What My Mother Gave Me (13 page)

AFTER MY FATHER
 moved to Newport Beach, and then began dating a woman he'd dated in college, whom he eventually married, they fell off the face of the earth. Or maybe I was the one who fell. When I was a sophomore, a scant eleven months after my mom's death, my father sent me on an expensive study-abroad program, Semester at Sea. Billed as shipboard learning, it was a four-month global circumnavigation departing from Port Everglades, Florida, and returning to Long Beach, California. I turned nineteen in Accra, Ghana. I was happy; for 120 days I pretended to everyone I met—to my fellow students and teachers and the French accountant I met in Abidjan and with whom I had a three-night stand—that my mother was alive and well in southern California, throwing cocktail parties and sending me care packages.

IN THE FIRST
house I bought with my first husband, whom I'd met in graduate school, we had a built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcase in our bedroom.
Th
is meant that every box of books we'd been dragging around from apartment to apartment could be unloaded. Late one afternoon I opened a box and spied the jewel-toned spines of the all books I'd received for Easter while my mother had been alive. I knew immediately what else I would find; there at the very bottom was
White Gloves and Party Manners.
By then I'd had enough therapy to access my eyeball-popping anger, the adolescent rage that had been unexpectedly short-circuited upon my mother's death.

Th
e book became emblematic of everything I felt angry about regarding my mother, which was everything, including the fact she had the gall to die, just as I was getting around to telling her I wished she was dead. I left the book out on our rickety Goodwill coffee table, and occasionally read from it as a party trick. I claimed to have thought it was hilarious. “It will tell you what to do and what to say to make people like you.” I would read to my friends from the introduction, one time so pissed off a thread of spittle flew from my mouth and landed in the middle of the page. I could have performed it on stage as a piece of political theater.

I had become no one my mother would have recognized. I had not one but two college degrees. I lived with my boyfriends, made my own money, read Kafka, quoted Kafka, refused to learn how to cook, wore steel-toed cowboy boots and drank scotch, neat, worked at being as smart as I could possibly be, was funny not sweet, used
fuck
as an adjective (as in, “that fucking book”).
Th
e young woman I had become would have put her in the ground. But, of course, she was already there, so what did it matter?

Th
en, more years passed, and I had some more therapy, and my own daughter, and I forgave her a little. I was embarrassed at having been so predictable in rebelling. Some of what she taught me made sense. It was good to have manners, and to refrain from parading your intelligence around as if it were a Kentucky Derby winner. Upon my daughter's birth I saw, immediately, that mothers come fully equipped with complete lives that their children couldn't begin to imagine. I came to the conclusion that my mom had been desperate to stay attached to the Mahoneys out of some complicated combination of guilt that she had left her working-class family behind, and one-upsmanship. She'd left them behind, but she wanted them to remember that she had, as often as possible.

But my forgiveness was misplaced; I would learn that I was wrong.

My father died in 2000, of lung cancer. He was seventy-five, having survived both his second wife and fifty years of two packs a day. I wrote a book that won some acclaim about caring for him during his last year of life. On the day he died, after the hospice people came and collected his body, I came upon a safety-deposit box in his closet. Inside there were the usual important documents: the death certificates of my mother and his second wife, Beverly; his two marriage certificates; his and my birth certificates; the legal document indicating that our name was changed from Karbowski to Karbo. At the bottom of the box there was a small, yellowing envelope from the Detroit Legal News Company, dated two years before my parents were married. Inside the envelope there was a two-by-two-inch news clipping, a legal notice stating that the Wayne County Probate Court had approved my mother's petition to change her name from Joan Mary Rex to Joan Mary Sharkey.

I held the square on the palm of my hand. My mother's secret, which my father had dutifully kept until they were both gone. I immediately suspected that my mother had had a previous marriage. Wasn't her beauty legendary? Wasn't she twenty-five (i.e., old) when she married my father, thereby giving her plenty of time for a disastrous first marriage to Mr. Rex? I enlisted a friend, a retired Los Angeles County deputy sheriff turned private investigator, who set the record straight in under an hour. My mother, it turned out, was not a Sharkey. She was not the daughter of Maud, the much younger sister of Lorraine and Julia, the aunt of Mary. According to her birth certificate, she was the daughter of Calvin Rex, age nineteen, and Nora Carrigan, age seventeen. She had not been formally adopted by Maud, but still carried her father's name, Rex, until she became engaged to my father and changed it to Sharkey. She must have wanted the record to reflect that she was not a foster child, not a foundling left at the boardinghouse in Ypsilanti run by Maud Sharkey, the woman I thought was my grandmother.

