"Barry Smells Himself"

But Mother, I had plans!"Juanita jumped up from the floor to follow her mother down the hallway after Edna hung up the telephone from talking to Melvina.  Edna turned and just folded her arms across her chest, looking at her daughter with equal parts of compassion and frustration.

She was standing right next to an inexpensively but tastefully-framed triple-portrait which featured President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy hanging on the wall.  The hallway lighting was less bright than usual because one of the light bulbs beneath the ceiling fixture was out.  Edna Smalls was somewhat distracted by this: another thing to remember to fix , another thing to attend to....shoot!   She was hoping there were some spare 50-watt bulbs in the linen closet or underneath the kitchen sink or maybe on the top shelf of one of the kids’ closets.

“Barry! Get a fresh light bulb for this hallway!” she shouted, while she was still thinking about it.

“Ma! Why can’t Juanita get it! She’s the oldest!” Barry stuck out his head from the bathroom and into the hallway.  He had been in there examining his chin, underarms, and the area beneath his navel for the new smells and growths of his pubescence.

“Boy, don’t make me snatch you!”  Edna threatened.

“But I didn’t even do anything, Ma! You treat me bad, no matter what.  It’s always you and Juanita against me!”  

     Barry slunk out into the hallway, giving both his mother and sister a grimace on his way to the kitchen.  He was the shirtless underdog with smelly armpits.  Juanita squeezed her eyes shut to demonstrate her disgust at the sight of him.  Just now, Barry was nothing to her but a big, annoying head crowning a scrawny neck and torso, newly-hairy lanky legs, and feet with long, crooked toes.  Even Edna was slightly rattled at the sight of her son:  he wasn’t a baby anymore.  She had done her best by him up to this point, but, now...?  

“That’s not true.” she said weakly, as Barry stomped past her, leaving a loud aroma of 12-year-old funk on the air.

“Mother, I’m nearly graduating from high school---I’m not a kid.  I wanted to go out with my friends, tonight.”  Juanita attempted to manipulate her mother’s emotions by slowing-down her impassioned delivery and making an inward gesture toward her chest with her fingertips---something she had learned in Mr. T’s Interpretive Reading class at her school.  

Perturbed, and somewhat displaced from her usual center of Mother Power, Edna turned her back on Juanita, her eldest child, nearly a young woman, and marched straightaway to her bedroom.  She wanted so much to close the bedroom door on her daughter’s advancing face.  The conflicting sensibilities inside of her wanted to strong-arm things back to the way they were when she was clearly the mother of young children; not the mother of young birds eager to try out their own wings in the world.