Free Stuffed by Patricia Volk

What can I tell a woman who believes she has the power to alter human follicles with her bare hands? Isn’t it time for her to give up?
    Never.
    So I say, “I get it, Ma. Interesting. Fascinating.” And for one minute more, before evaporation starts to take its toll, I am my mother’s image of what I should be, what I could be, her love-engorged vision—whatever, God help me, that is.

    Mattie Sylvia Lee Myles Weems Watts at my sister’s wedding in a Larry Aldrich illusion-top dress. She was my New Year’s Eve date for fourteen years.

HASH
    Two years before she died, Mattie told me I was her favorite. She had a favorite? Both of us got Mattie’s chocolate cake on our birthdays. Both of us played jacks on the kitchen linoleum while she read the sports pages of the
Daily News
. She took us both to the pedodontist, weeping and shredding her hankie while we squirmed in Dr. Adelson’s chair. She took us both to the pediatrician too, because my mother was afraid to “take his fire” when we stepped on the scale. Both of us she dressed for school.
    Naturally, I tell my sister, “Mattie told me I was her favorite.”
    “Really?”
    “Did you write her from camp?”
    “No.”
    “Did you bring her food?”
    “No.”
    “Did you ever send her a check?”
    “I could have been better to Mattie,” my sister says.
    Mattie Sylvia Lee Myles Weems Watts came to live with us when I was one and she was forty-three. “I took one look at how crisp Mattie was,” my mother says, “and that was it.”
    Mattie worked every day except Thursday and every other Sunday. She cooked, battled New York soot, and baby-sat. She did everything it takes to run a home except the wash. Wash was done by Lola from Freeport, who was so fat she had to come through the door sideways. Lola rang our back bell, then grunted and wiggled past the jambs while my sister and I angled to watch. The laundry was hand-washed in the pantry sinks, squeezed through a wringer, then pinned to a retractable rack lowered by rope from the kitchen ceiling. Eventually we got a washing machine. But until then Lola did it all by hand, even the sheets.
    The rest of the work in our two-bedroom apartment was left to Mattie. Mattie attacked dirt. She stabbed it with her broom. She pummeled it with her dustcloth. She vacuumed carpet till it was raw. “
Now!
” she’d say when something earned her approval, like a perfectly ironed shirt.
“Now!”
She’d stand back admiring the part she’d combed in my hair or roses she’d encouraged with roast beef drippings. “
Now!
” She’d knife the last swath of chocolate icing on her cake, the kind of icing that shatters when you rap it with a spoon. No matter how much we begged, she made it only for birthdays and graduations. The cake never lasted more than a day. Late at night, people bumped into each other groping downstairs for one last sliver. I licked the pot. I sucked the spoons. I scraped the bowl. When the cake was finished, I chewed the doily. This was Mattie’s Chocolate Cake, available only for big events.
    “Are you going to make the cake?” we’d ask as our birthdays got close. “Promise you’ll make the cake?”
    “Out of my kitchen.” She’d flap her hand.
    Mattie was five feet five and so skinny her legs looked like spokes. She wore gold-framed glasses. The tips of her shoes touched when she stood. She had a raised mole in the center of her palm—exactly where my mother had one—that I liked to finger when she held my hand to cross the street. She was a passionate Brooklyn Dodgers fan, although she looked like Satchel Paige, the screwball pitcher for the St. Louis Browns, who said, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” They both had soft faces with full lips and heavy eyebrows. They both looked as if they were holding back a laugh. Mattie’s plan was, I’d marry Sandy Koufax, the only Jewish Dodger. She talked about taking me to Ebbets Field, how we’d work