Free Write, Week 15

Dress-Up with Aunt Tootie

My face isn't on, she said while
unscrewing screws  from a paint-
chipped chair, ten years her twenty,
without hands; I feared the wood's un-
exercised muscles against those big-mac,
doughnut-pressing buns. I stood chicken-
legged, the peach fuze shinning from auntie's
three-beam mirror, in deniem overalls, a quilted
magenta daisy stitched yellow on the breast pocket
which hid the cotton-padded adhesive, covered with
a thin plastic sheet with holes for ventaltion, for the two
pesky mosquitoe bites that prepubesence keeps dormant;
mom says daddy gave her silicon ballons inexchange for
her bites. I don't tell her that one ballon looks deflated a
little. Tootie never married, never even brought a sex-
ual animal home. She lived with my papa Criag n' ma'mo,
her room always smelt like Johnson babies and powder. I
wanted make-up like hers: grey chalk to blanket my eye-
lids, dark chocolate brown sticks to draw on the banks of
lashes, and a black paint brush to give those lashes a three-
demensional look against those muddy banks. She always
penciled her lips with a midnight shade of primary red, never
coloring inside the lines with the same. I liked poppy
pink best. She said, that's just like a good little girl, smiling
with mocha-rose ink stains on her front incisors. When
she finished, it was my turn. Papa said I looked like a circus
clown; ma'mo went and pulled out her slick six-inch Sunday's
for my feet. I felt weighed down- but I was big! One
day you'll be big enough to play big all alone, Tootie
laughed as I prissed down the calio carpet runway of
their hall. I thought, if being big meant playing dress-
up every day with Aunt Tootie, I would like being
big- but that's not the way with growing up. Susie
only puts on a curly, sand-brown hair hat now, and I-
I just ask when I can cut my hair off too, to be big
like her.