Aside from a weird sense of relational vertigo, where the people I was told were my people were not my people at all, I was elated. I'd known from the time I was small that there was something off about the way we all interacted.
Th
is was it. My intuition was to be trusted after all. I wasn't even eyeball-popping angry that my mother used to explain that the reason I needed to be nice to Jeri was that we were
cousins
. Which we weren't. We were nothing. My mother, the love child of a pair of teenagers with whom we had no connection, had kept us hitched to the Mahoneys not out of guilt, but out of desperation.
Th
ey were the closest thing to family my mother had, her fake family of origin. But as in all families of origin, fake or otherwise, she had a lot of unfinished business with them. And then she died.

And I was wrong again.

In 2009 I was giving a talk at a gallery in southern California. I'd had trouble finding a place to park and was running late. As I rushed in the door I noticed a young blond woman in an orange sleeveless dress note my arrival and duck into the office at the end of the room. So clearly was she waiting for me, I thought she worked there, and someone had asked her to notify them when I'd arrived.

I came around the corner, into the office, and there was Aunt Mary, whom I hadn't seen in over thirty years. I'd know that blue-eyed glare anywhere. She'd read about my appearance in the newspaper and had come to say her piece. She skittered around the corner, into the main gallery space, and waved in the direction of two blonds—Jeri and her daughter, I guess. Jeri had had some work done.
Th
ere were teeth and breasts and lots of hair. She looked great. I opened my mouth to tell her so, even though, at the same time, I wanted to go over and ask why the hell, at her age, she was party to this ambush, but Aunt Mary started in.

“I read that book you wrote about us,” she said.

“Uh . . . ,” I said. What book was she talking about?
Th
e book I'd written about my dad, in which I made passing mention of the Mahoneys? But there was no time to get my bearings in the conversation, or to figure out what she was even talking about. She was there to take me down, and she was so eager to do it, she didn't give me any time to respond. I noted, almost without realizing it, that she was overdressed, in a gold and blue brocaded tunic and skirt, something the mother of the bride would wear.

“We would have come to scatter your father's ashes, you know.”

“OK,” I said.

“You just had to ask!”

“Uh—”

“And Gramma? She's dead.”

“Lorraine, you mean? I'm so sorry to—”

“She died five years ago.”

“Oh—”

“And Gramma? Gramma was your gramma.”

“Gramma was my gramma?” It took me a minute. Lorraine,
my mother's sister, whom I'd been instructed to call Gramma
, even though she was my aunt, was actually my mother's mother? Is that what she was trying to tell me?

“Gramma
was
your gramma.”

I felt as if we were freemasons, or members of some other secret society that required the exchange of cryptic passwords.

“OK. Well. It's good to see you.
Th
anks so much for coming.” I leaned down and gave her the most insincere hug ever exchanged between two human beings. If she thought this would rattle me, she was mistaken. I was a Karbo, and one tough Polack.
Th
ey sat through my talk, then left during the Q & A.

AS I WRITE
this, I still don't know to whom my mother was born. If Lorraine was really her mother, if Gramma was my gramma, then who was Nora Carrigan, the woman listed on my mother's birth certificate? Lorraine's nom de unwed mother? If so, that would make Aunt Mary not my mother's niece, but her half sister. Perhaps during those long hours spent with the Mahoneys what I was witnessing between them was the secret war between siblings.

Another daughter might want a definitive answer, but I know what I need to know about my mother. For decades now, I've not just supported myself, but also my family, mostly by my wits. Some nights I'd lie awake wondering how I could continue to do this when I'd had no mother to model anything close to the skills I needed to keep going, wishing that I'd had a mother who had at least held a job, who knew how a mortgage refinance worked, or an income-tax audit. I cursed my mother for being a sheltered housewife. Now that I know the truth about her shame, if not about her story, I realize that she, too, traveled up and out into the world in a way that no one, certainly not her unmarried teenaged parents, whomever they may have been, could have possibly expected. I'm sure she also lay awake nights and wondered how to throw a dinner party for my father's boss, or the chair of the board of a volunteer organization she belonged to, when there had been no mother before her to help her through it.

