My mother and I were hiding behind our 1974 station wagon when I almost set her on fire. The smell of singed bird feathers hit my nostrils just as I realized that the feathery ring around her neck was disintegrating into glowing red and black witches’ claws. The first thing that came into my 10-year-old brain was Stop, Drop, and Roll. So, without thinking, I used my oversized, pre-pubescent body to tackle her to the ground. Which would have been easier if she hadn’t been in a full-sized Mrs. Big Bird costume.
“What the hell!” my mother said as she hit the pavement, cushioned by the pillow of boning and wires and pounds of feathers that made her bird body bulbous and round. The larger-than-life bird head that we had removed earlier at the start of her break, sat on the hood of the station wagon staring down at us with disgust.
“Roll!” I screamed, though I hadn’t thought through how she was going to do that with my body now squarely on top of hers. I then grabbed the long thin Virginia Slim cigarette out of her mouth and tossed it across the pavement.
Fairies existed in my house. They were made of glitter and glue, wire hangers bent until they swoop into submission, held together by bits of tulle. But these wings weren’t being worn by a toddler or even a 3rd grader. These wings were being made by my 16-year-old daughter rebuilding her life.
For months she had withered in her bed, caught in the web of the pandemic, cocooned under bedsheets and blankets, her only companion a computer screen. I watched helpless as she zoomed the flesh from her bones, teamed away her school days until her eyes turned grey, google met her friends in far off places only blocks away. I pulled and pushed, insisted, and pleaded for her to move, to sit, to lean against me. I cried when I found the food I fed her, hidden in the trash below a nest of paper torn into oblivion. Until the day her back seized and her hands shook, and we both wept on the floor of her room, moments away from driving her to the hospital as she disappeared in my hands.
* * *
In 1969, a group of volunteers at the local Denver PBS station created Mrs. Big Bird. They spent months gathering feathers from local chicken farms and hand dying them the iconic bright yellow tufts of Big Bird, stuffing the big orange feet and claw-like gloves, and hand stitching the long yellow beak albeit, slightly off center and much droopier than the real Big Bird. The main part of the bulbous, larger than life frame was built in two pieces. The body and the head. The feathers were then painstakingly sewn onto the form. The final touch besides the big bug eyes glued just above the beak, was the blue and white full body apron sewn to the structure to cover what would have been her exposed bird breasts. Just above where the head slipped over the body there was a small window of yellow netting, where the puppeteer could navigate, just barely, where they were going. Mrs. Big Bird would make appearances at local PBS events for kids and the yearly telethon raising money so that Sesame Street could continue to be seen by children across the Rocky Mountains.
* * *
I don’t know how my mother got the job as Mrs. Big Bird. She had long ago given up her work in cancer research to be the perfect stay at home mom. The perfect socialite at the country club. The perfect wife. Maybe she volunteered. It didn’t matter. I loved it. I liked to think that Big Bird was my brother.
One of the very few pictures I have of my grandmother is a black and white snapshot taken in the 30’s. She was one of the first SeaWorld models in Florida when it first opened. In the shot she stands on a plank that hangs precariously over a large tank of water. She is wearing a bathing suit cinched so tight her waist almost disappears. The bodice consists of two small, black traffic cones pasted to her somewhat non-existent chest and her hair is perfectly curled into a bob just slightly above her shoulders with curls plastered tight around her face. The makeup is thick, and her lips are so red they seem to pierce through the black and white celluloid of the photo. What is even more impressive is she is standing at the very edge of the plank, in high heels, holding a small fish in her outstretched hand over the water below. Next to her is large dolphin suspended in air, it’s mouth gapping open about to grab the fish before it completes its flip back into the water. The dolphin dwarfs my grandmother, making her in this moment, seem like almost a doll. Which isn’t that surprising since my grandmother was chronically anorexic.
Perhaps my mother got the job of Mrs. Big Bird through her modeling agency. On a whim she had taken a class. She learned to keep her sleek brown hair, perfectly curved just at the edge of her shoulders, how to keep the wrinkles from her clothes, how to wear just enough Yardley’s lavender toilet water on her neck to mask the smell of cigarettes emanating from her lips. After an agent spotted her in the lineup one day, she soon adorned many of the local department store catalogues in Denver such as The Fashion Bar and May D &F conglomerate twisting and turning her body to show the best sides of the newest fashion.
