Shady Lane

Whenever I think about getting pubic hair, I think about Wanda. Granted, I don’t think about getting pubic hair a whole lot, so I don’t think about Wanda a whole lot either. Wanda was a lady my mom knew from work. She, Wanda, had to retire early because she was dying of lung cancer; so she had to pull around a tank of oxygen wherever she went. She wasn’t supposed to smoke, I mean she had lung cancer for Christ’s sake, but also because it is dangerous to have open flame around an oxygen tank. Yeah, Wanda didn’t give a fuck; she was going to smoke her damned cigarettes up until the day she died of them and she said so in her oh so cliche smoker’s voice.

Wanda looked 143 years old, but she was actually only 56. The smoking and the cancer will do that to a person. She wore a wig the color of a faded paper bag; it was too enormous for her head and threatened to swallow up her death mask of a face which was also the color of a paper bag - one that had been used since the QFC closed a million years ago. She always wore the same polyester pantsuit on her 92 pound frame and if you guessed it was beige, you’d be right. Do I even need to tell you what color her shoes were? Yeah. It was like the world was in color, but Wanda had been photoshopped sepia wherever she went.

Her house sat all alone at the end of a dirt road. It isn’t there anymore, they plowed under the whole area to build a thoroughfare so I could get out of town quicker. I’m sure her house wasn’t hard to tear down, it looked like a good windstorm could do the job nicely. And I’m bored to say, her house was tan too. Although one thing stood out about her home: it had an American flag in the upstairs window - completely covering it. This was back when flags in windows didn’t stand for September 11th. In fact, this kinda made her seem hippie to me. I know my mom thought it was counter-culture so I liked it even more.

My mother felt sorry for her. I think that is one of the things my mother did to make herself feel better - she pitied people. She was a professional. She showed her pity by taking food to Wanda and rolling her eyes when she didn’t eat it, deciding instead to smoke another cigarette. I don’t think my mother had the brains to figure out life is a merciless and horrific place for some of us. Or maybe she thought it was her lot in life to suffer through the buckets of bullshit and not be a drunk or a drug addict or a whore or a cigarette smoker. She definitely did love to play the martyr, “After all I’ve done for you, this is how you repay me?” I would hear variations on that theme hundreds of times up until the day I unceremoniously moved out while she was at work two weeks after my 18th birthday.

“That Wanda. She knows those cigarettes are killing her. She doesn’t care she just keeps on smoking them. She just gave up after Paul died.”  Thanks. There’s my mom - master of the obvious. You’d be safe to assume Paul was Wanda’s deceased husband. Ironically enough he died of lung cancer but he did not smoke. I almost didn’t tell you that because it seems so contrived; sometimes you can’t make this shit up. I never met Paul, but according to how everyone talked, he was awesome. I guess it’s not nice to talk poorly of a dead man, especially when his bride is so close to joining him. 

It was one of those days, probably after church - church always put the spirit of giving in my mother’s heart - when we turned left off the paved street and onto Shady Lane, Wanda’s Shady Lane. My mother driving, my sister next to her holding the hamburger-cabbage casserole and I in the backseat. We passed the huge cottonwood that Philip Baumgartner would hang himself from in three years, passed the little pump house where I would have to fend off Kyle Turner for trying to get his hand down my pants and on to Wanda’s crumbling abode. Sitting in the backseat amplified every bump and pothole, which made my 11 year old breasts remind me of their existence. Everything made them hurt, but they got me thinking about my period. Shouldn’t it be right around the corner? 

“Mom, when will I start my period?” I saw my mother’s eyebrows work double time and her jaw clench slightly. Even though I suspected my mother had had sex at least five times, she hated talking about it or anything to do with it. This is the woman who was perfectly at ease letting me think babies came out of women’s belly buttons. I secretly loved to get her to talk about it; I loved to see her get so uptight and anxious. I figured she owed me after lying to me about where babies come from. By the time she answered my question, “Oh not for a while now. You have to get pubic hair first,” we were sitting in front of Wanda’s bland house; my eyes fixed on the flag. “What’s pubic hair?” I asked even though I knew exactly what it was. “It’s hair that grows on your vagina!” she spat at me. 

That’s another thing my mom did:  whenever she had to say something concerning sex, she coughed it out like one does when someone doesn’t hear you for the fourth or fifth time. But this time I didn’t take it personally like I did the time we were at the coast and she hissed, “It means putting your face between someone’s legs!” 

I could have started this tangent differently so you’d know what the hell she was talking about, but I wanted you to be as confused as I was when I was eight years old sitting in the back seat of our orange Toyota Corolla station wagon at the A&W in Lincoln City. Great way to start a weekend at the coast. 

Her explanation was to get me to stop saying, “I’m going to eat you!” I made it up because I thought it was more entertaining to say than “I’m going to get you,” or “I’m going to rip your head off.” Of course I was eight years old, raised in a Mormon household (!), I did NOT know the sexual connotation of “I’m going to eat you,”  and had I been more savvy, I could have retorted that my mother had an evil dirty mind for going there. But go there she did. For weeks she had been telling me not to say it and I asked her every time what the big deal was. 

So finally, getting ready to feast on hamburgers and root beer floats she drops it on me. I was threatening to devour my sister for getting her seat belt off first. As we pulled into the parking lot, mother whipped her head around, “Julie!  I’ve told you not to say that,” followed by the aforementioned definition. Well, all I could picture was politely placing my head in the middle of someone’s fully clothed legs. My mother huffed out of the car wearing her best long-suffering face.  If she thought I was anymore enlightened than I was 15 seconds prior, she was not only insane but fucking crazy. I looked at my sister, 11 years older but also surely as clueless as to what it meant; she just giggled and shrugged.

“Mom, isn’t the vagina actually the part that goes inside? You get hair up there?” 

“Well, not your vagina but...you know what I mean!”

I did know what she meant because as we were having our loving mother-daughter talk I was peeking down the front of my pants smiling. 

Wanda didn’t answer the door that day, by the way. She had smoked her last cigarette, in honor of my pubic hair.