What My Mother Gave Me (12 page)

White Gloves and Party Manners

KAREN KARBO

Th
e book was an Easter present the year I turned eleven. It was propped on the white brick fireplace beside my white rattan Easter basket. A few neon yellow marshmallow Peeps perched atop the fat snarl of green plastic grass.
Th
ere was also a hollow chocolate Easter bunny in a tall box with a cellophane window inside the basket. I remember that bunny distinctly—he was slightly melted, his head caved in a bit, his blue and yellow candy eyes cast heavenward like an ecstatic saint—and the book,
White Gloves and Party Manners.

Th
is was not my usual Easter book. At only sixty-five pages long, it was the size of a children's picture book. Usually the Easter book was an important hardback with a jewel-colored spine and beautiful illustrations.
Th
e Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Alice in Wonderland. Tom Sawyer.
On the cover was a line drawing of a girl with a soft side-parted pageboy and with puff sleeves, smocking across the chest, and a bow in back, the kind of loathsome dress my mom routinely gave my cousin and me for Christmas each year. I would get the blue one because I was a strapping hulk, and my cousin would get the pink one, since she was blond and petite. When I try to solve the riddle of my lifelong antipathy toward this cousin, the blue dress/pink dress tradition is as good an answer as any.

I remember sitting crossed-legged on the living room floor flipping through the pages of
White Gloves and Party Manners
with growing dismay. Inside, there were more delicate line drawings, not unlike those found in another book called
Very Personally Yours,
passed out during fifth-grade assembly when the girls were marched off to the cafeteria to receive the appalling news about menstruation.

Th
e introduction explained that this was my first book about manners, and it would tell “what to do and what to say to make people like you.” It promised that someday, “when you are a beautiful young lady, all dressed up in a flowing gown and long white gloves, you will be glad you read this book, because then you will be completely at ease, and have a wonderful time.”

I closed the book and investigated the candy in my Easter basket. I would never be a beautiful young lady, all dressed up in a flowing gown and long white gloves, anywhere, ever. For one thing, I was already five feet eight. My mother had taken me to the pediatrician only a few months earlier to see if he had any advice about how she could safely stunt my growth. My shoulders were broad, my feet big, my hair, as my mother characterized it once to a hairdresser, like that of a Ubangi woman, and she had no idea where on earth that head of hair had come from.

My mother had been a stunning young woman, a real redhead with snowy skin, green eyes, and silky copper-penny-colored hair. She had been slim in all the places where I was wide. I realize I'm focusing exclusively on what she looked like, but during the time she was in my life, that was what we focused on. She believed a young lady's looks were money in the bank, something which her own experience had borne out.

She had grown up in the boardinghouse run by her mother, Maud Sharkey, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a dozen miles east of Ann Arbor. She was the youngest of three sisters, and the most beautiful. Julia and Lorraine were twenty-two and twenty years older than her, respectively.
Th
ey were short and round, with small pale blue eyes, large noses, tiny teeth, and tiny feet.
Th
ey reminded me of a pair of nesting birds and were so different from my mother, who was tall and angular by comparison.

Th
e Sharkey girls were working class, high school educated. Julia and Lorraine both married young. I don't know much about Julia's husbands—they kept dying and leaving her money—but Lorraine married a man named George who worked on the assembly line at Ford Motor Company, and they had a daughter, Mary. My mother did not marry young. She worked first as a secretary, then became the first female executive at Holley Carburetor Company; then, when she was twenty-five, she leveraged her beauty to snag my dad, who held a master's degree from Art Center School of Design (as it was then named) and worked in the design department at Ford. She had done what her sisters, and eventually her sisters' daughters, had failed to do: married up.

Th
ere's a lengthy section in
White Gloves and Party Man
ners
called “Meetings, Greetings and Good-byes,” that
teaches you what to say when you meet a congressman, a judge, an ambassador, a senator, and the vice president and president of the United States (and their wives).
Th
is is what she hoped for me, that, like her, I would grow from a gawky girl to a staggering beauty and climb the socioeconomic ladder a little higher.

