September/October 2012

Suddenly an image of my mother as a young girl flashed through my head My mother always wanted a little girl. One who would wear frilly pink dresses and bows and barrettes in her hair and would play with dolls and have tea parties with china and have perfect manners and would take ballet and would grow up to marry a fine young gentleman and then have some more lovely children. But she got me. At first, when it was announced that I was a girl, she cried with joy. She fitted me with lacy baby dresses and gave me all the dolls a girl would hope for and adorned me with hair accessories. But her happiness didn’t last long. I absolutely detested dresses, and I threw a humongous fit when I was forced to wear them. I yanked bows out of my hair and threw them across the room. Once I even swallowed a barrette. By the time we had gotten to the emergency room, it had already ended up in my dirty diaper. When she gave me dolls to play with, I pulled off their heads and stomped on them. When she tried to put the pink booties that Grandma had sent me on my feet, I screamed and tried to chew on them. More than ponies with manes that I could braid, I enjoyed my older brother’s action figures. I would pretend they were invading the dolls’ planet and taking it over. That was one of my favorite games. As I grew up, I didn’t become any less stubborn. My mother wanted to grow out my long brown hair so that she could put it in a French braid, but I hated it because it got in my eyes and interfered with sports, and it tangled easily. When my mother refused to let me cut it, I became angry, so I took a pair of flimsy stationery scissors and snipped it off myself. It was jagged and cut close to the neck, and I knew it looked awful, but I liked it because it was much more manageable. When my mother saw it she clutched her heart and whispered, “Oh, Angel, what have you done?” And that’s another thing that I hate: when my mother calls me Angel. My real name is Angelica, but I think that sounds terrible. If my mother had known what I would really be like when I was born, she would have named me something much more practical, but she didn’t know. So now I’m stuck with a name like Angelica. Whenever anyone asks what my name is, I tell them that I’m Angie. It’s not great, but heck knows it’s better than Angelica or Angel. On the day before school picture day, my mother went out and bought me a skirt without telling me. It was knee-length and billowed out when you spun around. It was made of brown fabric with pink roses all over it, and it had a little lace bow on the waist. I hated it upon sight, and I refused to wear it. My mother became very upset. When she’s mad, worried, or stressed, she straightens her dress over and over and over and fixes her bun again and again, even when there’s not a strand out of line. She did this when I wouldn’t wear the skirt. “But Angel, it looks so dear on you,” she said, hopelessly trying to explain to me why I should wear it. “And what’s so wrong with it? I think it’s perfectly charming.” She reached out to stroke my pixie cut, but I ducked away. “It’s ugly,” I told her. “I won’t wear it. And don’t call me Angel!” “Don’t be unreasonable,” my mother said. “You will wear it and that is that.” I knew enough not to argue with her, but I wasn’t going to be seen in school with that on either. So I went to school early on school picture day and slipped into the school. In the girls’ locker room, I changed into my gym clothes, something I knew my mother would never approve of. Sure enough, when the pictures arrived and she saw me dressed in sports shorts and a T-shirt, she totally freaked. She gave me a lecture on responsibility, though I have no idea what that has to do with changing clothes, and then sent me to my room. She always sends photos to Grandma and my aunts and uncles, but she couldn’t do it with those photos. So she arranged a photo shoot with a real photographer and made sure that this time I couldn’t weasel out of it. But I pretended to come down with a fever, and we had to postpone. My mother never got around to rescheduling the shoot. *          *          * Now it was an hour before my first middle-school dance, and I was picking out what to wear. Of course, my mother was by my side, criticizing my choices. I pulled out a pair of light capris from my dresser and held them up for inspection. My mother shook her head and said, “Oh, Angel, you really can’t think of wearing that, can you?” “Why not?” I asked flatly, not really wanting an answer. “Girls should look nice at dances,” my mother argued, taking a flowery, lacy skirt from the very darkest depths of my drawer where I kept all the clothes I swore never to wear. She smiled and shoved it into my arms. “This will look just lovely with your thin complexion.” Stung at the comment about my complexion, though I knew she was oblivious to its harm, and even more disgusted with her choice of clothes, I shoved it back. “No thanks, I’d rather have something more practical.” I put the capris on top of my dresser and then started looking for a shirt. After some browsing, I chose a dark green T-shirt with a picture of a palm tree on it. “But