What My Mother Gave Me (7 page)

It's “flip and flirty” as my mother prescribed. It's crisp yet splendid. It makes me feel I've put on made-to-order armor.

My mother's armor.

Armor that helped shield me from exclusion.

Armor that shielded me from inferiority.

Th
ree-Hour Tour

EMMA STRAUB

When I was in graduate school, I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, on a narrow spit of land between two lakes.
Th
e actual word for this land formation is an
isthmus,
but no one who is not a crossword puzzle champion or a resident of said city knows what that means. I lived closer to the smaller lake, Monona, which is famous for being where Otis Redding crashed his airplane and died.
Th
e larger lake, Mendota, was where all the college kids did their boat-sailing and suntanning. I paid neither lake much attention, other than taking walks nearby and sometimes stopping to watch the water move in the sun (summertime) or watch the ice stand still (wintertime).

In the warmer months, when the lakes weren't frozen, a small charter company called Betty Lou Cruises took groups of people out on the water for what can only very generously be described as “tours.” I sometimes saw these groups standing together in the parking lot beside one of the docks when I went to brunch, and my first thought was always,
Oh, how sad and strange
. One could walk around the entire lake in a few hours, forty-five minutes on a bicycle.
Th
e path went by sweet-looking houses and parks in Madison, and through a suburb on the far side of the lake.
Th
e whole enterprise struck me as a thing that people did when they had already exhausted everything pleasurable, or when family visits went on too long and one simply
had
to get out of the house.

My mother, a Wisconsinite by birth and a New Yorker by choice, felt differently. A friend, a local travel agent, had told her about the cruises, and my mother thought they sounded charming. She sent me a gift certificate for my birthday, passes for two, on the lake of our choice.
Th
is did not surprise me. My mother's mother had a closet full of Ferragamo shoes, endless strings of pearls, and she never washed her own hair, and so perhaps it makes sense that her daughter went in the opposite direction for herself and for me. My mother long ago stopped buying me clothing, or jewelry, or anything remotely girly. Instead, we look at art together, or she springs for “experiential” presents, which she claims last longer in the memory. In theory, I agree, and think such presents are wonderful. In practice, I had zero desire to spend three hours on a lake the size of the Central Park reservoir.

Th
e gift certificate sat on my desk for months while I was in graduate school, too busy writing stories and reading books to care much about the outside world. I moved to a different apartment, and the gift certificate moved with me. My mother and I speak on the telephone nearly every day, and every so often, she would ask whether I had gone on the cruise yet. Eventually, it made me feel so guilty that I looked for the damn thing, determined to use it before I left Wisconsin, which was suddenly nigh on the horizon. And it was gone.

I panicked. Surely the folks at Betty Lou kept careful records? I called.
Th
ey didn't. My choices were as follows: I could either call my mother and tell her that I'd gone on the cruise, lying through my teeth, or I could do the grown-up thing. I am a horrendous liar, and so the choice was clear. I bought tickets for myself and my husband—forty dollars each—and on a rainy morning in October, we lined up on the dock and waited to board.
BETTY LOU CRUISES
was written in script on the side of the double-decker boat, the upper level hemmed in by a waterproof blue tarp. From close-up, I could tell how small the boat really was, not to mention the lake it was sitting in.

Th
e boat smelled like gasoline, as boats often do. We filed on, though I was fairly sure that the boat was about to explode. I figured that if something
did
happen, I would only have to swim about ten feet back to the shore, where I could climb back up and go to brunch on land, as I would have preferred. My husband shot me a withering look, already deeply miserable himself.

Captain Steve greeted us in a yellow rain slicker and a monogrammed baseball hat that read
CAPTAIN STEVE.
We quickly took seats near a window, as the rain was coming down just enough so that being outside would have necessitated one of Steve's slickers. Other, braver folks—women in belted leather jackets and plastic rain bonnets—took in the view from the outer deck. As we departed, I heard the faintest strains of Otis Redding's “(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay” coming through the loudspeakers. No one remarked upon this, but it struck me as both ominous and vaguely threatening, as in,
Th
is lake only looks safe.
I began to worry that three hours might be too much time. Captain Steve steered us to the right, taking the lake in a clockwise motion. He announced over the microphone, “Here's your first view of Monona Terrace,” the Frank Lloyd Wright – designed conference center close to the dock.
Th
e first of many views, we all understood, because Monona Terrace was the only architectural milestone on the lake.

