2023 WOW Women on Writing CNF Essay Competition Finalist.
As I peer inside the doors of Mom’s vanity, I see two shelves lined with plastic storage baskets, each filled with lotions, face creams, and makeup. Mom’s extras. A supply of personal care products that have outlasted her time in this house and will likely outlive her. I pull out the basket containing lotions and creams.
I feel like I’m shopping at Bath & Body Works.
Bottles and tubes of Hello Beautiful, a scent featuring notes of white gardenia, jasmine, magnolia blossom, pink nectarine, and cotton musk. I snap open a bottle and squeeze a dab into my hand. The fruity floral fragrance drifts into my nostrils. I’d say it smells like Mom, but I don’t know that it does. I don’t recall her scent. I presume it to be her favorite, but I don’t know that either. It’s possible she stocked up when they were on sale. Mom loved to shop.
Hello Beautiful suits Mom.
She is, after all, a former homecoming queen. A newspaper clipping from 1959, in an album I found in Dad’s den, shows Mom being crowned by the student body president. In another clip, she sits on the back of a white convertible, her jet-black hair pulled into a ponytail. She’s wearing a ball gown and elbow-length white gloves as she holds a bouquet, and smiles for the camera. In yet another, a congressman kisses Mom on the cheek while handing her a trophy. In every photo, her face is beaming, her smile radiant.
Mom wears that smile frequently.
I wonder how often it’s hiding an emotion she’s uncomfortable showing. She doesn’t open up much, at least not with me. Not even to share stories about her younger years. When I ask, she says she doesn’t remember. I do know that when she was a child, my grandmother took her and my uncle and left my grandfather and Nebraska to live in Texas with her sister. I can’t imagine the impact that must have had on Mom. Perhaps it’s the reason she holds her feelings close. Maybe it feels safer that way.
What I know about my mother comes from my own memories.
Anything I don’t recall or that happened before I was born remains a mystery. If not for the newspaper clippings, I might not have known she was homecoming queen at my alma mater twenty-five years before I earned my degree. I do know that’s where she met Dad. Six years her senior, he enrolled in college after serving four years in the Navy. They wed the day after Christmas following their college graduation and were married for sixty years.
Tucked behind the plastic storage bins in Mom’s vanity, I find several empty zipper pouches.
Clinique gift-with-purchase bags. I grab one decorated in rainbow-colored circles and begin stuffing it with bottles and tubes of Hello Beautiful. I feel bad taking them. Mom isn’t dead; she just no longer lives here, in the house where I grew up, the house she and Dad called home for over fifty years. What if she asks me to bring her more lotion? Her request for face cream is what brought me here to shop from her stash. That’s when I noticed the abundance of Hello Beautiful and felt the urge to take some.
I wanted to bring a piece of Mom home to North Carolina.
Something to remind me of her when I’m two thousand miles away. Something to help me remember the woman she was, not the woman she has become since Dad died last year. Now feeble, her memory failing, she spends her days alone in an assisted living studio apartment, only venturing out for meals. She’s a faint shadow of the glamorous homecoming queen, renowned artist, wife, and mother she once was.
When the rainbow bag is full, I zip it closed and tuck it into my suitcase. The lotions will be my salve. Something to soothe me as I watch from afar as Mom slowly disappears.