Free Tales From My Closet by Jennifer Anne Moses Page B

fire.
    “Uh-huh,” she said again.
    “A total dork-out dweeb of dweebation,” I added.
    She must have thought I’d mainlined caffeine. “Well,” she finally said. “My name isn’t Justin. It’s Justine.”
    “Just Justine!” I sang. “Just, just just — Justine!”
    Then the bell rang and she went into her class, and I was late for mine and got a tardy.
    What is wrong with me?
    When I got home that afternoon around four, the first thing I did was call Mama Lee. Here’s what I said: “Can I come over to your house this weekend?”

     
    “Prettier than ever,” Mama Lee said, giving me a big hug. In the past few years, her cheekbones had become even more prominent, and her wide-spaced dark eyes even more wide-spaced. Her hair had gone entirely silver, and glowed, like it was back-lit. And even though she had a slight limp from the stroke she’d had a few years earlier, her posture was erect and stately.
    She was the most amazing person I’d ever known. She’d been the first in her family to finish high school; then she worked, doing whatever she could to save up enough money to go to secretarial school. And then, in 1951, she became the first black saleswoman ever to be hired at Bamberger’s, which is where she met my grandfather, who worked on the loading dock. In old photographs, her long hair is pulled back into a smooth puff, and she wears pearls, cotton dresses with cinched-in waists or suits with padded shoulders, with smallish hats perched on her head.
    “How’s my baby girl?” she said as I inhaled the smell of her warm skin — part baby powder and part hand lotion.
    “Okay, I guess.”
    She released me now to take a step back and look at me, like she always did when I came to visit. “Uh-huh, I see,” she said. “Sophomore year, huh?”
    “Yup.”
    “You’re growing up fast! Tenth grade already. Imagine that!”
    “It’s no big deal,” I said. “It’s just high school.”
    “And you looking so fine!”
    That was just so — so Mama Lee. She didn’t even know how to be anything but my biggest fan, like she’d never even heard of being critical or demanding or cranky. She didn’t know how to look dowdy, either — not even with the right half of her body listing a little. She was wearing a pair of navy slacks with big brass buttons and a white blouse, and her fingernails were painted red, like she was expecting some boy she had a crush on to come over instead of her dorky fifteen-year-old granddaughter.
    “Baby,” she said, “I’m so glad you came over today. Because I got some work you can help me with. Would that be all right?”
    “No problem,” I said. “Only . . .”
    Only I didn’t know where, or how, to start. With the fact that I loathed my junior-high-school-sized dresses? Or that I’d told my parents that I was on (gag) Debate Team? How about the fact that my parents didn’t really have a clue who I was, seeing me as a smaller, younger version of Robot Girl, when in fact I was nothing like her and never could be? Or about my big blabberthon mouth? My inability to push the stop button? Or how about that new girl, Justine?
    Finally I just said: “I’m just so stupid.”
    “What do you mean, baby?”
    “Well, for starters,” I stammered, “I talk way too much. I was trying to be funny, but instead I scared this new girl off at school. She was wearing a paper dress and I told her if she ripped it she’d have instant air-conditioning, and now every time she sees me she runs away like I’ve got the worst case of cooties ever. Plus, I have this stupid idea that I want to start a fashion blog, but who am I kidding? I have all these ideas, but I’m not a good writer. I mean, I’m just not. Plus, look what I look like. I look like I’m ten!”
    She leaned back and laughed. “My, my, my,” she said. “A paper dress? I remember those! They were a big hit, back in the sixties. I even had one, if you can believe that. Your grandfather thought I’d gone and