When I was seven, my mother had tried to get me to model for the kids’ collections. The shoot took place in the penthouse of a downtown apartment. Most of the walls were mirrors. I was handed a pair of jeans and told to put them on and sent to a black and gold bathroom. But they wouldn’t fit over my growing hips.
My mother tugged at the jeans as if, through sheer strength, she could get the button into the buttonhole that sat at the other side of my bulging flesh pouring out in between. There were discussions of slicing open the jeans in back so they could photograph me from the front. But someone nixed the idea and sent me back to the adorned bathroom to change out of them while letting me know I had the face for modeling, just not the body.
* * *
My grandmother lived in a huge house with my grandfather in upstate New York, where the walls were crumbling, but the grand white columns and cobblestone sides kept it upright. There were large porches on three sides that looked out over the farm and down into her sunken garden. The house was opulent in its creation, now tilting towards dilapidation in its time. Inside the house the walls were covered in books, every hallway or bedroom had at least two full walls of built-in bookshelves. At the top of the grand stairs sat a special white cabinet with glass doors only opened with a skeleton key, hidden in the top drawer of her bedside table. Inside the cabinet were old, treasured books, worn and frail. Treasure Island, Undine, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, all with illustrations by Arthur Rackham, each intricately drawn scene hidden under a thin white translucent page to protect them. At night, she slipped the key into the keyhole, grabbed the nearest volume, and tucked into bed beside me, her thin arms next to my thick ones but she never mentioned that. Instead, her words spun stories in my head. I counted the pages until an illustration peeked from behind its white veil, and she allowed me to turn the delicate white screen to reveal the characters that twisted and curled in color held in their four-sided world.
* * *
I was eight when my mother cut off all my hair. We had moved to a ranch or at least what remained of one. A sprawling 2000-acre plot of land that lapped up against the foothills of Denver, now chopped up and sold off in 10- or 20-acre development lots. Our new angular house clung to the side of the foothill with a long-slanted roof on one side as if trying to blend in with the angle of the hill itself. Both modern and stark in its creation by a local architect, it seemed to me to resemble something more akin to a razor blade stuck in the side of an apple. A beacon of upward mobility. Now my hair had to comply.
I sat on the small wooden stool I had used to reach the bathroom sink to brush my teeth. Though I hadn’t used the stool for some time. I was far outgrowing my peers, constantly being mistaken for being older than I was. I watched as my prized blond ringlets fell to the floor. A vogue magazine folded back on itself balanced on the counter, a guide for my mother’s scissors as they flattened the landscape of my head. On the open page, a picture of Twiggy in a mini skirt.
* * *
When my daughter was born, her premature, barely breathing body on my chest, I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in to make her petite. To make her pretty. To give her a smaller nose, thinner bones. Ones that would not incite ridicule. Would not become the butt of every middle school boy joke. To make her anything but me.
Even when my big body had performed a miracle. Doctors had wanted to take her from my womb, cut me open to save my life. Pre-eclampsia. I told them to wait and closed my eyes and undertook what I had practiced for months, breathing, and sinking into a hypnosis, my body going slack, my blood pressure dropping on its own. Hypnobirthing. I didn’t know if it would work. But I needed to try.
Doctors and nurses came and went during my labor to witness the woman in room 215B, who despite the monitors scratching out the violent lines of labor, laid with her eyes closed, completely calm, feeling no pain for twenty-five hours.
As the contractions came quickly suddenly visions filled my head. Centuries of women squatting under trees, dressed in purple and gold headdresses, breathing to the sound of the ocean as slick babies slipped into their awaiting hands. Even as the rhythm of my breath whispered her out of my birth canal into the hands of awaiting medical staff still open jawed and notating the impossible.
Still, I prayed for her to be nothing like me.
* * *
I wanted to join the 4H club and ride my old horse Cody through the barrel races. My mother was against it at first but finally gave in.
