we buried mom in the cocktail shaker
We certainly weren’t going to shell out for a casket. Don’t pay good money for that shit, she would have said. So, while Mom shook down to ash, I looked for urns between crying shifts. I hid my face in her mohair sweaters that still held Dior even though all the days were permeated with industrial strength cleaners, weak chicken soup. The urns weren’t bad. stardustmemorial (with the pretentious annoying all-small-letters-weaving-into-each-other-logo) offereda coronet pewter keepsake for just 19.99, engraving another 14.99. These shenananiganners always nickel and diming you.
But special offer lipstick with the blusher in the faux leather bag, gold logo imprint for another 24.99? That was Mom all over. You could not walk through Nordstrom’s with that woman without collecting free samples and making a fifty dollar purchase, coming out from behind the sales counter, a cheery smile, a thick shopping bag.
I like those bags, and the smiles always seem genuine despite being part of a commercial transaction in an industrial capitalist society that replaces worship with purchase. Oh please, Marx, Mom would have said, running her hand down my arm, Why did I let you shove off to hippie school? She liked me best in push-up bras just this side of scandalous, Frederick’s of Hollywood. I nearly blew milk out my nose the first time I saw their ad “First time? We want to make it special. Take 10% off.” My first time snuggled in a strawberry patch, the boy I picked — sweet and delicate, long hippie hair Mom would have laughed at. He had no concerns about which knickers I was in.
For Mom I modeled garter belts, peignoir sets. She clapped forme up and down the runway between the hospital bed we had shoved intothe living room and the kitchen where I paused to stir curry. Vivacious, she made me cry.
Two days before the memorial, I was making a case for “black elegance,” so art deco. Why not be dead in an urn that looks like a Tiffany lamp clicked off? I remember sitting in the Met’s garden with Mom, my head against her shoulder, drifting. Tiffany said, I have always striven to fix beauty … by using whatever seemed fittest for the expression of beauty. What best to express Mom’s beauty?
Not the Never on a Sunday video box she clutched as we watched curled up together with her oxygen tank. She’d tell anyone she wouldn’t have minded extended life on a Greek isle under a palm tree. But how to shunt scraps of bone and ash into flimsy cardstock?
Picture us, a few middle-aged children and our middle-aged hippie lovers, running through rooms in the elegant house, hysterical at trying to cram Mom into the hookah she and dad bought in Afghanistan while considering ceramic frogs. My brother started frog burping, hopping his hand about so hard I was afraid he was going to break something.
The cocktail shaker — a mystic color rainbow mirage. Turn the lid and know what goes in a Cosmopolitan, or whatever your heart desires. We set it to Palm Beach for the tart sweet kick.