When my sister and I were kids, my mother always baked a cake for Mother’s Day. Red velvet layer cake for me in odd years, coconut sheet cake for my sister in even years. It was supposed to be red velvet this morning, even though it’s an even year. All she got for her time and effort was two thick puddles to be flushed down the disposal. Later, when I finally made my appearance, she made a joke of it. Imagine. Forgetting the baking soda. But what she was really thinking was how the malignancy is chewing up her sticky brain cells, digging deep holes into which things disappear, never to be retrieved.
What time is it? she’ll ask. Ten minutes later than the last time you asked, I’ll think. Two twenty, I’ll say.
She’s sentimental these days; the past has acquired a warm, fuzzy glow. Did I know she wanted to be a stewardess? No, I say, resigned to hearing the story again, knowing the pleasure she gets from telling it. She still has a letter from Mr. Peter van Hussell, Recruiter, telling her the airline was growing and encouraging her to apply again when she was eighteen.
My mother, by TWA, in a perfectly tailored suit and jaunty cap, silk scarf knotted at her throat and immaculate white gloves on her hands, dispatching her duties, maybe catching the appreciative eye of the captain.
Coffee, tea, or milk?
She might have traveled the world, had adventures, met people earthbound girls would never have an opportunity to encounter, had songs and stories written about her. But first, she wanted to see the ocean. The Jersey shore was only an hour away from the ketchup factory and her roommate Betty had a car. Every man should be as fortunate as my father and first appear as an object of desire backlit by a blazing sun. She was on her back, her arm slung across her face to protect her eyes from the sun. The voice, gravelly, with a harsh accent, light-years from the familiar rhythms of the Carolina hills, made her turn her head in the sand. She opened her eyes and saw his flat, strong feet, inches from her face. My mother’s eyes wandered up his calves, his thighs, passed quickly over the wet jersey trunks, and settled on the black thicket covering his chest. Her eyes played a silly trick on her and created a halo effect around his head. He could never have been born in her mountains, not with his thick black brows and crooked nose and eyes such a deep brown they seemed black. He belonged to another world. He had big white teeth and a smile that made her believe he could see through her modest swimsuit. And when he knelt beside her, she was thrilled and mortified at the same time.
He smiled and told her what a pretty voice she had. He made her repeat his name over and over.
Anthony.
Again…
Anthony.
What’s my name?
Anthony.
He persuaded her to wade into the water. She was too shy to tell him she couldn’t swim, had never even stood in water deeper than her knees. And when she wobbled in the surf, frightened and tentative, he stood behind her. His reflexes were quick and, when a wave knocked her off her feet, he caught her before she fell.
My father, too restless to settle for a union manufacturing job and frustrated by the limited opportunities for a journeyman machinist, was rebuilding his life on the G.I. Bill the summer he met my mother, focusing his ferocious energy on mastering the intricacies of heating and air-conditioning. She was not quite twenty and he was thirty-one when they married in a civil ceremony at City Hall in Philadelphia the following year. She didn’t write her brothers; a few of the girls from the factory were her only family at the ceremony. She spent her wedding night and the first year of her married life in his bedroom in his mother’s house. One year after the civil ceremony, after my mother converted, she and my father were married again, properly, in Saint Mary Magdalen de Pazzi Parish. My mother was three months pregnant with me on her second wedding day.
I might have grown up on the streets of South Philadelphia, nourished on cheesesteaks and Italian water ice, but my father had dreams and a wanderlust that would take him far from the neighborhood where he was born. On an unseasonably warm October morning, he helped his expectant wife into a used Oldsmobile packed with their few belongings and drove away, leaving his weeping family behind on the stoops of Montrose Street. He had five hundred dollars and the president of Pennco Technical School ’s letter of introduction to an alumnus who was looking for an apprentice in small city in the South. When he asked my mother, a native of North Carolina, about Gastonia, she looked at him as if he had asked her to describe Jupiter or Mars. And so, within three years of leaving the farm, my mother was back in North Carolina, never to leave again.
He could be demanding. He could be thoughtless. He had a temper and sometimes lashed out, frustrated by the world. She wished he could be more patient with me. But he never hit her or her kids and didn’t get drunk and didn’t run around with other women. He was better than a good provider. And, once upon a time, he had washed her hair and crooned Sinatra tunes in her ear while they swayed to the radio. A lifetime later, on what would be their last anniversary, he told her the day she married him was the happiest day of his life and she held and comforted him while he cried, ashamed because diabetes had left him incapable of making love to her. She told him she didn’t mind, and she didn’t because, after his body failed him, he started to woo her again, kissing her gently first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, just before she spooned her body into his and he fell asleep. If you asked her, she’d tell you she’s had a good life. The world has surprised her by letting her be happy.
My mother, by June Allyson.
But that was the past, and what terrifies her is the future. The holes are getting bigger, and one day, soon maybe, she’ll blithely emerge from the bedroom, her wig on backward, lipstick smeared like a clown, her blouse unbuttoned, her slip mistaken for a skirt. She’ll be smiling, unaware she’s an object of ridicule, no, worse, an object of pity. Poor thing, they’ll say, remember how meticulous she was about her appearance? Today it’s baking soda. Tomorrow she might be wandering naked into the street.
She’d let me sleep this morning, knowing how hard it is to work all week and be at her beck and call all weekend. I need my rest so I can turn her over to Rent-A-Nurse tomorrow morning and hop a flight to escape. And no sooner will I board the plane than I’ll start to miss her, regretting all these days spent away from her, the dwindling opportunities to let her know what she’s meant to me. But if I stay she’ll drive me crazy. G’wood, she’ll say over and over again until it pushes me past the breaking point and I’ll want to smash her against the wall.
“Finish your drink,” she says when the waiter offers coffee. She stares at me, wondering whether this human detritus sitting across the table is her fault. I look away, down at my new watch.
“You shouldn’t have done this,” I say, looking at my watch.
“You’re right, maybe I shouldn’t have,” she says, sipping her coffee. “But I did.”
That’s my mother. Are you happy now, Matt?
Casta diva
Another Kennedy is dead.
The talk show host says we measure our lives by their tragedies.
The sunlight pierces the dark lenses of my Ray-Bans. I need coffee and aspirin and water. Especially water. My mouth feels like I gargled with sand. The flight from New York to Charlotte was torture. Barely navigating on two hours of sleep, I got to the gate just as they were closing the door. The flight attendant eyed me warily. Unshaven, agitated, a little wild eyed, sweaty, I was a perfect match for the airline’s suspicious passenger profile. Inebriate? Schizophrenic? Terrorist? Fortunately US Airways decided I was harmless enough to board the plane. We circled Charlotte for thirty minutes, waiting for clearance. I forgot where I parked the car and took a wrong turn out of the lot, driving three miles in the wrong direction before I could turn around. I don’t have enough energy to turn the radio to another station.