Th
e gift of
White Gloves and Party Manners
was more about my mother than it was ever about me. She'd known from the time she was small that she had to be good, pretty, neat, cheerful, and polite, or be cast aside.
Th
e mystery remains a mystery, but I've made peace with it.
White Gloves and Party Manners
sits on a shelf beside my desk, between my French-English dictionary and a copy of Rilke's
Letters to a Young Poet
. Once, years ago, I got a magazine assignment that involved meeting President Clinton. I consulted the book to see how I should address him.

Her Favorite Neutral

CHARLOTTE SILVER

I once watched my mother put out a fire with her bare hands. She was a chef and her hands, from decades of being in the kitchen, were tough.
Th
is happened in the old days when the restaurant she owned in Harvard Square used to have something called Cabaret Night, for which we hosted an old-fashioned supper club in the Club Bar with black-and-white diamond floors and the stuffed crocodiles that Teddy Roosevelt had shot mounted above the fireplace.

On one of those nights, a cabaret singer stood under those stuffed crocodiles belting out a Peggy Lee song called “I Love the Way You're Breaking My Heart.” “Although you're gonna ruin it, it's heaven while you're doin' it,” she sang, and then, before anyone saw it coming, the sheet music brushed the tip of one of the candles and burst into flames. Back then, you still could use real candles in restaurants; you could smoke indoors, too.

We had not had a serious fire since I was little, when one of the kitchen pipes burst into flames. But because the restaurant, named Upstairs at the Pudding, was located in a drafty old Victorian building, the threat of fire loomed as a perpetual fear.

And so, the night the sheet music ignited, my mother didn't waste a second. She jetted across the black-and-white diamonds to the piano and sliced her hands karate-style through the thickening flames. She did it; she put it out.
Th
e show, as they say, went on.
Th
e cabaret singer resumed her song, the bartenders rattled their cocktail shakers, customers returned to bowls of vichyssoise on beds of cracked ice.

Th
at night, my mother was wearing a pair of black satin pumps with ribbons that laced ballerina-style up the ankles and, continuing this romantic sketch in a rather Degas mode, a full skirt with crackling layers of bluish violet tulle underneath.

Also, sunglasses: enormous Chanel frames sweeping
movie star – style across her face, the lenses tinted a custom shade of lavender.

Also, a cocktail coat: this particular one comes back to me as a cloud of white chiffon.

Th
ese, these were my mother's trademarks, her badges of feminine armor against the world.

IT HELPED, OF
course, that she was beautiful. In her youth she was said to resemble Kim Novak and even worked, briefly, as a bikini model. And in dreary old Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the Puritan influence reigns in the genteelly faded color palette of the houses and the sensible shoes of the women, my mother is notorious for these sunglasses and for her style of feminine
abbondanza
at large. Pink is her favorite color, though not the wimpy pink of little girls but the lustier, more femme-fatale shades of adulthood. And leopard print her favorite pattern, the motif of a long series of gifts to me, some bought, some new, but many given straight from her closet.

In my mother's universe and later on in mine, leopard was not so much a pattern as a piece of the background. “Leopard,” she used to say, “it's my favorite neutral.” Plaid was also a neutral, and she enjoyed both plaid and leopard in combination, a preference for theatricality in self-presentation that is another one of her gifts to me.

When I was a child, my mother dressed me in the classics: sailor dresses in summertime, black velveteen ones come Christmas. But when I was in my early twenties and began to ransack her closet for inspiration, it was often the leopard-print items that I reached for and which she, in her usual spirit of generosity, agreed to pass down.

One thing I could not get my hands on, though, was her most beloved piece of clothing, the one which, more than any other, marked her territory: a leopard-print Italian swing coat, lined in mocha velveteen. She bought it in my childhood and wears it still; I just turned thirty.

Of course a leopard-patterned coat is the leopard item to end all others.
Th
e year I was twenty-two, my mother gave me a new one for Christmas. It infused the streets of Cambridge with urban glamour and my life with a thrilling sense of toughness it had not previously possessed. I am speaking here of illusions, for Cambridge had no glamour and I, at that stage in my life, no toughness to speak of. But the coat, with its fabulous contrast of honeyed blond faux fur and oyster-sized jet buttons, suggested that both of these things might one day be possible.

