What My Mother Gave Me (14 page)

“I just wasn't capable,” she remarked to me once, “of a small life in a minor key.”

Someday, I hope to be able to say the same.

Right at My Fingertips

RITA DOVE

Th
e gifts my mother had given me — over four decades worth — were lost in a house fire on Labor Day 1998. It was the first rainstorm after a parched summer, the first lightning bolt . . . and suddenly the sentimental treasures of my youth, from ribbons and popsicle-stick constructions to old letters and an heirloom brooch, went up, quite literally, in smoke.

I remember standing at the foot of our driveway around midnight watching as the flames leapt, settled back, then flared up again in another spot, leapfrogging from one air pocket to the next. I pictured the progress of the fire inside the house while mentally bidding good-bye to our accumulated lives: our daughter's baby clothes in the attic, the first editions on the hallway bookshelves, tourist T-shirts and prescription pills, my favorite purple bra. As the rooms burst into giant Molotovs, I whispered: “I guess I can live without that.”

Remarkable what we can live without.
Th
e house was rebuilt and refurnished, new stuff accumulated to fill the shelves and end tables. Gone forever, though, were the little things that sparked memories so keenly — my mother's letters when I was in college, my first pearl necklace, the recipe card I lifted from her flour-dusted index box. (I'd copied the instructions onto a fresh card to replace the one I'd stolen; I wanted to see the recipe in her handwriting whenever I baked the Yeasty Cookies that carried me through my junior year.)

And yet there is one gift from my mother that survived, a display that lies right at hand; every day I look down at them and smile. My fingertips, I mean: ten brilliantly patterned nails, each sporting two colors on the diagonal — gold tips with bottom diagonals of purple, green, turquoise, fuchsia, and coral. Long before “Flo-Jo,” the Olympian sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner, I was painting my nails in stripes and polka dots, heraldic fields and fantastical coats of arms — in fact, more than forty years have passed since the spring day when that long-awaited Avon shipment arrived. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I grew up in a fairly religious community with strict (though mostly unspoken) rules: no talking back to adults, no chewing gum, no makeup before the age of fifteen.
Th
is did not mean, however, that we loped about dressed like little girls on the prairie; earrings were encouraged, chic ensembles and snappy shoes de rigueur, especially on Sunday mornings.
Th
is schizophrenia reigned in my own family as well: I wore gloves and anklets to church until I turned twelve, when the anklets were jettisoned; from the time I was ten, I could predict my father's birthday presents—a nice piece of jewelry (dangling peridot earrings, an onyx ring) and a briefcase. My grandmother had been a practicing Catholic until her move up North unmasked the latent prejudices of that reputed promised land; barred from Akron's Catholic community, she joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where women took the phrase “putting on your Sunday best” to heart. She became a milliner, famed for her elaborate Sunday-go-to-meeting hats.

Fashion was in the genes. Before marrying my father, my mother had worked as a seamstress in a dress shop; she sewed all her own clothes and made sure her daughters greeted sunrise service every Easter in brand-new exquisitely tailored dress-and-coat ensembles fresh from her needle. She wore rouge and lipstick while working around the house and took out her pin curls each morning before coming downstairs to make breakfast. We pored over Butterick patterns together, and I would squeeze onto the couch beside her whenever the Avon lady came calling, with her valise of little flasks and silvery tubes.

One Saturday afternoon found me flipping through the Avon catalog's offerings, dreaming of the day when I would be allowed to sweep dazzling minerals over my eyelids like Cleopatra and enflame my lips like my namesake, Rita Hayworth. Unfortunately, that spring the fashion moguls had called for pastels, and Avon was toeing the line. Even their nail polish adhered to the prescribed color palette, boasting the usual array of frosted pinks. I was disappointed, sad even, until I saw the promotion:
FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY
, two quirky new hues, Robin's Egg Blue and Sea Foam Green.

I leapt up to show Mom. Absolutely not, she said. I cajoled, I reasoned, I begged. I was almost fifteen, I wasn't asking for eyeliner, I didn't plan on flaunting red claws like some
Jezebe
l
! What harm could painting my fingernails do? It might even stop me from biting my cuticles. And the green— that sea foam green would match my Easter outfit
perfectly
. After all, it was nothing more than . . . than . . . finger jewelry!