“Fine. But you can’t keep riding in those scruffy jeans and raggedy t-shirt.” She insisted we go shopping.
Sheplers, the kingdom of all things cowboy, had just opened their first store in Colorado. Entering the behemoth of a building, you were instantly hit with the smell of tanned hide with a slight hint of cow manure. The walls were lined with rows and rows of cowboy boots and Stetson hats.
“Howdy, ma’am, how can I help you today,” said a gentleman, his massive silver belt buckle intricately carved with a scene of a cowboy holding down a young calf while twisting rope around its small hooves. While my eyes were transfixed on the violent act on his waistline, his eyes were on my mom.
“Please call me Marty.” I was used to men looking at her this way. Now with my short hair, I had also gotten used to people mistaking me for a boy, my big boned frame, bulky and awkward.
Before the belt buckle gentlemen staring at my mother’s perfectly formed breasts mistook my gender and pointed us in the wrong section, my mother spoke up. “Can you point me to the girl’s section, please.”
“Sure can, it’ll be right over there. I’m happy to show…”
“That won’t be necessary. I think we can take it from here. Thank you though.” The gentleman sulked away, peering back over his shoulder a few times to catch a glimpse before being accosted by another customer.
I wasn’t allowed into the dressing room alone. I was accompanied by the now familiar sighs of frustration from my mother as she tugged and pulled on shirts that wouldn’t close or pants too small to fit around my thighs. I was a doll, whose stuffing had come loose. An unmade bed whose sheets wouldn’t tuck in. My body was not my own.
Before I could raise a protest and with the only thing that fit, we were walking out the store with a red cowboy hat, paisley pink cowboy shirt, red corduroy pants and matching red and pink cowboy boots. An outfit I was now forced to compete in. My nickname became “Big Ole Red Riding Hood’ and “Amazon Annie” amongst the older kids in the county 4H club.
* * *
Mrs. Big Bird took up residence in the trunk of our car, nesting there until it was time to drive to the next gig. Sometimes my father opened the back hatch and the bulging bug eyes made him gasp and drop his beer. I always made a point to kiss her beak.
Mom always needed me to help transform her into the big yellow beast, so I was her constant companion to every event. Usually, we traveled to outdoor children’s festivals or publicity stints for different PBS channels. There were rarely any dressing rooms, nowhere to don her bird feathers except in the parking lot behind our car. In the dry heat of summer, I would shield her from others by holding up a towel or sheet while she stripped down to as little as she could. I was already wearing her shoes, an inch taller than her; therefore, I stood at perfect curtain rod height.
Then I would help pull on the orange polyester tights and slip her feet into the big bird claws that made her walk like she had a pillow between her legs. We would pull the body of the bird from the trunk of the car and lift it over her head until it rested on her shoulders rigged with some unexplainable contraption inside, her long wavy brown hair and green eyes just cresting over the edge.
The last was the head, that stood a good two feet above the top of her own, precariously balancing on the hole in the neck. Then, only with my help, could she slip the bright orange claws on to her perfectly manicured fingernails and disappear into the body of the mother bird, the only semblance of her left, the sound of her voice coming through the small yellow screen just below the drooping beak. When we rounded the corner, we were lucky to make it out of the parking lot before she was pummeled by children.
* * *
There was one place it felt safe to love my body, the pool. I spent every waking summer hour I was allowed in the water. The sun was barely up when practice for swim team began. I swam lap after lap until my lungs hurt, arms went wobbly, and my blond hair, finally growing back towards my shoulders, turned green. I was not just a good swimmer. I was a great swimmer. Beating all the records, the best breaststroke, the best back stroke, the best butterfly. I had a wall of blue ribbons to prove it. Butterfly was my favorite. I loved launching my body out of the water as my arms spread wide, stealing the blue sky in my outstretched palms before plunging it below the surface with me once again.
But soon after it felt as if my body had begun to betray me once again, growing at a rate that outran my ability to control my limbs in the way I had always known, my growing breasts drowning my torso and clipping my butterfly wings. As I grew taller and wider, the ribbons began to dissipate.
