The Myth of Wile E

Acme Retroactive Abortions

For a long time I was able to take heart in knowing that if the Something were to be found anywhere, it would certainly turn up in one of Mama's catalogs, where it would probably cost about $19.95 plus shipping.

Mama was always getting catalogs full of stuff to give her more energy and make her faster and thinner and healthier and younger. Mostly what she cared about were the "youngerizing" products. She ordered Dead Sea salts, blue-green algae, and anti-wrinkle creams. She woke up every morning with a different colored clay face. I was afraid of her in the morning; she looked like a papier-mâché project.

Once she even got a big gooey fungus thing that looked like a pink jellyfish. It lived in the refrigerator for a while until it developed streptococcus, and then penicillin. Daddy did not like having this sickly, self-medicating mushroom in our refrigerator so he set it free in the back yard, where it probably founded its own civilization. I don't know how the anti-aging mushroom was supposed to work. I think Mama was supposed to drink it, but she was afraid to, and I don't imagine the mushroom had been too keen on the idea, either.

Mama was an ex-dancer, and ex-dancers do everything gracefully except grow old. They're always picking a fight with aging, and things can get pretty messy.

Mama had tried at least five hundred anti-aging products by the time we moved to California. Nothing had worked. We were pretty sure she was still thirty-two.

But she kept trying; she was sure the right product was out there, somewhere. Maybe someday she'd find it, and then she'd turn twenty-five, or twenty. Maybe (I'd thought), she could even become as young as me. Then I'd have someone to play with.

Of course, if Mama'd ever gotten as young as me, Mama and I would probably have had to find someone else to make us go to bed at night, and keep us from putting forks in the toaster, and take us to the doctor when we got sick, and tell us we'd understand everything when we were older. But at least Mama could have grown up all over again, and this time not get saddled. This time she could not have Dougie—or Gladys, or me—and not give up her dance scholarship, and not miss out on being the ballerina she'd always wanted to be. I thought maybe one day she'd find in a catalog just the right age-banishing item that could make me un-exist.

What I didn't know then was: even with all the catalogs in the world, Mama could no more recapture her youth than Wile E. Coyote could capture that roadrunner.