TO THIS DAY,
I think my mother gave in because she figured the polishes were too wacky to stand the test of time. Pastel polish against brown skin was bound to look peculiar; after the first few applications, I would surely lose my nerve. And I almost did. When the order finally came in and I unwrapped the coveted parcel — two sleek bottles, my very own indulgence! — I swallowed hard. As far as blues and greens went, these seemed awfully pale . . . more Baby Nursery than Femme Fatale. But I knew my manners: I thanked the Avon representative, hugged my mother, then scurried off to my room to explore my options in private.

Th
e first experiments were disastrous: arrayed in Robin's Egg Blue, my right hand looked vaguely frostbitten, while my left hand looked like a tray of after-dinner mints spilled across a mahogany table. But what if I stopped thinking of my nails as natural extensions of my fingers? What if I treated them like ornaments, as boldly artificial as baubles? Since Easter was on its way, why not decorate them like Easter eggs? I tried alternating tints, then used both colors to bisect each nail, adding tiny polka dots in the contrasting shade . . . ah! It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

A woman of her word, my mother did not revoke my nail-painting privileges after the Easter eggs had had their day. My request for a contrasting color in order to create borders was granted: a bright pink.
Th
en, in the wake of the Summer of Love, came the psychedelic shades — fuchsia, chartreuse, cobalt, lemon yellow, black. I filled a notepad with designs, each one more elaborate than the last: red and white stripes, orange zigzags, four-color checkerboards. I took care to coordinate my nails with my school clothes each week, while holidays brought out the specialty logos—pumpkins and black cats, green wreaths and snowmen, fireworks against inky skies.

My cuticles grew back, but the decorated nails stayed. “You're so creative, a true artist!” the ladies at church would gush, and my mother beamed. Gradually, inexorably, my fingernails became both trademark and smoke screen, the badge I held up to an increasingly inquisitive world—a gambit my mother, with her rouge and tailored clothes, understood all too well. When I was a college freshman and found myself swamped with assignments, I tried going without my multicolored polish for a brief time, even no polish at all; but the sight of my blanched fingertips was so depressing that I soon returned to my weekly lacquer ritual, patching the tips when time was short.

NOWADAYS, MY BUSY
schedule demands a speedy beauty regimen. I'll often scale back the design to a diagonal divide with a different color on each bottom half and gold on all the tips, a pattern guaranteed to match nearly any outfit, simple enough that I can do my nails on the run — in a car or on a bus, aboard a train as well as a plane — yet still capable of provoking delight: not everyone has a rainbow at their fingertips.

So my mother's gift — one she hadn't intended to give — is a mutable one. Yet it is also very tangible; for every time I sit down to decorate my nails in the bold designs that have become my trademark, I think of my mother — who watched as I crossed the threshold into womanhood and allowed me to do it my own way.

Midnight Typing

LUANNE RICE

My favorite gift from my mother is a small pen-and-ink drawing she made on a folded-up piece of typing paper. It depicts Gelsey, her ragamuffin Scottie, along with the words, in shaky handwriting, “Beware of wee ferocious beastie.” She'd taped it to the kitchen door of her cottage on the rocks above Long Island Sound, where she was dying of a brain tumor.

Th
e sign was quintessential Lucille Arrigan Rice. It managed to be endearing, self-protective, and manipulative all at once. Translated, it said, “Don't bother me, but if you do, don't let the dog out, and please think I'm loveable.” She hoped being thought loveable would make up for being thought grotesque. She had had surgery to debride infected parts of her skull after removal of the tumor, and her head had collapsed like a rotten pumpkin.

People showed up at her house every day, especially the visiting nurse, neighbors bearing meals, and the South Lyme ambulance crew, summoned by the push of the Lifeline medical alert button she wore around her neck, if she could get to it in time, before losing consciousness from yet another seizure.

She spent most of her time writing, and too many intrusions kept her from focusing on her novel. As a college student she'd had short stories published in the
Saturday Evening Post
and a play produced in Boston. After graduation, she married my father, a devilishly handsome and tortured Irish Catholic rake, just home from World War II. She must have hoped her early promise as a writer would grow, but then she had three daughters. We spent our lives on pins and needles, wondering if my father would come home each night. Early on I learned to smell his breath for alcohol, and to feel gripped by jealousy for the women he preferred to my mother, my sisters, and me.