“How I birthed someone so much bigger than me, I’ll just never know,” I overheard my mother say to one of her tennis buddies, her hands gesturing to reference her petite frame against my towering one. My shoulders slumped, and I bent my feet inwards until I was standing on my ankles. Maybe if I could take a few inches off by doing both, it would get better.
After practice, I stood with the other girls in the locker room shower, suits still on until we drained the hot water tank trying to get warm from the cold morning practice, the acrid smell of chlorine still permeating our skin. I tugged at the sides of the suit which now felt awkward, not meant for curves like mine. When we all ran outside to lay on the hot concrete of the pool deck, the impression of my growing body left a watermark on the ground after peeling myself from one lukewarm spot in search of a hotter one. I used to marvel at the outline of myself, the muscles, the sleekness. Now, I grasped my hair and rung out the water onto the impression below, obliterating the shape of me.
* * *
I loved to watch my daughter dance. First when she was three, in her pink leotard and tiny shoes, running around and tumbling to the ground in a pile of toddlers. Then when she was five, the shiny black patent leather shoes tapping out of rhythm. Classes began to multiply as her dance bag filled with different shoes. First two classes a week, then three, then five. I watched each spring at the concert, the smallest one, so petite and lithe, always chosen to be picked up and flown across the stage.
And we loved to dance around the kitchen, singing at the top of our lungs. I could easily pick her up and swing her around and around until a fountain of giggles peppered the lyrics until they were unrecognizable.
Then her back aches began. The massages. The doctors. The physical therapy. The MRI. But no answers came. Just more pain. Then her classes dwindled. First four, then three. Then the pandemic hit and everything went online.
She tried to dance in front of the computer screen, the little zoom boxes moving in unison as her feet hit the hard floor of the living room, the couch and coffee table and chairs strangling her ability to move her arms with ease. Then two classes. Then one. Then she sat on the floor, with the camera off, listening to her teacher count dance moves in time.
I was cast in the middle school musical as Chimney Sweep #8. When I walked into the rehearsal room for the first time, I didn’t recognize anyone.
“Everyone, listen up,” the director said, “let’s gather around the piano please to warm up.” I dropped my backpack on the floor and made my way with the others. I had never seen so many people of all shapes and sizes. Wondered where they had all come from. I hadn’t noticed them out into the hallways of school. None of them where in my classes.
“Hi. What’s your name?” an upperclassman asked. As I turned, she smiled. She must have had 10 little hoops, clinging to the rim of her ear. Her t-shirt had clearly had an affair with a pair of scissors, the cuffs of her shirt cut into makeshift fringe along with the bottom. As well, several well places snips had left holes in places that danced along the edge of dress code rules.
I held out my hand. “Annie.”
“Well Annie. Nice to meet you. Welcome to the island of misfit toys.”
* * *
I had seen all my grandmother’s bones through her translucent skin when months before she died, my mom and I had visited one last time. My mother was always so different around her mom. She never hugged and kissed me in front of her. I was always to be dressed to perfection. But now, as my grandmother wasted away, something shifted. We needed to get my grandmother into the bath and my mother could not do it alone.
“Can you lift her,” my mother asked.
“Yes.” I lifted her out of bed with ease and moved her into the bathroom. My mother gently removed my grandmother’s silken robe and laid it on the counter and then I lowered her into her bath, her bird like body, light as a feather, nothing left but her laughter as we made an awkward rose scented water.
* * *
It was late in the night when I slipped out of bed few months later. The lights of Denver from the hilltop where our house clung, shone bright and the stars in the sky bled into one another out the sliding glass door. A landscape of stars. I was drawn out onto the balcony. My cotton night gown, billowed in the evening wind, pressing against to my newly forming breasts. The cold air hovered around me, unable to penetrate the heat of my body. A shudder traveled up my spine, and I felt glass shatter, and I knew. My grandmother was dead. I knew it, though I didn’t know how I knew, I just did.
I stayed for a moment, eyes to the sky, then as if she had told me to do so, I slipped back inside my room into my bed, rolled over and reached out my hand. It felt like she took it, as if she lay next to me, translucent like the pages protecting the illustrations in her prized books. A book in her hand. My hand in her other. I fell back asleep bathed in her warmth.