She had her work cut out for her. I was tall and loud and spent a lot of my spare time whacking a tennis ball against the garage door. I was stubborn. I walked heavy and jiggled my legs when I ate. I liked to stand on my head in the living room. I asked for a unicycle one Christmas, and when my dad bought me one without consulting her, they had one of the only arguments I ever remember them having. In high school, I played every sport that would have me. I skateboarded and surfed. I had road rash on my knees, abrasions on my rib cage from the wax on my board, and muscular thighs that made my mother shake her head with genuine sorrow.

Even though it was the early '70s, the era of Helen Reddy's feminist anthem “I Am Woman,” I believed my mother: my future depended on being a girly girl, on making sure boys thought I was smart but not too smart, sweet but not funny, receptive to the point of passivity. I spent hours straightening my unruly hair and trailing my mother through Bullock's and May Company, the department stores of my youth, in search of flattering clothes. Even though I wasn't overweight, but was merely tall and strong, we were perpetually on the hunt for skirts that were slimming, for tops that would minimize my broad shoulders. “You can do anything you set your mind to!” she once said. “If you want to make yourself over, you can.”

My father had no such agenda. He was the only son of a self-made woman, Luna of California, as she called herself.
Th
ey'd come from Warsaw to Chicago when my father was a boy. Somewhere along the way his father abandoned the family, and his mother moved them to Hollywood, where she parlayed sewing, her only real skill, into a business designing Christian Dior – inspired gowns for the wives of professional men and movie moguls. He believed my future would be more secure if I knew how to pound a nail, build a table, draw a box in perfect perspective, shoot a gun, change the oil in the car.
Th
e weekend after I got my driver's license he took me to an intensive three-day high-speed driving course, so I could really learn what a car could do. Like buying the unicycle, he did all this without consulting my mother, who believed that with each new skill I acquired, I was rendering myself less and less appealing. Once, when I was washing the car, down on my hands and knees scrubbing the white sidewalls with an old Brillo pad my father set aside for just that purpose, she came out and slapped the back of my head. “Stand up,” she commanded, “This is men's work.”

MY MOTHER WAS
the only Sharkey sister in California, and so we spent that Easter, like every other Easter, with Lorraine's daughter, whom I called Aunt Mary, her husband, whom I called Uncle Dick, and their two children, Tim and Jeri. (To protect their privacy, let's call them the Mahoneys.) We spent every major holiday and all the minor ones with them, all the birthdays, anniversaries, and a lot of random Saturday nights. Over the Christmas holidays Lorraine and George, whom I called Gramma and Grandpa because Jeri and Tim called them Gramma and Grandpa, took the train from Detroit and stayed for six weeks, sometimes at our house, sometimes with the Mahoneys.

It was always the same: the adults would sit around in a circle smoking and balancing cocktails on their knees, silently negotiating some dark, complicated adult business I could sense but couldn't name.
Th
ey would drink for hours, then my mom or Aunt Mary would “serve,” as my mother called putting dinner on the table. My mother was a tremendous cook of the dishes of the time: beef Stroganoff, lasagna, spaghetti carbonara. Aunt Mary stuck with a hunk of meat, mashed potatoes, and an overcooked green vegetable. Often, when we ate at the Mahoneys', the drinking would go on too long and dinner would be late.
Th
en there would be an argument. Aunt Mary would lose her temper and start screaming, my mom would try to talk her off the ledge, my dad would disappear into another room with a book, and Uncle Dick would go out to the backyard and drink straight from the bottle.

Because I was an only child, and Jeri had only a brother, we were encouraged to treat each other like sisters, but I couldn't force myself to like her. Her greatest crime that I could name—and did, when my mother begged me to be nicer—was that she never wanted to
do
anything, never wanted to ride bikes or play bike tag or statue maker. She didn't want to shoot baskets or hit the tennis ball against the garage door. Her preferred activity was sitting in her room at her pink vanity brushing her hair. When she was finally pressed into, for example, joining a neighborhood softball game, she would insist on being allowed to stay at bat until she hit the ball. If I protested, she'd take the matter to the adults. She would cry and I would glower and, somehow, I would be the one who wound up on the receiving end of a lecture.

