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Paper Dresses by Michael Cornwall In those days Mama wore paper dresses. She ordered them from the back pages of romance magazines and hung them from her bedroom door so the folds would fall out. She liked the blues and reds best. I heard Mama tell her friend Thelma it was cheaper in the long run to buy those paper dresses. "Sure are handy things," she said. "No cleaning, no ironing, nothing to them. Come all the way from Florida, mail order. Six to a pack. Not a stitch of cloth on them. All I do is open a package and pull one out. Toss it when I'm finished. ' "Pretty too," Thelma said. "You got your something there." "Since the baby come along, anything that frees me up from extra laundry is an answered prayer," Mama said. "Funny thing though. It's like they always say, you can never tell who's waiting for you around the next corner. You should get a couple for yourself. Try them out." Thelma laughed. "Can you see me in 56 a dress? I ain't worn a dress since first grade." She slapped herself on the knee. 'First thing I'd do in one of them paper dresses is break a heavy sweat. Then where would I be? Standing naked before all mankind is where. No, you can keep your dresses. Cloth and paper both. Give me a good strong pair of Levis any day." She raised her beer bottle, took a long drink, and wiped her wrist across her lips. Mama said, "Just don't have all the money it takes. Have to give something up. I m just one of them people. I can get used to about anything if it happens to me long enough.' They toasted each other, clinking their beer bottles together. They were always laughing and toasting something, Mama and her friend Thelma. I was only eight or nine at the time, and Mama was as big as the world is to me now. Most nights, Mama got herself all dolled-up to go out to Mary Lee's Chicken Shack. She'd stand at the bathroom sink, one foot on the tail of her baby's nightgown, keeping her from crawling around the house and getting into things while she was making up her face. Ga stand beside Mama and watch. First thing, Mama made faces in the mirror, pulling the skin on her cheeks toward her ears with her fingers, smoothing the wrinkles. "Your mama ain't got too many years left on her," she said, gripping two or three bobby pins between her lips. "But I was something in my time. You should've seen all them boys that come around. Everyone of them, sweet as a little puppy." She showed her teeth in the mirror and brushed her pointer finger over them. "Said I had the prettiest teeth in the county." Reaching for her comb on the side of the sink, she gripped a few strands of hair at a time between her fingers, teasing until her hair was a foot in the air. Took my mama an hour just to braid my hair back then," she said. "It was all the way down to here. Black as coal." She poked at the sides of her hair with the pointed end of her comb, lifting and separating. "The boys would come. Oh, them boys would come and line up on the front porch with that look in their big, puppy eves, wishing they could touch me. All of them puppies sure did turn into dogs." She laughed and sprayed her hair wildly with hair spray, spraying as if she were trying to kill a pesky fly buzzing around her head. She made two fishhook curls with the strands of hair that hung down beside her ears and taped each of them to her cheeks. They moved when she talked. "Men should stay boys," she said, looking closely at herself in the mirror, "instead of turning from puppies to the mangy dogs they are." She placed a little velvet bow in the center of her hair and reached for the sample-size bottle...

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