Landslide

            Being a fool was the worst crime in Mama’s book, so I tried very hard not to be one. The tricky part was that Mama had a whole set of irrational terrors. Tripping over any one of them would make me a fool, someone who lived life dangerously, wastefully, throwing away money, health, time, food, useful supplies, or even energy. Mama believed that life was hard enough work without doing extra like going running. (“Fool,” she’d say, pointing to some panting and scarlet exerciser staggering along the road in shorts.) Or she’d pull the truck over and watch someone who had spent a fortune on a kayak paddle around the lake and see exactly what we saw from shore, only wetter. Though presumably the kayaking fools did get some nice up close views of loons. And vice versa.

            I did some things that were truly foolish, no doubt. But consider all the things that Mama considered dangerous: using the dryer, for example, because Grammy got electrocuted once when Grampy was practicing unlicensed electrical engineering in the laundry room and handed her the live wire accidentally.

            “Ten thousand volts,” Mama would say to me, standing in front of the dryer with her arms out to protect me from it, wearing her Danger Face. I never told her that’s what I called it, but it’s how I thought of it from the earliest time I knew what was what. Danger Face is pretty bad. Mama has bangs and straight black hair, shoulder length, though graying now. (She won’t dye it. People who waste money dyeing their hair are, you guessed it, fools.) She’s super pale because she won’t go in the sun because of cancer, so when she turns Danger Face on you, the effect is pretty daunting. That pale white face framed by black hair. Her face goes dead still and expressionless, and her mouth goes flat and her eyes get huge and dark, like a cat when it’s scared. And then she will tell you every horrible kind of way to die from whatever otherwise innocent activity you had considered engaging in, until you’re convinced not to. Or until you walk away, like a lot of our former friends and current neighbors and her boyfriends, back when she used to have boyfriends, all of whom got tired of listening to the Voice of Doom.

            “Ten thousand volts went straight through her body. You listen to me, Annamarie Eddloe. That woman was never the same. She used to put teabags in the coffee maker.”

            “Okay,” I would say. “Could you put my stuff in the dryer, though? Because my clothes are all wet and I have a hiker to pick up.”