* * *
My mother had wanted a drag of her cigarette but didn’t want to take the time to get the big orange stuffed bird claws off her hands to do it herself.
So, I had dug into her purse, pushed in the lighter in the car until it popped out with the glowing red ring and placed the cigarette into my mouth, pulling a drag just long enough to light the cigarette but not long enough to fill my lungs to point of coughing. Then I reached up and over the rim of the costume where the body separated from the head and held it to her mouth, her face releasing the stress of two hours inside a costume hugging children and shaking bird claw to hands. But I had held it to her mouth too long and the ash fell into the pillow of feathers without me knowing, setting my mother alight.
“Shit…shit…shit!” was all I heard for the next few moments as I rolled off her and a blur of yellow feathers, orange and yellow ribbed legs and oversized bird feet rolled back and forth over the black asphalt while bird claws slapped at her neck.
It didn’t take much time before the fire was out, leaving a few blackened feathers melting into the asphalt along with several stray yellows for good measure. By the time we were both sitting up (which took some effort from me to lift Mrs. Big Bird to sitting) we were both crying and laughing so hard, it was hard to tell if I was going to be praised for saving her life or in trouble for lighting her on fire. “Thank you,” she said as she tried to grab my hand in the enormous bird glove. I laid my hand in the massive claw, and we sat for a minute in silence. It wasn’t until I saw her staring down at my small hand against the monstrosity of orange digits, that she looked up at me. “I’m sorry,” she said. I know, I thought but instead tried to squeeze tight to the bird claw and looked away.
Soon it was time for my mother to go back to the festival which meant I had to wipe away the tears from her face for her, lift her to standing and pluck away any remaining burnt feathers from her neck. Later we would swing by the local hobby store and painstakingly sew in some replacement feathers so when the costume was passed on to the next volunteer, all evidence of the narrowly averted bird inferno was wiped away forever.
With the acrid stench of singed hair still lingering, I once again reached into her purse, pulled out her Yardley’s Lavender toilet water and spritzed around the neckline. Then lifting the still sneering bird head, careful not to knock the beak, I placed it on top of the costume.
When she was completely engulfed in the costume which towered above me, I felt beautiful next to her, petite even. And needed. She couldn’t take a step without me holding her, guiding her big bulbous bird body in the right direction or she would fall flat on her beak.
* * *
My daughter emerged from her cocoon, first barefoot in the kitchen sipping soup from a coffee mug, then nibbling bread. Then eating chips on the way to the clinic on the first day she could get her Covid shot for freedom.
My little girl who hated needles, stood in line brave and determined. Her shot to see her friends once again, she murmured to herself. Her hands still shaking, her back still in pain. When we entered the room, the two nurses smiled. She was one of the first sixteen-year-olds they had seen, ready to be vaccinated.
But the sight of the needle sent waves of panic through her small frame. Rocking and shaking, crying and pleading. Maybe she can’t do this after all. I grabbed and held, rocked with her, pleaded with the nurses to give us a moment. Maybe, I should hold her arm, make her do it.
No. The nurse said. She must agree on her own. It must be her choice. I retreated to the other seat, took a deep breath. She was right. My daughter must decide for herself. I sat on my hands. Didn’t say a word.
Then my daughter spoke. Can you put your hand on my shoulder? Yes. The nurse said. Can you hold the needle close to my skin not swoop in from far away? Yes. Will you wait till I say go? Yes. And the nurse waited. For 20 minutes. Her hand on my daughter’s shoulder. The needle hovering just an inch away from her skin. We all waited. While my daughter breathed in the silence, a private monologue in her mind.
Go. And with that the shot went in and the tears came. Not from pain, but from joy. She had asked for what she needed. Someone had listened. Her body was not her back pain. Her body was not starving under the weight of a pandemic. Her body was not mine. She had claimed it as her own.
And now there was a gaggle of teenagers, with painted faces and glorious giggling, all with homemade fairy wings adorning their backs as they celebrate a birthday in the back yard under a tent even as it rained. Even as the twinkle lights blew in the wind. Even as the water made the dye run from the cheap tulle turning their skin into a mosaic of color.