Celia shaded herself with a wide, floppy-brimmed hat that stretched out past her shoulders and nearly obscured her face when she wore it at an angle, like a model. She checked her bathing suit, making sure her cleavage was just so. Satisfied, she wrapped a sparking red sarong around waist and secured it a large diamond-encrusted brooch in the shape of a long-legged spider. It had been a gift to mother from an admirer during the days she sang opera in a small cabaret in the city. She looked at her toes, decided that she still liked the garnet color she painted them, and reached for the black, strappy stilettos sitting on a shelf filled with high-heeled shoes.
Celia only wore high heels. “They make my legs look so long and lean!” she thought while admiring herself in the full-length mirror. She slid a leg out from the slit in her sarong, bent the other leg so the exposed leg pivoted on her toes, and dramatically ran her fingers up her leg from her ankle to her hip, flipping her arm up into the air and tilting back her head. It was the end of a tango for one.
“Perfect!” she said, looking at the ceiling. “I am a star!”
Celia giggled to herself, did a little dance step with sweeping arm gestures, gathered her bag and her diary, and twirled into the next room. The room was once a great dining room with rare-wood furnishings, exquisitely decorated china, glittering crystal chandeliers and glasses, and deep burgundy velvet cushions. Very Important People used to come for dinner. Now the room was empty except for a long, cracked Formica table flanked with faded turquoise chairs accented with torn cushions, featuring tufts of stuffing and sleeping orange cats. The only sound that filled the great room was the echo of her pointy-heeled footsteps clicking softly past piles of newspapers and magazines.
“The day nurse was in the house. She can deal with Mother,” Celia thought. “But still…” Celia didn’t want Mother to hear her moving about, so she decided that it would be best to glide, not click, through the room. She slipped through the room like a silent-movie phantom with arms outstretched and hands and head tilted back. She navigated her way through the storage room that was once a kitchen, and silently exited the house through the back door.
Outside, she crept along the side of the mansion, arms still outstretched, lest Mother be sitting on the upper terrace and spy her. Celia made her way to the overgrown jumble of privot, wisteria, hydrangea and whatever else was growing along the fence and into the yard. There was a path beneath the overgrowth, and Celia followed it to an equally obscure clearing the back corner of the yard. She could see the house from here. She was certain that Mother, who couldn’t see past her own hand without her thick glasses, wouldn’t see her in the yard.
Celia sat down on a crumbling stone bench under an ancient dogwood tree. She drew her legs up beside her, removed her diary and a pen, and held the pen aloft, thinking of something to say. She was thankful that the afternoon heat was mild, and the bugs had opted for a different part of the garden.
As Celia turned her gaze toward the house, she saw Mother emerge onto the terrace. Her long white hair was piled high on her head behind a tiara, and she wore a faded, ill-fitting opera gown that wouldn’t close in the back, and hung perilously around her bosom.
Mother walked unsteadily to the terrace railing, turned three quarters, placed her left hand on the railing, and the right to her chest. She surveyed the yard with a dramatic turn of the head.
“So it’s going to be one of those days,” Celia thought. “Mother’s going to be the opera diva with the nasty temper.”
The nurse nervously followed Mother outside, pleading with her to come back in. Mother waved her off. “My audience will be disappointed if I don’t give them an encore,” she stage whispered.
Mother turned and faced the empty yard. She saw lights and heard thunderous applause and “bravas” from an adoring crowd. Mother smiled gratefully, nodding her head to various parts of the garden.
“Oh!” she exclaimed clasping her hands to chest, pushing the low-hanging gown down even further with her fleshy arms. “As long as you continue to love me, I will never cease to love you!” Mother spread her arms out wide as if graciously accepting the well-groomed audience’s adulation rather than the silence of an overgrown, junglish garden. Her gown miraculously stayed in place as Mother bowed, blew kisses to every corner of the garden, made a grand, wobbly curtsey, and stepped backwards into the house, waving.
Celia glanced back to her diary with its blank, yellowing pages; her arm was still posed in the air. She looked over her shoulder to the back of the garden, then back at the diary. She licked the pen and was about to start writing when she heard Mother’s shrill, operatic voice from inside the house calling, “Ceeeeeeelia! Celeeeah! Ceeeeelia!”
Celia simultaneously snapped shut her diary and unclicked her pen before stowing them away in her purse. She stood up, raised her arms overhead in a stretch, and returned to house as strangely as she had emerged, all the while repeating, “I am a star! A star, I am! I’m a star!”
[Three Word Wednesday submission using the words cease, nasty and heat.]
