Go Ask Alice…when she's 94

Alice told me she needed some “tops”–blouses, shirts, sweaters. We decided to take the new walker out for an extended spin at Lloyd Center, the nearest mall.

She had never heard of Marshall’s and wanted to go inside the moment she saw it, despite my hesitation. Once inside the door she looked around and loudly announced, “These are the worst looking clothes I’ve ever seen in my life.” Nevertheless, she dispensed with her walker and ventured off stiffly on her own, holding onto clothing racks jammed with floral prints and plunging necklines. I followed anxiously behind, pushing the walker, just in case. After a trip down the third aisle with no results, she grabbed it from me and got into position. “Let’s blow this joint,” she said, doing her best Brando from The Wild One.

Sears was next door, but that didn’t please her either. She held up a slinky black top with beaded buttons in a zig-zag pattern down the front. “Am I supposed to wear this?”

But when I found the Land’s End racks she began tossing blouses and sweaters onto the seat and arms of her walker, using it like a grocery cart. I felt awed by my mother’s capacity to keep going. She read my mind. “Aren’t I amazing?”

I agreed that she was. She turned her face up to me and wanted to know if her make-up looked okay. It did. I asked why she wanted to know. “Because,” she said, “I made it myself.”

A woman about a decade older than I hovered nearby, listening.

“First,” Alice said, “I took some of that skin lotion that Thalia gave me. It smells so good. I didn’t measure, so I can’t say how much I used. Then I added some of your friend Jo’s face cream. Remember when she brought me that jar of cream one day out of the blue? It smells good too and it has olive oil. I put in about two tablespoons of that. Then I emptied out a whole tube of 99-cent Walgreen’s hand lotion and added that.”

The woman who had stopped to listen edged closer.

Alice said she shook in some talcum powder and moved her hand up and down as if holding a saltshaker. “Then I put in some rubbing alcohol to get the right consistency.” She raised one finger. “Now here comes my special ingredient: cranberry juice for color. But then it got a little bit too pinkish.”

She was enjoying herself now, and I was enjoying her too, loving all her 94 years’ worth of odd ways. I flashed back to the time she dragged an old, broken lava lamp up from the basement and added some melted wax and rubbing alcohol, then tossed in a handful of raisins so she could watch them float up and down in the aqua liquid. But when she plugged the lamp in, its top blew off and hit the kitchen ceiling, leaving a brownish smudge that was still there the day the house was sold, some twenty-five years later.

She needed to adjust the pinkness of the make-up, she said, so she’d dribbled in about two teaspoons of the coffee she was drinking at the time and mixed everything up with a manicure stick. The coffee did the trick. The color looked right. “I thought about adding some of that ear oil the hearing aid doctor gave me to help with my earwax problem,” she said. “I thought long and hard about using that to make it smoother, but then I decided it might be too oily.”

The mixture yielded a cup of make-up. “I figure with all the money I save doing things like that, I deserve some new clothes.”

The hovering woman nodded soberly and moved on.

We walked out into the sunlight and loaded the back seat of the car with bags of tops, then we headed back to The Place. When we entered the apartment, the phone was ringing. She pushed her walker across the room, turned, dropped back into her Laz-E-Boy and picked up the receiver. “Hello? Who’s this?”

I went into the bedroom and hung up the tops, then slipped into the bathroom to take a peek at the make-up concoction. She’d poured it into a small, shapely jar. It looked and smelled exactly like the real thing. Maybe better.