Free Glitter and Glue by Kelly Corrigan Page A

unbearable, and, considering she was as beyond my control as American foreign policy, unfair. Butwhen I was in middle school, the very zenith of self-consciousness, a nervy boy named Harry Morrison who liked to hang around my brothers but didn’t like my mother’s house rules (and wasn’t afraid to give her the finger behind her back) took a potshot at her, and a dormant allegiance rose in me.
    One night when no one was around, Harry Morrison took a can of black spray paint to the concrete underpass leading to our street and wrote in giant letters:
    THE WITCH IS HAVING A SALE! BROOMS $1!
    SUPPLIES LIMITED—ACT NOW
    168 WOODED LANE
    I read the announcement twice before I understood what it meant. “Oh my God, Mom.”
    “That’s nice,” she said coolly as we drove past it.
    “That’s YOU.”
    “Sticks and stones, Kelly. We don’t worry about that sort of thing.”
    I
worried about that sort of thing. I was thirteen; that was pretty much all I worried about. What did people think about me? What did they think of my mother—her nylon sweatsuit, her frosted hair, the way she cracked her gum? Last and most important, did what they thought of my mother make them think less or more of me?
    “What are you going to do about it?” I asked, my voice shrill with panic.
    “Absolutely nothing.”
    Some
foul-mouthed
kid who didn’t like to be told to clean up his language or go home? Who wasn’t invited to stay for dinner after rolling his eyes at her? That kid and his graffiti tantrum didn’t bother my mother
one iota
.
    In a matter of days, the message was covered by a sloppy black rectangle, but when the sun angled in, you could still see our address. On bad days, when I’d had a blowup with my mother over cutting my hair in her bathroom and clogging her sink, or using a certain dismissive tone with her that she
wouldn’t use to talk to a criminal
, I’d think maybe Harry Morrison had it right. More often, I felt a strange, powerful mix of pity and chemical anger. It was my first taste of protective wrath, the kind that only mothers are said to possess.

 

    It’s still dark when Milly wakes up. I can hear her out there opening cabinets, so I roll out of bed and head to the kitchen.
    “Hi,” I say, turning on the overhead light.
    “Hi.”
    “Want some toast?”
    “No.”
    “Oatmeal?”
    “No.”
    “Cereal?”
    She sits down and looks at her reflection in the kitchen window. “My hair isn’t long enough.”
    “What? I love your hair.”
    “It’s ugly, and it won’t stay up.”
    “I can braid it. I can French-braid it. Have you ever tried that?” She shakes her head. “Well, if you want, get a hairbrush and a ponytail holder, and I’ll see what I can do.”
    My mom and I did not do this sort of thing. She had neither the inclination nor, as far as I know, the skill for hair design, and she was on high alert for vanity’s handmaidens: blow dryers, hot curlers, special bands and accessories. The only exception I can recall was the night before my First Communion, when she told me to take a shower and meet her in her bathroom. She had a vision. I did as I was told and reported to her door. She led mein, sat me on the counter, and for the next fifteen minutes labored over me, slowly dividing my wet hair into sections, twirling the sections into tiny buns, clipping the buns to my head with two silver hairpins crisscrossed. We did not talk, but I knew she was happy because she made the same satisfied working noises she made when she polished silver or pulled flagging leaves off her potted plants, and because I saw her face in the mirror as she wrapped my head under one of her many navy blue/kelly green scarves and she was grinning. In the morning, she slipped out the pins two by two, and then it was time to shake out the curls.
Voilà!
she said. I put on my flouncy dress and buckled my hard, shiny shoes and stood in front of my mom, who looked at me and nodded. I could have tap-danced all the way to St.