Face Lifts

When I recall myself with her, my Gram is a single woman in her fifties, one of the first female real estate agents in Canada. She is short, funny, mean, she has her hair set once a week and wears tailored clothes. I sit in the passenger side seat of her blue Cadillac and give her directions from the map while she smokes in my face. She lives alone in a high tower apartment that overlooks the river, university and golf course. She has a print of Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait over her mail desk in the foyer.

I try on her high heels, I read all of the sex columns in her stacks of Cosmopolitan magazines and I watch entertainment television from the United States in the back part of her apartment.

Thanks to some famous cookbooks that were released, Mom is experimenting with vegetarianism and no cable television right now. I don’t know what the TV has to do with our vegetarianism. I’ve been digesting so much couscous, This Old House and Agatha Christie I can now solve a murder while sanding wood. We have an antenna that picks up Canadian networks and PBS out of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho - that’s it.

In the back part of Gram’s apartment I have over twenty channels to choose from. Some from exotic locations like Seattle. And while I watch my shows, Gram drinks gin and tonics and watches TV or talks on the phone to a relative in British Columbia in the living room.

”I’m making a long distance call, Kelly!”

Gram always announces a long distance call because they are expensive and she can’t be interrupted.

On Gram’s modern little TV I’m watching an interview with Joan Rivers, she is talking about her facelift.

The more I listen the more it occurs to me… are these women talking about cutting their faces off, pulling the skin to their ears and sewing it back on??

I hobble from the den in two-inch purple and silver sandals, down the wide hall to where Gram sits in the living room. I stand beside her mail table. From her reading chair, Gram covers the receiver and looks at me.

”It’s long distance.”

”Are facelifts really cutting off your face and sewing it back on tighter?”

”Yes.”

”Rich people do this?”

”Yes.”

”Why?”

”To look young. Shirley? Sorry…”

Gram goes back to her long distance call and I look at the Norman Rockwell print over Gram’s desk. I’m two inches higher than I normally am and can get a good look at it.

Joan Rivers cut her face off and sewed it back on.

All I want to be is Joan Rivers.

I am too young to be Joan Rivers.
But Joan Rivers got her face cut off to look young.

Is Joan Rivers too old to be Joan Rivers?!?

I walk back to the den, sit on the brown velvet couch and kick the purple sandals off.

I pick up Cosmopolitan, read about blow jobs and eat sugarless wafer cookies and realize it’s a good thing Mom only allows me have access to NOVA, black beans and The McLaughlin Group.

We need balance.