Free The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller Page B

amorous dog. She always shookme off her, shrieking. One time, desperate to be freed from a crowded Greyhound bus, I scratched her face until it bled. She wept for my cruelty. I even took a crafty little poop in one of her favorite shoes, hoping to foil her plan of going out to dinner one night. It was one of a pair covered in pink velvet that matched her new dress perfectly. When she saw what I had done, she tried to be furious, but she couldn’t stop laughing. For, in spite of the flaws in my character, or because of them perhaps, Suky loved me fervently, even ardently. She just couldn’t get enough of me, couldn’t stop cuddling, sniffing, kissing, nipping at me. I remember at the age of six or seven struggling to emerge from one of her embraces, not because I did not enjoy her affection but because I actually could not breathe.
    I was the first girl after four boys. Suky mothered my predecessors fine; she herded them into and out of the bath as if it were a sheep dip, then shooed them into bed like a flock of pigeons. She ferried them conscientiously to their endless sports competitions. Yet I had the feeling, growing up, that Suky saw only me. Being the only girl, I had my own bath every night, and Suky would sit on the lid of the toilet, legs crossed, languorously watching me as she filed her nails, or stood at the mirror plucking her eyebrows. We would chat about this and that – the other girls in my school, who was friends with whom, who was planning on running away, what hairdo was best for which occasion – while in the next room my brothers shouted and teased and bashed one another over the head. At bedtime, she gave all the boys a swift kiss good night, but she lay down with me, tenderly stroking my head till I was asleep. We would dance to Bobby Darin in the kitchen, my feet on hers, holding hands, round and round and round.
    I was the youngest, and for a few years, this lavishing of attention made a certain amount of sense. But once I was six and could fend for myself, the boys began to resent Suky’s clear preference for her only girl. She even bought a camera, the sole function of which was to take pictures of me. She dressed me as angels,cowgirls, movie stars. Occasionally she photographed me naked. She was the most passionate of mothers.
    Suky was a diminutive, peppy woman with bright red hair and a high, squeaky voice with a slight southern lilt, a shadow of her mother’s viscous Mississippi drawl. Her waist was so tiny, her ankles so slim, she had to shop in the teen section of the local department store. I was proud of Suky’s Tinker Bell figure; other people’s mothers, with their rounded, fleshy bottoms and jiggling breasts, struck me as bovine and sloppy compared to my lithe, lively, tireless mother.
    Suky smiled easily, wore her hair in a low beehive, and nearly always kept her eyebrows up in an expression of bemused surprise. In spite of this, I think she was a closet pessimist. I could tell by her driving. As she man euvered our fat-assed station wagon around the narrow country roads, she sat bolt upright, her little hands clamped to the steering wheel, knuckles white. Every time we approached a turn, she whacked the horn, warning the eighteen-wheeler that was surely barreling round the bend, making ready to spin out of control and flatten us. An insomniac, she would stay up deep into the night, baking cookies, paying bills, or just pottering around. I remember waking from a bad dream in the middle of the night. The house was dead quiet. Knowing she’d be up, I walked downstairs and found her trimming the dead leaves off the plants in her pajamas. She was happy to see me. She made cocoa; we snuggled up to each other and watched TV till five, when we both passed out on the sofa, her arms around me, my head on her breast.
    Suky slept there often. She’d say she was up so late, there was no point going to bed. We’d come down and find her huddled under the