All My Friends Were Fiberglass
…headless and legless torsos with faded skin, too-old disembodied heads…
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My parents must have started collecting body parts before I was born. Cracked and chipped slender-fingered hands, headless and legless torsos with faded skin, too-old disembodied heads; these things lay on our tables and shelves; they were hung on nails in our walls. We even had a series of life-sized bodies, inanimate human-like things, intact, posing throughout the various houses we lived in during my childhood. I posed next to them sometimes, especially the little girls, when I felt like hamming it up for the camera. I would stiffen, and twist my body into whatever awkward shape theirs were in, maybe a couple of white curlicues of hair falling over my eyes, some plastic beaded necklaces lying over my bare little-girl chest, a puffed-out belly protruding slightly below the lines of my ribs. As clothing, the girls would sport my hand-me-downs; mostly pretty, fluffy-skirted dresses. One wore a funny little red and black pillbox hat made from Chinese silk.
In the mid-seventies, my mother and father had just married and were both artists living in Northern California, when they fell into doing work with mannequins. Occasionally I went to work with my parents when I was a child. The back of the factory smelled of chemicals; spray paint, fiberglass, epoxy and other resins. I liked the smell; it was similar to the way I enjoyed the smell that wafted through the car window when we were filling up at the gas station. Good, but with a bit of a headache behind my eyes.
Most everyone around the factory wore small white masks over their mouths to keep out the fiberglass and cut the fumes. Pink and brown body parts hung, drying, from the high unfinished ceilings of the warehouse, having just been sprayed with one of many different layers of paint. After they were covered in their designated skin color, the heads would go to my mother and the other make-up artists in the factory, then to those who attached and styled the wigs.
I worked in the factory too, on occasion, as a hand model. I would have to cover my hand and forearm with a thick layer of Vaseline, position my fingers in a certain uncomfortable way, per my dad’s instructions, and sink it into a box full of cold, pink, sweet-smelling, liquid silicone. When the mixture had solidified enough to keep its shape, I’d pull my lubricated arm out, the strong suction creating the sort of sound a chimpanzee might make when hoping for a big kiss.
My hands were attached to child mannequins, to be displayed in store windows all around the country.
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