, dancing, slideshows. The works.

And there in a corner, while my sister was off downing martinis and thanking the waitresses like she’d just been handed an Academy Award, a group of about six of us were standing around my mother in the kitchen giving her a sundry of instructions on looking casual, while my friend Stephanie fired off the camera. Some guests thought she ought to tuck her bangs behind her ear, while others thought she should try smiling with her mouth closed next time. About every five shots, we stopped to review the results.

It wasn’t going well.

I believe that was about the eleventh time my mother decided she was going to pursue EHarmony or match dot com, and wanted “help.” “Leesha, tell me which site I should go with— which is the best one,” she inquired, in that junior high best-friends-forever tone I hated? It was painful. Hearing the slightest utterance from her on the topic made me want to slit my wrists for ever mentioning the mere existence of the World Wide Web to her. But the damage was already done. She’d been on and off dating websites before, but hadn’t found any success. And by success I don’t mean that she didn’t meet the man of her dreams; I mean that she wasn’t able to wrangle a single online date.

She’s my mother. She’s my mother and I know she’s got some crazy goin’ on, but she's attractive, so I half wondered what kind of crazy emails she might have sent to prevent a solitary outing. Not one date? Did she tell them that she liked to eat onions whole, eat them like apples? Did she tell them how she spoke in tongues on occasion or mention her bladder surgery? Her unusually sized colon? These are things my mother casually slips into conversation among friends, but I suspected she had more sense when it came to dating,

Once upon a time, she had the luxury of luring in her prey with side-long glances and giggling, and then later she would unleash the wacky-town, but with the new age of cyber dating, I wasn’t sure how she’d been trying to bait them. Surely she was still saving crazy for after the meal—I mean, she’s nutty not dumb. I really wasn’t sure of her escapade details and the more I thought about it the more I realized I didn’t want to know much beyond the fact that she had a profile already circulating on www dot something or other dot com.

One thing I knew then and still know to be true today is that my mom’s got game. And I know this from seeing her in action with a number of my former male acquaintances. It was at my sister’s graduation, from about 5 yards away, that I noticed my mother making a pass at a guy I happened to be dating. That was the first moment I realized she had some moves and simultaneously came to understand that there was a new set of rules unfolding between us. She leaned into to him slightly when she smiled, touched his arm, and spoke in a murmur of coy, enchanting tones that I could barely overhear. But I heard enough. At the time I was both enraged and amazed, and as I stormed toward them I duly noted her posture. Touch his arm. Giggle, don’t laugh. He is the funniest person in the room. You are not.

I no longer had the luxury of compartmentalizing the images that come to mind with discovering your mother’s poly-blend panties tangled in the bed sheets as a kid. She liked to get hers. And when I saw her ask my date to dance at a wedding, I knew nothing good would come of it. Still, I watched from the bar, where I was taking shots with the groom’s men, keeping my eye on her, noticing how her arms worked around his waist, how easily they found their way under his suit jacket.

My mother is an attractive woman. I’m not crazy about the highlights that her hairdresser talked her into, and I’d tone down the mascara, but for the love of GOD could we not get a single decent photograph? Over and over again, Stephanie snapped pictures and every single one was just as bad as the last. She cocked her head to the side so that she had six chins, one eye was half closed, and appeared to be rolling back in her head. Or the whole thing was a complete blur.

“Deb, what’s the problem here, are you wasted?!—open your eyes,” Steph said in a moment of amazement and indignation at just how long the process was taking. Steph had promised all night that she’d get some great photos of my mom, and the anticipation had been building.

“No, Stephanie, this always happens to me—my eyes always end up closed—I’m trying to keep them open,” she explained in a voice that revealed that she felt somewhat foolish.

It was true. Common knowledge too. My mother was basically incapable of having her picture taken. Even as a kid I recognized the pattern. Wedding photos, baptisms, prom pictures. Her eyes were always at least half closed with a wheezing look like she was about to sneeze, complicated by the awkward cock of her head that added about twenty pounds. It never really mattered much to me, because I knew what she looked like, and besides, it was funny. But I was becoming more and more sure by the second that this picture situation was really the problem with her online dating snafu. After round ten of takes I realized what the problem was.

“Okay, Mom, I have just cracked the code to your existence of bad photographs.  Everytime, right as she's about to take the picture, you start bobbing your head like some invalid giggling at a cartoon. It's not like people are actually going to see a silent film of you—it’s a fucking picture. Why are you pretending to laugh?  Smile. Look at the camera and don’t move.”

My siblings and I really beef up the language for our parents’ sake. It’s part of what we determined to be their lives’ sentence. We drop F-bombs on them like it's Armageddon. My mother sometimes enjoys it, because she likes to think that we see each other as equals that way, but in mixed company our language works to mortify her quite well, and then she retaliates.

“Fuck you, Alycia!” Our friends just stood back and watched the scene play out. It was really nothing new.

“Well, Jesus Christ, Mom, people have been doing this for a fucking century and somehow you haven’t caught on. I’m trying to help you here—When you get your picture taken, it’s a few easy steps: Hold still, open your eyes, and smile. That’s it. "

It was the truth, damn it—That wasn’t a good freeze-frame look for her. She stared at me with her pissed off face, the one with empty threats written all over it.

All four of us kids dished it out to my mother on regular basis, like she was Joan Crawford getting roasted on Comedy Central. If she did it, we were going to make fun of it. I gave my mother shit and as far as I was concerned it was nobody’s business.

