Pretty Face
by Ann Bogle
“Get that pretty face out of my face!” my mother said, as I tried to slide out the door to smoke a cigarette illegally. I had started wearing make-up with green eye shadow in seventh grade, first year of junior high, with other Protestant girls who started with light blue. The Catholic girls started in eighth grade, middle year of junior high, the year their mothers remembered as the year before high school, in training them to wait. If I had been arrested for underage smoking, I never would have smoked again. Poet Bill Yarrow asked at Knickerbocker at what age I started, and for a change I answered, “Twelve.” I puffed at twelve. The two girls who were my best friends had not minded that I didn't draw it in. It was Obie, as we called him for short, who commanded me to inhale at thirteen. “You're dead,” Obie said, as soon as I did it. I fell backward in the tall, yellow grass. I knew about the Surgeon General's new warning that smoking cigarettes may cause dot dot dot, and it still is true that chemical additives in cigarettes may. At any rate, I remember thinking, do I want a mother? Yes! Answer. Then be not too pretty, I told my straight-A, responsible self. My mother was naturally beautiful, graceful, and elegant. She drew on her lipstick in the rear view mirror. She did not wear rouge or mascara. Her hair was not dyed: the color of champagne, very light red.
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Author's Note
Appears along with eight other stories in a group called "In Audience," _Connotation Press_, Robert Clark Young, Ed., Issue II, Volume VII, November 2015.
Your matter-of-fact approach is always dead on, and catches the reader every time.
"At any rate, I remember thinking, do I want a mother? Yes! Answer. Then be not too pretty, I thought to my straight-A, responsible self."
Good writing, Ann. *
"I remember thinking, do I want a mother? Yes! Answer. Then be not too pretty." Such insight at 13. Clearly a writer's mind. *
Fascinating read.*
People are paying big bucks for George R.R. Martin to put their names into one of the Game of Thrones book. Maybe we Fictionauters can bid to be inserted into one of your pieces! :)
Is any narrator ever reliable? Hard to know. Lovely details in a non-linear narrative that collapses the years in an interesting way.
Master of making emotions shine through a mask of matter of fact. *
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Ann, this fascinating. I agree with Beate.
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P.S. I remember being with you and Marc Vincenz and Bobie Lurie at the Knickerbocker almost two years ago, but I forgot that I asked you that question. Or am I falling into the fallacy of thinking that details in a piece of fiction are really real?
Love it.*
Thank you for reading, commenting, and fav'ing.
What is partial about the piece, partial in the sense of biased, is toward the details, the ones to leave in, the ones to leave out, the sum of the details that exists in written form, the details in others' stories thought or felt, the stories of their youths, that this brief story may elicit. How would I know what it elicits? Is it illicit? Yes, underage smoking is. I wrote this piece triggered by a comment Meg Pokrass made on Fb about her mother's old saying about Meg's quotient for patience. Patience was not overtly my subject, but something my mother said once, along with its travel route inside my head suddenly became a subject.
Beate's comment is complimentary. I analyzed it today, standing in the kitchen, reading it on my Blackberry.
The word master may be exalting but it, too, may be matter of fact, master in the sense of craftsman or gardener.
The highest compliment in her comment is "making emotions shine" -- that is high praise. "Mask of matter of fact" refers to method. Mask reminds me of "guise of fiction" and here the mask or guise is not of fiction but of fact. I like her choice of the word mask and how it mates with master, making, and matter.
I decided that her comment was advanced and concise.
The truth of these statements as facts: _x_ Yes __ No.
To paraphrase: A pretty face is just a pretty face, but a smoke.... Ah moms & cigarettes. *
Thanks, Dan.
"I puffed at twelve."
that's an amazing piece. drew me in like a motherfucker. loved it and want more.
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Thanks, Bud, good of you to comment and find it. Yay!
Minor changes -- emendations. 10/30/2014 at 6:17 a.m. CDT