The newest member of our family is now six years old. One of my nieces, whose three children are grown, adopted Chelsea after having fostered her for a couple of years. When Chelsea first walked through the door of Cathy’s house, she said, “Umm, I wish I could live here forever.” Cathy’s answer was, “You can.”
Chelsea has blue eyes like peeps of sky seen through the bisque skin of her broad face. When she smiles her eyes squint and twinkle and her mouth stretches almost ear to ear. She is quick to smile and just as quick to cry. Her birth mother was a drug addict, causing Chelsea to be born with an under-developed heart. There’s a long complicated medical term for this condition, but it’s not necessary for you to know it in this character sketch, only that this true-beauty is on lots of meds that possibly produce such side effects as startling easily, which leads to crying. But for the most part Chelsea smiles, especially in beauty pageants. That is, unless she loses, or something scares her.
Cathy, a blue-jeans sort of farm girl and a nurse, got Chelsea into pageants because she can’t participate in sports, for one thing. Also, Chelsea likes to dress up.
At one recent pageant, Chelsea made friends with another little girl, also competing. Like Chelsea, the child had lost her temporary front teeth. The evening before the pageant, they played together, held hands and talked, or as Cathy says, “They hit it off.” Kids being kids.
Next morning, they were down to the business of becoming little-big-girls: hair curled, faces slathered in makeup, tiny bodies bolted into the kind of flashy gowns Paris Hilton might wear.
All ready, waiting for the pageant to start, Chelsea with her straight blond hair in ribbons and ringlets, set out to find her new friend among the crowd of nervous mothers and their dolled-up little girls. Finally, the child she was looking for stepped up to Chelsea, who hadn’t recognized her because her short hair now hung down to her waist, and she had teeth.
“You have teeth now,” Chelsea said, swinging hands with her new friend.
“Flipper teeth,” said the girl, gaping her mouth and flipping her top teeth up with her tongue.
Chelsea let out a wail. Her eyes teared up and her mascara streamed down her made-up face.
Now she is begging Cathy to buy her some flipper teeth. Cathy claims that this is where she draws the line. “Who ever heard of a kid with false teeth?”