Later, my mom would explain to me that when it came to my cousin Jeri, I had to be the bigger person because I had so many more advantages than she did. My father made more money than hers did, and I had nicer clothes. We lived in a nicer house in a nicer suburb. I was a superior girl in all ways, and because I was, I had to give Jeri a break. In this way my mom affirmed her basic premise, that if you were female, weak, and ineffectual, the rules would be bent for you, and in that way you would wind up the winner.

IN SOMEONE ELSE'S
story, the girl would leave home for college and all hell would break loose.
Th
e girl would embrace her wild hair, like the Jane Fonda character did in
Coming Home
. She'd drink too much, smoke pot, sleep around, and realize that her mother was pretty much full of shit, an opinion to be reversed when she, herself, became a mother, and saw how difficult and truly endless the task was.

Instead, three months after I arrived at the University of Southern California, when I was seventeen, my mother was diagnosed with brain cancer. She underwent an eight-hour surgery, during which the surgeon was able to remove some of the tumor, along with enough healthy brain tissue to completely change my mother's personality. Where she had loved cooking and parties and chatting on the phone with her friends for hours, she became moody and paranoid, convinced that my father and Gramma (her sister Lorraine), who had come to California on the train from Detroit to take care of her, were trying to kill her.

I was away at school, which is where my parents wanted me.
Th
ey wanted me somewhere where they wouldn't have to worry about me, and also where I would be spared the horror of witnessing my mom's rapid decline.
Th
ree months after her surgery, I received a phone call on the house phone of the sorority house where I lived. It was my father, choking with tears. Lorraine took the phone from him and told me that my mother had slipped into a coma. While I was driving home from school, an ambulance took her to the hospital. I refused to go and see her in the ICU, an impertinence that earned me a slap across the face from Lorraine. I didn't see the point. If she was going to die, I didn't want this to be my final memory of her; if she somehow recovered, I would see her again when she wasn't in a coma. She died in the middle of the night, never having regained consciousness. I had turned eighteen the week before and had gone home for the occasion; it would be the last time I saw her. She was still on her feet. She'd spent the week before preparing my birthday dinner; it had taken her a day to set the table, moving slowly between the kitchen and the dining room, carrying one utensil at a time.
Th
e night of her funeral, I drove back to school and took an oceanography midterm. My father always liked to say that we Karbos were tough Polacks, and so we were. I got a B+ on the midterm. My father sold our house in Whittier three months after my mother's death and moved to a town house in Newport Beach; he packed up all my books, including
White Gloves and Party Manners,
and there it sat in a box, in the garage, for the next decade.

TH
E BEST-KEPT SECRET
about grief is there are some things from which you never fully recover. Grief is a chronic ailment, like seasonal allergies. Sometimes it's worse than others, some days (her birthday, her deathday, any holiday that requires the producing of a huge ham or prime rib) are worse than others, year in, year out. Grief is not something to be gotten through, like a boring dinner party or an algebra class. We claim to move through it in order to endure it. My mother's death when she was forty-seven and I was eighteen maimed me, has given my life a distinct limp. It was 1975. No one thought I might benefit from grief counseling, or any counseling, for that matter. We Karbos were tough Polacks. My father said so, and since he was the only one I had left, I had no choice but to believe him.

After my mother died, the Mahoneys, even Lorraine and Julia, vanished from our lives. Our connection loosened so easily, it was hard to believe it had ever existed. No more long, ominous evenings, the adults with their cigarettes and their drinks perched upon their knees, Jeri and I inmates sharing a cell in the prison of their entanglement, gone gone gone, never to return.
Th
e last Christmas with my mother was the last Christmas with them.