But the bar was open, and the warming trays were warmed, and we all helped ourselves to small plastic glasses of champagne and orange juice, or Bloody Marys, and to heaping plates of French toast covered with candied pecans.
Th
ere were inch-thick slabs of pink prime rib, for those eager to move on to lunch, and hash browns smothered with cheese. Everyone piled their plates high, and went back for seconds. Most people clustered around the bar, and the one Asian family on board stuck close to Captain Steve, who pointed out things to them that the rest of us didn't see. A legless man in a wheelchair faced a window. Someone had brought a baby, who was crying, but we were by far the youngest patrons who had come of their own volition. My husband tugged his hooded sweatshirt around his face to block out the noise and the cold, misty wind off the water and, I thought, in an attempt to enter a one-person witness protection program.

We circled the lake once, and I got as excited as a puppy at the sight of the dock, but no, of course not yet. We circled the entire lake again then, then a third time. By the time we hit a rock, temporarily halting our voyage, I began to wonder if we would ever disembark, or if I had willingly signed us up for the maritime version of
No Exit,
where we would be with the rain-bonneted ladies and Captain Steve for the rest of our lives. Relaxing into the pain, my husband and I took photos of each other, and the rainy deck of the boat, and our food.
Th
e lake itself looked gray and uninviting, but I thought I could still swim back to shore if necessary.
Th
e water would be cold, but I would get home faster.

After our misbegotten shipwreck, Captain Steve revved the engine enough to knock the rock loose, and we were again on our way. By the time the boat had again reached the dock, my husband and I were feeling solid on our sea legs, and rushed toward the plank that would bring us back to land. As soon as we rounded the corner onto the leafy residential street that would bring us home, I called my mother to tell her that we had finally taken the cruise, and then described it to her, second by second, while she laughed, her hooting and snorting keeping me warm as we walked the four blocks home.

I don't remember many of the gifts that my mother has given me—though a knockoff watchband from Chinatown and bags of Margarita Mix from her pantry do come to mind. But when I think of her, I don't think of objects. I think of walking somewhere with her, arm in arm, our laughs always the loudest in any room, or her clapping along with whatever music is playing, always having more fun than anyone else. If my mother had come on the boat with us, she would have hummed along with Otis Redding and introduced herself to Captain Steve. She would have been driving the boat, rain bonnet or no, happy as could be. My own happiness during every terrible minute of the Betty Lou Cruise came from knowing that when it ended, I would get to tell her all about it.

Th
e Circle Line

MARY GORDON

She throws an envelope onto the kitchen table, vaguely in my direction. She has written my name on it, and underlined it twice. I know what's in it: it's my birthday and inside the envelope there will be, as always, a check. I am only ten years old, and I do not exactly know what to do with money, and I wish my mother had bought me a present, like other people's mothers. But the only time I expressed that wish she answered, sharply, harshly, “Who the hell could figure out what you want?” So I'm not getting a present like other kids, and it is—somehow—my fault.

Th
is is the scene that came into my mind when I was asked about a favorite gift from my mother. My first response was, “My mother never gave me any gifts.”
Th
ese words were followed by a generous helping of self-pity: that sickish sweet, oily syrup that somehow encourages the tongue and the palate to demand more and more. I try to stay away from its allure, and so, when I feel it coming on (particularly when its source is my mother), I seek alternatives. I begin by going the route of Marx or Freud: my mother was working class, the child of immigrants, her young womanhood lived out against the backdrop of the Depression. Or: her childhood was difficult; she was the oldest of nine children of a harsh mother; she was stricken with polio at the age of three, an affliction which made it impossible that she would love her body. She was a single working mother, a widow, living with her grief-stricken child, her demanding mother, her jealous sister: she of the gimlet eye and viper tongue. And so, finally, I push both Marx and Freud into the background and settle on a simpler explanation: She was worn out. She was tired.

