The turbaned, red-lipped and broad-shouldered apparition announces she’s heard my pleas.
My daughter, Delilah, the snarky adolescent that she is, had bought me a Joan Crawford prayer candle as a gag gift for Mother’s Day. Now, I see she must have moved it to where it’s currently sitting— on my alter.
“I am delighted you beseeched my help to straighten out your daughter,” Joan says.
╬
Joan points out that I also could use advice on general household management. “Handsies kneesies is the only way!” she says, throwing out my mop. I scrub, scrub, scrub until she agrees the floor looks immaculate.
For dinner, Joan insists on using her recipes. We make her wilted spinach salad along with her infamous meat loaf, which substitutes one third beef with sausage meat for extra flavor. She refuses to provide a recipe for potatoes. “A woman your age should already know to avoid those!”
Delilah is initially baffled at Joan’s presence but is won over by the delicious meal. “This is way better than the frozen pizzas Mom makes.”
“You just wait!” Joan tells her. “There’ll be a lot of changes around here.”
╬
Since Delilah’s father ran off, she’s been giving me nonstop pushback about chores and school. “I’ve asked Delilah, begged her, to clean out her cat’s litter box. She keeps saying, later, later,” I complain to Joan.
“Do you hear yourself? Asking! Begging! You should be ordering! Commanding!” Joan says.
I am used to Delilah sassing me but she’s much more reluctant to backtalk Joan Crawford. Joan’s voice thunders throughout the house. As she scolds Delilah about showing a lack of gratitude for all I do for her, I catch myself muttering, “Yeah … tell her, Joan.”
╬
I am contacted by Delilah’s school. They hadn’t bothered to alert me about each absence as she conned them into believing she has a serious medical condition.
“I have driven her every day since she started at that school,” I say to Joan. “Door to door! Only to find out she’s skipped a week’s worth classes in her first month.”
We call Delilah downstairs.
“Since you are a liar and can’t be trusted outside your mother’s sight,” Joan says, “She’s going to rearrange her work schedule to accompany you to all your classes.”
╬
I explain to Joan that the principal vetoed the plan. Shaming, he told me, is not allowed these days. “First, they took away our ability to impose fear! And now shame!” I say to Joan. “What’s left?” I laugh but I mean it: fear and shame had been the almost exclusive motivators for nearly every decision I made at Delilah’s age.
Joan’s Plan B sounds a bit harsh, but, as Joan reminds me, I don’t want Delilah to become a dropout or a delinquent. We ground her for the month. Joan insists we temporarily remove all of Delilah’s possessions from her bedroom too except for a couple of changes of clothes, a blanket and the box spring (Joan believes leaving a cushy mattress sends the wrong message).
“We can give some of your items back to you this month as you rebuild our trust,” Joan tells her.
╬
The principal has let me know that Delilah’s been handing in all of her assignments and her attendance has improved. To celebrate, I take her out for tacos and deep fried ice cream.
“Why do your shoulders look so huge?”Delilah asks as we walk into the Mexican restaurant.
“Shoulder pads! Joan says they balance out big hips.” I didn’t realize just how wide they were until Joan showed me the photos she had surreptitiously taken of me. These shots, from all angles, were her “gift” to let me see how I’ve been “presenting myself to the world.”
╬
“Your mother and I are pleased to return an item of your choice to you,” Joan tells Delilah that evening.
“Well, it would mean the world to me to get my phone back.”
We fork it over and continue replacing all wire hangers in the closets with wooden ones.
╬
“Can you believe that little punk called the child protection services people on me?” I ask Joan the next night.
“I know all about betrayal by one’s own child. That girl’s your Christina,” Joan says.
╬
Joan and I have indulged in canapés — chicken livers wrapped in bacon and cocktail onions speared with salami pieces— but we haven’t had dinner. We’ve each consumed more than a couple bull shots, though. Introduced to me by Joan, these cocktails of vodka, beef bouillon, hot sauce and lemon are a great source of nutrients when not in the mood to cook.
I’m clearly feeling the vodka because I let her bait me into arguing over who’s the worse mother. Joan admits that she had two “bad” kids but says her twins were little angels. I point out that I, in contrast, only have one kid who’s being bad. But, Joan counters, two out of four is usually a pass whereas zero out of one is always, always a failure.
╬
At the child protection office, I am being given advice by a hippie-looking social worker with scraggly hair and a colorful smock. She says too many parents focus on behaviors instead of dealing with underlying causes.
╬
Joan says counseling is a bunch of mumbo jumbo. “We didn’t have anyone asking about our feelings as children and look how well we turned out,” she says.
We have some drinks— Golden Dream cocktails, made by combining Galliano, Cointreau, orange juice and cream, and shaking the mixture over ice.
When I say I feel obliged to do the recommended therapy, Joan huffs: “You don’t need me then!”
I go downstairs to let Delilah know Joan is gone. The Joan Crawford prayer candle is burned down to the wick.
Angela James is a lawyer by day in a small Canadian community where she lives with her spouse and many, many pets. Her words are found in various publications including Pithead Chapel, Cowboy Jamboree, and Wrong Turn Lit.
The Disappointed Housewife 