Th
e years passed and other hand-me-downs followed—a leopard capelet, the throat of which closed firmly yet sweetly with a black pom-pom; a leopard collar she'd bought in Paris; and a pair of leopard-spotted Ferragamo pumps, spiky, inimitably, even ruthlessly Italian.
Th
ey were too high for me, those beautiful shoes, those gorgeous things, but I trotted them out on the rare occasions where I considered the danger worth it, and was dazzled, as ever when putting on high heels, by my transformation into a dizzy, imperiled creature: a sensation which is, to me anyway, highly sexual and not at all unpleasant.

It seems to me that animal prints are all about the sensuality and the intoxication of contrast.
Th
e brutality, the suggestion of violence of the pattern must be softened, thrown into relief, by the lushness of the fabric, the inviting, touchable nature of it.
Come close,
a leopard collar says to the other observer,
but not too close.
Leopard invites and repels intimacy. In the same instant, it allures and imposes boundaries.

In this way, leopard prints achieve the same function as my mother's sunglasses.
Th
ey turn heads yet preserve mystery. Not for nothing are animal prints said to be a kind of camouflage.

Camouflage, illusion, indirection, enchantment—my
mother was in favor of all of the above.
Th
e lighting at the restaurant, and in our home, was pink, care of rose-colored lightbulbs. Paints were high-gloss. Fresh flowers necessary, and one's conversational style encouraged to be charming and evasive.
Th
e art of evasion, indeed, was part of the charm.

It was all of a piece; all a kingdom of camouflage, one way or another.

When I was younger, I used to despair of this. When I was younger, I thought this wasn't fair. I thought my mother's policy—this policy of the indirect over the direct, the veiled pink lightbulb over the naked yellow one—wasn't the truth. I thought of it as all some kind of loopy pretense. For I still believed, then, that concepts like fairness and truth could be neatly identified and labeled in any given situation.

I don't believe that now. No, I have come not to believe in such swift certainty of judgment at all. I have come not only to admire my mother's emphasis on personal style, but even to aspire to something like it myself. I have come to see, as my mother did before me, the unexpected solace of surfaces—that they can bear a strong correlation to the state of one's mental health. As life went on, I often found that whenever I was in one of my periodic episodes of despair, I had only to reach into my closet for one of my mother's hand-me-downs to remind myself that I could sally forth to face the world after all.

Th
ere is a wonderful saying of Oscar Wilde's: “A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.”
Th
is is a comic distinction with which my mother would have been swift to concur. Her face—skin oiled with Crème de La Mer, eyes shadowed with gentle, impressionistic swirls of lavender and almond powder, brows daintily plucked and blackened—was an elaborate, Wildean, masterpiece.

WHEN, LATER ON
in my twenties, I moved to New York City, my mother mailed me packages from Boston, glutted with goodies. My roommate and I would exclaim at the largesse of it all: vintage Missoni dresses; beribboned Manolo slingbacks in fabrics ranging from python to tweed; a Ferragamo purse, Bordeaux leather with fat cognac-colored handles; a Fendi animal-print jacket, palest pink zebra rather than the more ubiquitous leopard. I wore all of these gifts, often.

And because they were hand-me-downs, whenever I wore them it was as though I were wearing my mother's skin. It is a tribute to just how much I respect my mother that this closeness to her—I can even smell on some of these pieces the haunting residue of her trademark Joy Perfume—filled me not with a prickly discomfort or exasperation but with optimism. I wish I could strut into a room with half of her glory, her panache.

Like all mothers and daughters, we sometimes have our disagreements about my appearance, which is like hers in many ways but unlike it in others. For a long time, she begged me to wear lipstick. “I just think that the more feminine you are,” she would say, “the more masculine it makes men feel, and then it all works out . . . for the better.” She would trail off and I would be left wondering just what “for the better” in her estimation meant. And for a long time I couldn't reconcile what seemed to me to be a vexing contradiction in this piece of advice, especially coming from my mother, a woman who was wont to tell me, “Remember, Charlotte, relationships are a question, not an answer,” and who was not, at any point in her life that I know of, dependent on or under the spell of a man.

