I Knew She'd Call/Cover Girl Day - Darlene Nelson

When I was young and still hopeful, I looked for you everywhere. I looked for you in the faces of women I knew – my neighbors, my teachers, and my best friend’s mother. Eventually I began to look for you in the faces of strangers. Once, before my sophomore year of high school began, I was with my adoptive mother in the local drug store. It had been a good summer, long and hot in the Texas heat, and I had accomplished a lot. My reward was back to school make-up at the drug store.

My mother had driven me to the store in silence; the car’s air-conditioner was the only noise. I had never shopped for makeup before and my mother advised me until I picked out a frosted-pink lipstick, black mascara, and foundation in a glass bottle. As we walked to the cashier, a fellow shopper caught my eye. She was my height and her skin was so tan – startling with her light blonde hair. Her lips were already colored pink, much like the pink my mother was buying me. I stared at her, wondering if my birth mother might be, at that very moment, shopping for pink lipsticks too. I wanted that dark skinned blonde-haired woman to be my mother, I silently prayed, but she never noticed me.

As I sit writing this memory, twenty something years later, I can still remember the way the Cover Girl foundation smelled, something slightly sweet and a little medicinal. The pink lipstick lasted for months, the mascara not so long. In the history of my life, Cover Girl Day was when I stopped searching in the faces of other people and began to think of seeing my birth mother in person. It was when I began to pray that I would come home from school and find her sitting in the living room, waiting. On the other hand, maybe she would be standing on the front porch, ringing the doorbell. In my heart, I knew that was too much to hope for and so I began to think that one day she might call me on the telephone. I convinced myself that a phone call was possible. I knew she would call. But she never did.