Free A Different Kind of Normal by Cathy Lamb

husbands and four daughters. Her greatest regret, “I didn’t have enough sex. I was brought up in the wrong era. Praise be to Gloria Steinem.”
    She is selflessly interested in my life and she asked to meet Tate a couple months ago because I’d told her he was an expert at chess. This was against the rules, but I brought him anyhow. Tate ate a third of the pineapple meringue cake on her counter, at her invitation, and they became fast friends. Maggie has been playing chess her whole life. Her father taught her before he jumped out the window.
    She does not have much time. Late this summer I asked her what she wanted to do with the time she had. “I want to be with my daughters, their families, and my roses. I want to beat your son in chess. It would mean the world to me to checkmate him, fair and square, no pity wins. That’s what would make me happy, dear.”
    Tate calls her, “Maggie Shoes.” She calls him, “Bishop Tate,” because of Tate’s love of the bishop on the chessboard, and he has agreed to not let her win a “pity win.”
    She is living out her days as she wishes.
     
    “I’m getting all geared up to lose again next year,” my mother drawled, tipping back her martini. She’d flown up from Hollywood for the weekend to visit.
    “Maybe you won’t lose,” I said. I was making crab cakes with dill, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and mint leaves for dinner. Yum. Tate called them Crabby Yum Cakes. It was Grandma Violet’s recipe from her mother.
    “I will lose,” my mother sang out. “No Emmy for me, give me another mar-tee-knee.”
    “I’d vote for you if I could, Mom.” I stirred the Yum as a blast of wind and rain hit my windows. Today I had seen pink leaves, pink, on the ground.
    “Thank you, darling, but I’ll lose. I’ll get new Botox shot into my face so that I’ll appear young and youthful when I smile for the cameras but secretly I’ll wish that the vagina of the winner would fall out from between her legs while she is giving her thank you for recognizing that I am immensely talented speech.” My mother gasped in a mocking way, clutched her chest, and pretended to be flabbergasted. “Oh, thank you, thank you to my agent with his greasy hands, my co-stars whom I secretly hate, and the producer who is bipolar and screams at me on Wednesdays.”
    My mother has been nominated for an Emmy eight times and she never wins. I’ve gone with her to the awards ceremonies. She buys me a dress, we have our makeup and hair done, and she struts down the red carpet, cameras flashing. I hold my breath as her name is called and when she doesn’t win, after the camera pans away, I mouth out, “Underneath that slinky dress the winner is a man. You can almost see the penis.”
    And she whispers, still smiling, pretending she doesn’t want to tackle the winner to the floor, “I think her left breast is overly large.”
    And I say, “A third nipple. It’s on her left buttock. She was born with a third nipple .”
    And she says, “Did you see the horn out the back of her? She’s part devil.”
    This goes on and on until we are laughing so hard we are crying.
    My mother comes back up to Oregon and we putter in my greenhouse amidst the basil and lavender and “heal up.”
    I flicked through another recipe book. I wanted to bake and gobble molasses cookies. “A vagina falling out on stage would cause quite a stir, Mother.”
    “Yes, it would. Hollywood types are all bizarre, but a falling vagina would definitely bring the house down. What should she do? Pick it up? Walk away and get a new vagina? Say it belongs to the male host?”
    “It’s a tricky situation, but you are outstanding this season, as usual.” A striped sunset glinted off my greenhouse, beyond the maple trees lining the drive. I love my greenhouse. It is peace with glass. “Elsie Blackton is positively throbbing with evil and sexual tension. She is mean and manipulative and somehow oddly lovable.”
    “That’s because