And yet it was still essential, according to her code of etiquette, to court the male gaze with lipstick. In fact, several years ago, when Versace discontinued an exquisite shade of violet she'd taken to wearing, a rich and complex tinge with ghostly pink and blue notes surging underneath the slickness of the gloss, she took matters into her own hands and found a company that makes custom shades of lipsticks for a persnickety clientele. When I asked her why she had gone to such lengths, she admitted cheerfully and even, I thought, endearingly, to the simplest of all motivations: vanity.

I am not so vain, myself—I am not so vain at all. I appreciate Beauty but am not, as the expression goes, “high-maintenance.” I never have taken to wearing lipstick. I do not care for it, do not feel like myself in it, at all. And while my mother is the type of woman who prefers to saunter in high heels, I am the type who, most days, prefers to speed-walk in ballet flats. So like all daughters, I take some parts of my mother and am free to reject others. I take a love of cinch belts, black lace bodysuits, cocktail coats, and, yes, leopard print, but leave to her stilettos and dramatic maquillage.

“Blonder, blonder, blonder!” is my mother's rallying cry about my appearance. “I'll tell you what, Charlotte. You should get more highlights and have your eyebrows darkened. Have them darkened permanently. You have fabulous eyebrows!
Th
e shape of them. But not the color. Go get them darkened and then they'll be gorgeous!”

Blonder, blonder, blonder; darker, darker, darker!
Th
ese commands are typical of my mother, who adores contrast and tension, tumult and chaos, and who prefers high-gloss paint to matte, big, blowsy flowers to tight, tiny ones.

But recently I decided that it was time not to go blonder but to grow out my highlights after years of getting them done. Perhaps on some deeper, more rebellious level this was an attempt to differentiate myself from my mother, that Kim Novak look-alike who is so very much a blond. Or perhaps it was just that I wanted a change. Who knows? In any event, the way my natural hair color is growing out—in streaks of moody, deepening ash and gold—rather pleases me.
Th
e effect is not so flashy as the baby blond I had affected before, not so eager for attention, rather mysterious, ombre-like: to my mind, a soothing kind of camouflage, in fact.

But what of courting the male gaze, you ask? What of all that?
Th
at to me has never, necessarily, been the point of this, or not the main point. I see feminine artifice as a delightful thing for the sake of itself.
Th
at I have a mother who is in favor not only of camouflage, illusion, indirection, enchantment but also beauty, sensuality, flirtation, in a word, pleasure—this, too, I have come to look on as a gift. For what is the alternative? To settle to live in a grim, a dingy, a matte-paint world?

TH
E LAST TIME
I went home to Cambridge, my mother presented me with yet another hand-me-down—another gift: a pair of leopard-print Italian ankle boots, rakishly hooded with black velvet at the top.
Th
e label, dating to the 1980s, was a name I didn't recognize.
Th
e heels, thank God, were a less treacherous height than the Ferragamo spikes I had dared to totter around in on occasion when I was younger, and as soon as I put the boots on I knew that this coming winter would find me wearing them frequently in New York. As I packed them in my suitcase, I understood that this pair of boots, in my mother's “favorite neutral,” were just the thing to resolve this contradiction: that with them I might straddle, as my mother did, the line between hard and soft, tigress and enchantress. With them on my feet, I would never feel less than confident.

Only a couple of days after arriving back in New York, I happened to see in the sculpture garden at MoMA an older European woman—I presumed Italian—whose presence captured my imagination. Now that I am in my thirties, I find it is faces like this stranger's that are apt to do this; that I yearn to follow an older face behind a pair of sunglasses more than I do a younger, dewy one without them.
Th
is particular stranger had, in addition to sunglasses, slashing black eyebrows, a voluptuously bustled olive-green satin trench coat, and, the perfect touch, on her feet a pair of pointy leopard-print pumps.
Th
is woman, who was sultry and dark, couldn't help but remind me of my mother, who of course is still celestially blond. But the effect—the exuberant affirmation of femininity, and the promise of feminine experience—was the same. And something, I thought, to behold. I left the sculpture garden that day with a stirring sense of the winter season to come, and its inevitable events at which I would wear, perhaps with success, my mother's latest hand-me-down, my darling leopard ankle boots.