Tiff Holland

What she wears: sweaters, tight over missile-silo brassieres. Pink. Yellow. Two pairs of support hose and open-toed shoes, even in winter. Estee Lauder perfume. Frills. Too much hairspray on her cotton candy hair. Make-up, every minute she is awake. False teeth. She had her real ones pulled when she was twenty. All of them. They were crooked. Then she tore up all the pictures of her, all the sweater-girl pictures of her in poodle skirts, smiling with her own teeth. Sometimes, at work, she wears a smock covered in little pieces of hair. Sometimes the hair sticks to her, her arms and neck and face. Sometimes it takes root, grows.

What she says: you look like a boy. Chest out! You read too much. Just a minute, can't you see I'm on the phone? All girls who play sports are lesbians. Football players are a bunch of fanny patters. Oh, sit on my lap, you know you want to; you're mommy's little girl. Don't frown, you'll get wrinkles. You could be beautiful if you wanted to. I wish I'd never had you heathens. Your father? He's in there, lying down, wishing he was dead. He wants to kill himself. Suicide, get it? It's our fault. He hates us. Don't make me hit you. Go to the store, here's a note, get me two packs of Pall Mall. Marlboro. Merit. Give me a kiss, you'll be sorry if I die during the night. Then you'll miss your mother.

What she calls my friends: losers, lesbians, perverts. What she calls us: heathens, knot-heads, hair-brains, you damn kids. Crazy-makers. Ingrates. Little...She gives us all new names: Applejack for the brother who doesn't stop eating, Neil Armstrong for the smaller, thin and pale, Milquetoast for my father. I'm Milan. She makes us have tea parties, scoop jam out of tiny jars onto overdone toast, make small-talk about our imaginary lives.

What she likes: loud music. She turns on my Goodwill stereo, early in the morning and dances around, telling me- rise and shine, while she twists the volume, up, up, up. She likes to talk on the phone. Do her nails. She thinks the firemen at the station across the street, are watching her, making fun of her. Candy bars. Every night she gets up at two or three am and eats a Milky Way, drinks a Coke. I listen. Once she invited me down, too. I wait.

What she does: with switches, hot wheel tracks, hairbrushes, shoes - once with a coffee cup. She cries, every day for months, then she stops. She reads us German folk tales. The little boy doesn't wash his hair and small animals live in it. Another boy sucks his thumbs, and the great tall tailor comes and cuts them off. She gets religion, drags us, walking through mud puddles, to church Sunday mornings. She takes up crafts. We make toilet paper drums with felt and glitter for the Christmas tree. We string yarn through burlap sacks, glue macaroni to boards we shellac at the kitchen table. She goes back to work, leaves us with him. He takes us to McDonald's for lunch, puts the phone in the freezer in case she calls. When someone calls for me, she tells him, tells her, I'm not there. She asks my first boyfriend if I wouldn't be pretty if I gussied up. I hit her back. She asks another boyfriend if he's gay. She asks if I'm a lesbian. She walks in on me in the bathroom and accuses me of masturbating. She smokes. She gets a crush on a local politician. When dad finally leaves, she tells me it's my fault.

How she is now: she wonders why we aren't close, like we used to be. I tell her we never were, not for a minute. When I try to kill myself, she asks, how could you do this to me? She still kisses me, once on each cheek, and rubs the lipstick in. She denies the book of German folk tales. She tells me I need to adopt a baby, be a foster mother, get rid of those stinking dogs. She tells me to put my chest out. Asks, do you still love your husband? Really? She makes me ask my brother if he's gay. He tells me he's not. A few months later, he brings his boyfriend by. She is jealous of my father. You've made him into a saint since he died, she tells me, both of you. She has emphysema, quits smoking. She coughs so hard she wets herself, so hard, I know she's going to die and I feel ten again, sitting outside her bedroom door listening to her sleep because she has threatened to die in the night. She ignores me, me breathing each breath with her. She pushes away the napkin I pass across the table. When she recovers, she sucks on a fake cigarette, hard. She rubs it in ash between inhalations. She points it at me across the kitchen table, and I lean back, away from her, in my chair.

DRAGON LADY

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