She rolled her eyes in her head  in resentful surrender and said “Fine, Alycia!” She then stood against the counter with a wine glass up near her chest and flashed her gleaming teeth as Stephanie took one more photo. “Fucking happy,” she asked me? She then turned Stephanie’s camera around and showed us the results.

And there it was. The picture. “See, mom, I told you! This is gonna get you some tail. Don’t you wish I’d realized this ages ago?” I say things like this ironically, which she never really seems to catch onto, but she was beginning to recover from the blow now.

“You know... I do,” she said, not allowing any bit of our previous exchange to overshadow her more recent satisfaction.

My sister at this point in the party was stammering blissfully over from the bar with a new drink in her hand, “Ohhh… Mom, you’re getting glamor shots,” she crooned, but didn’t stop for a reply, working the room, moving through the crowd. I love seeing my sister in that state. She’s a happy person, allows herself to love life, and on the rare occasions that she is drunk it’s as if every good thing she did in her life coalesces to allow for her own private Hollywood evening. That evening was especially such.

My niece who had recently turned three was running through the house all afternoon waiting for Mandy’s return. Reese was at the age when she’d discovered the concept of relationships, still wanting to marry her father and grow up to be her mother. The minutes before Mandy's arrival, she had worked herself into a frenzy at how overjoyed Mandy would be to see us all here. So that I could distract her from the hubbub of setup, I sat her on the bathroom counter with her feet in the sink while I pretended to apply eye shadow to her lids and then smudged lip-gloss onto her little bow lips. She firmly instructed me to close my eye shadow and blush compacts so that they wouldn’t get ruined, just as my sister, her mother, would have told me to do also, appalled that my makeup was in complete disarray.

The clearest memory I have of my own mother from childhood is her putting makeup on in the bathroom. She would stand at the vanity with the drawer to the right perpetually opened, practically spilling with lipstick, plastic eyelashes, and liners in an array of colors. She had a white cotton dress she wore often, with a pattern of red, velveteen ferns covering it, and a plastic red belt that cinched at the waste so the fabric clung to her hips. In retrospect she was one sexy bitch. When she moved to her bureau to put on earrings and perfume she would look into the mirror and smile at who she saw, delighted, as though she came upon an old friend by surprise. It was a smile that passed from her face quickly and was flanked by regular discontent that welled up from a place I knew all too well.

I love my mom. I love my mother. I’ve been known to tell people this for no apparent reason. I can't help myself, and when I make the statement out loud I hate how it rings, how it sounds like I’m denying a crush on some guy in the room, though I’ve clearly been flirting with his disaster all evening.

My brother, two sisters, and I tell each other this often in the aftermath of a major mom bitch session, “Ohhh… You, know, I love mom though….”

“Me too…” someone else will say in response. But no one has any intention of releasing her from the sentence we've given.

Her second ex-husband was among our favorite topics to reminisce over for entertainment and torture, and about twice a year she’ll scream at us, “All right fine. I was a terrible mother. But am I ever going to be off the hook for Kent?!”

“No,” we unanimously reply. Kent would always be free game. The four of us had been known to berate our mother to near anxiety attacks over her loser ex-husband. On one occasion we broke her down into a teary eyed defense during a friend’s Christmas party, amidst an audience of smiling bystanders. And we felt no remorse. We stood there drinking our hot ciders, munching on a variety of holiday sweets and laughed, until my brother, said “dude these peanut butter balls rock,” and we moved on with the conversation. People honestly seemed to find it funny, otherwise we  might have stopped.

Mandy will on occasion say something later like, “Do you think we were too hard on mom?

To which we all respond with a resounding, “Nahhh...” And this is enough to assuage any tinge of guilt.

I love my mother. But at this point in my life she feels more like the new kid who I’m chaperoning around the heartless halls of a junior high school than she feels like a mother. I’m not sure when we went from her telling me if I didn’t get up for school she was going to dump a bucket of water on my head, to me explaining why I did in fact think she should break up with her boyfriend who recently spent time in prison for being part of a Mexican drug cartel. "Okay, Mom, I'm only gonna tell you this one more time...."

I often wish I could live her life for her. If I could, I would not eat the entire onion before leaving for the movie theater. I would not have a fourth glass of wine, or even a third. I would not choose my father again. And again. I would break up with my boyfriend. I would tell my boss to fuck off. I would pull myself up and stop pretending. I would do all the things that some days I don’t have the strength to do for myself.

As a child Mandy and I used to sit in the stairway with my mother while she told us about her pregnancies, how she grew up near a swimming hole, how her first day of kindergarten went, her wedding day. And she told us over and over that we would have happy lives full of love. And I knew she meant that we would have lives different from hers. And I believed that.

There are days I’d like to set her hair on fire and call it an accident, but I love my mother. And sometimes I see her in myself, as she chuckles with her head cocked like a deranged bird dog and still wonders how her photographs never come out quite right.

By this time, Mandy had begun her latest dance routine with the Dyson vacuum, straddling it like a stripper pole in rhythm with Queen, martini in one hand, and an upholstery attachment raised to her mouth in the other. My sister is beautiful, happy, and on that evening only Queen could do her joy justice. As the Dyson began to take on an identity of its own, I noticed my mom staring at my sister and laughing. Her temporary photo-op fan club had broken up into smaller groups, joined another cocktail table, stepped outside for new conversation, the vacuum was transforming into a mechanical bull, and judging by Mandy's gyrations, the party was only getting started. I had the urge to tell my mother then that she would have a life full of love, say that she would make herself happy, tell her to, but rather than bust up the party, I laughed along with her from across the room.