Diary of a Blues Goddess by Erica Orloff Read Free Book Online Page B

almost seventeen, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was late-stage before they found it because she was too busy tending to me to take care of herself. Suddenly, hating her for her decidedly bad taste in clothes and bedspreads (mine was still Barbie in high school) was pointless.
    I read to her while she was sick in bed. She liked romances with happy endings, and that's what she got, though I was at an age when I didn't believe in happy endings. I still don't. "I can see you rolling your eyes, Georgia," she weakly said one afternoon.
    "Mom, happy endings are bullshit."
    "Georgia Ray, the language."
    "Fine. But they're still bullshit. Happy endings aren't for people like me."
    "What exactly is a person like you?" she asked, breathless. Everything, every word, took so much effort.
    "An outsider. Different."
    "You're New Orleans born and bred. How does that make you an outsider, Georgia?"
    "No father, for one." As soon as I said it, I regretted it. Now that she was sick, I was trying so hard not to wound her, but sometimes my resentments were right there on the surface.
    I tried to explain to her that happy endings were for the popular girls, not for me with my kinky hair that I never quite accepted, and my exotic looks in the southern state of Louisiana, the social scene in high school dominated by Magnolia Queens and blond debutantes with beautiful drawls. Happy endings weren't for Damon either, with his lust for the homecoming
king
—not queen. His desire to
be
the homecoming queen. Yet complaining about my hair seemed selfish, when my mother's own perfect coiffure fell out in clumps in the shower one day, swirling down the tub and clogging the drain. I dropped the subject and kept reading to her.
    Damon used to come over and give her makeovers, drawing on eyebrows and tying up colorful turbans out of silk scarves. One time, he did her eyes and eyebrows like Elizabeth Taylor in
Cleopatra
.
    "You look just like Liz, Mrs. Miller," Damon said, painting on the last of her new eyebrows.
    "Hand me a mirror."
    I went to get a hand mirror, knowing she would freak out the second she saw herself.
    "Now, you just have to go with it." Damon stood and surveyed his handiwork.
    I handed her the mirror, bracing myself for her reaction. But it wasn't what I expected. She howled with laughter until tears rolled down her face, all the while Damon was begging her, "Don't cry, don't cry. It'll all run." Soon, she had black tear stains tracing a path down her now-thin face. Then we started laughing, too. After that, for the first time, my mother started to relax a little, to laugh with us. Maybe she was trying to leave some good memories for me.
    Surrounded by death at home, I tried to be a normal teenager knowing my mother was slipping away and my father had stopped sending postcards when I was in the tenth grade. I tried to eat lunch with Damon and study about the Civil War with Mr. Hoffman, my favorite teacher, and learn about sines, cosines and tangents in math class. I tried to carry my lunch tray without tripping and open my locker without getting crushed by the crowds in the hallway.
    We eventually moved in with Nan, selling our two-bedroom house in a parish outside New Orleans and coming into the city to live with my grandmother and her ghost. Nan had always been more like Auntie Mame than a grandmother. Strong, adventurous, feminist, stubborn, she tried to will my mother into getting well. But my mother had always wilted in the face of her mother, just as I wilted in the shade of my own mother's shadow, and so Nan's will aside, my mother was gone before winter was out. She died in a hospital, something she never wanted to do. Nan and I were there. It was the first time I ever saw a dead body.
    That night, I cried until my stomach ached, and then I cried more but without any tears. I had never been perfect for her, and now I wouldn't have the chance to lose the adolescent brooding and be nice to her, and maybe get a prom date