One of my mother's most treasured ways of identifying herself was to let everyone know that she wasn't like other women. She spoke of everything connected to the traditionally feminine with a lacerating contempt.
Th
e decoration of houses, the preparation of food (even the discussion of food), hair, makeup, clothing—all these were the property of a category she referred to as “lightweights.” I have come to understand that this was a complicated defense against what life didn't give her, what she couldn't have. Her polio meant that her body would never be acceptable by conventional standards. It was probably easier for her not to look at it too closely; buying clothes would have required this kind of self-scrutiny, a scrutiny that was, for her, a very bad bet indeed. Better to say she was above all that, beyond all that. To relegate that to the “lightweights.” As she relegated cooking and interior decoration because she never had the kind of marriage (my father earned no money; his contribution to our financial life was to get us into debt) that would allow the kind of leisure that attention to cooking and decoration might require. So she relegated the domestic realm to lightweights as well.

What was the opposite of a lightweight? It wasn't a heavyweight. It did not mean a person who was earnest or even serious.
Th
ese people were rejected out of hand as “sad sacks” or “pains in the ass.” Humor was the coin of the realm. Its prod
ucts were her treasured capital. 
Jokes were important, jokes
were essential; a satiric commentary on the follies of one's fellow humans was a pearl of great price. Some things, though, were of critical importance. Anything having to do with the success and superiority of the Roman Catholic Church was always welcome. Anything pointing out the inferiority of the Republican Party was just fine. But jokes, religion, and politics—where could you buy them? How could you wrap them? What color would be preferable? Did you want them large or small? All the things my mother prized, being incorporeal, did not make themselves available as gifts.

You may wonder why my mother didn't buy me books.
Th
e answer was simple: she didn't trust her taste. My father was the reader and writer in the family, and she realized when I was very young (my father taught me to read at three) that books were his province, his and mine. We were the superior inhabitants of a superior realm, a territory she wouldn't have dreamed of trespassing upon. When he died, when I was seven, she left the selection of my reading material to two of her closest friends, both of whom had been to college. She had only finished high school, and though she knew herself to be intelligent, she was fastidious at granting intellectual pride of place to those with what she considered superior credentials.

And so, I have come to understand why she never got me presents, and this failure was the objective correlative of her inability to give me any useful guidance on a good way of being a woman.
Th
is, too, has been a cause for generous lashings of self-pity when I drink the hemlock of deprivation and regret for what I have not had, or what I had to earn or win myself, through luck or labor.

I THOUGHT NO
more about the question of my mother and her gifts, or lack of them. And one day—it was a sparkling late afternoon in the middle of May—I was in a cab driving down the West Side Highway.
Th
e sun glimmered on the river; coin-sized patches of light danced along the Hudson's silver skin. My eye fell on a rather unprepossessing boat; I heard its cheerful, workmanlike tooting. I saw the sign spelled out in white along its sides.
CIRCLE LINE
, it said.

Immediately, I am back more than fifty years. It is a spring day, but an earlier one: the beginning of April. Easter vacation. My mother has taken a day off. “We're going on a little adventure,” she tells me. She has booked tickets for Circle Line: the boat that takes people around Manhattan Island.

I remember, driving next to her in our two-toned blue Nash Rambler, a high sense of rightness, but a rightness whose exaltation nevertheless felt entirely secure and safe. My mother was driving me on “an adventure.” She had taken a day off. We were going to the city. Not only to the city: we were going on a boat. No one we knew had ever done this. It was something people talked about doing, but never did. And we were doing it!

I don't remember how long the voyage took. I remember sitting next to her and eating ham sandwiches we'd brought from home. I remember bringing her a coffee from the bar inside the boat; I selected, for myself, a lemonade.
Th
e air smelled wonderfully of salt and the larger world. “
Th
ere's the Statue of Liberty,” my mother said. We picked out the Empire State Building. Neither of which we'd ever actually visited, or, being New Yorkers, were likely to do. I was so proud of her, and of myself as her daughter. She had taken a day off! She had had this wonderful idea! She had made everything possible. Everything that no one else could have done.

It occurred to me that day, fifty years later on the West Side Highway, that this was a very great gift indeed. Better than a Ginny doll or an angora sweater or a poodle skirt or a heart-shaped locket or a gold bracelet or my first pair of high heels. She was giving me the gift of the larger world. And the belief that it was something that could be reached. If you just thought of it, and figured out how to make it happen.
Th
is was the reward for not being like other women.
Th
is was our reward for not being like other mothers and daughters. An adventure on the water.
Th
e sight of the glittering city.
Th
e possibility of the greater world.