My mother had a cheating husband, three little girls, and the burning desire not only to write, but to
be
a writer and have a writing life. We didn't have much money and although I remember worrying, at the age of nine, whether we'd have enough to pay the bills that month, my mother always managed to keep subscriptions to the
New Yorker
and the
Atlantic Monthly.

Every night, after my sisters and I were in bed, she would sit at the dining table and write.
Th
e sound of her typing would drift upstairs, soft and steady, a lullaby that let me know she was there in a way I never felt when we were face-to-face.
Th
e clack of those keys and the bell of the carriage return were code to me. As I lay still, listening, I felt my mother sharing what really mattered to her.

During the day she cleaned the house with Mim, her mother, who lived with us. I'd stay home from school a lot, sometimes half the days of the academic year, not because I was sick, but because I felt the need to stand guard and make sure Nothing Bad Happened—that my father wouldn't die in a drunken crash, or be stolen by someone else's wife, and that my parents wouldn't get divorced.

Spending those missed school days upstairs in the room I shared with both my sisters, I'd hear my mother and Mim talking in hushed tones, my mother emotional and Mim tsk-tsking my father.
Th
e smell of floor wax, white vinegar, and Pine-Sol would waft through the air.

Along the way my mother went to night school, got a master's degree in education, and began teaching English at a junior high because we needed the money and health insurance. Her studies and new teaching job distracted her from both writing and motherhood, in just about equal proportions.

My mother didn't talk much to my sisters and me. We called her “the mother figure,” intending no irony. During our childhoods, Mim was hands-on maternal, rocking us when we cried, giving us baths in cornstarch when we had the chicken pox, telling us to stop sucking our thumbs unless we wanted buckteeth. As adults we compared notes and realized not one of us remembered our mother ever hugging us.

Mim was the keeper of my mother's flame, knowing she had been cut out for a life more creative and celebrated than the one she had. My mother was burdened by daughters, a wayward husband, and internal conflict. I see her as living in limbo with motherly responsibilities she couldn't quite meet, and writing dreams she could neither fulfill nor allow to die.

Everything changed when we grew up. Our father died, and all three of us left home. Suddenly we were on our own and so was my mother. My sisters and I married within one year of each other, and my mother loved having sons-in-law. She wanted us home every weekend. My then-husband and I would take the train from New York, laden with bags from Balducci's, and we'd cook elaborate dinners, drink wine and Armagnac, talk about books and writing.

For her sixtieth birthday—August 4, 1984—my sisters and I gave her a Scottish terrier puppy. She had just retired from teaching, to devote herself to writing. Mim and Gelsey were her companions in that little house by the Sound. She gardened and wrote, and cooked and wrote, and welcomed us every weekend. As she began to find happiness in her own life, she finally became a good mother.

Six months later, she got a brain tumor. Unable to care for her mother, who had developed Alzheimer's, she asked for my help in getting Mim into a nursing home. I had just moved to Paris and flew my mother and Gelsey over—my mother's first ever plane ride—to look after them and drive her for chemo at the American Hospital in Neuilly. We'd have to cut through lines of paparazzi because Rock Hudson was there, dying of AIDS, Elizabeth Taylor at his bedside, and my mother was starstruck.

She never wore a wig. We went shopping on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and Avenue Georges V for scarves from Hermes and Givenchy, and she'd wrap them around her head, then cover them with a blue velvet riding helmet to protect the hole in her caving-in skull, and she'd walk through that crowd of photographers and fans with beautiful dignity.

When she was well enough, we went to London, to see landmarks my father had talked about from his leaves as navigator bombardier in the Eighth Air Force, including a church where he'd been at Mass when it was hit by a buzz bomb, but mostly to make a literary pilgrimage to the houses of Charles Dickens and Dr. Johnson, and to Stratford-upon-Avon.

By then my first novel was out, and I was working on my second. Writing always came first for me; no midnight typing because I'd spent the day cleaning. I had dropped out of college to do it, and even as a young married woman I was a natural recluse. I wouldn't answer the phone or the door.

My mother would read on the sofa in the apartment on Rue Chambiges, try to talk to me, but I wouldn't even hear her because I was living another life, as the main character in
Crazy in Love
. She observed my writing behavior, but I had no idea it would affect her the way it did.

She loved those days in Paris and London, and she took the memories and sense of herself as a world traveler back to Connecticut, where she resumed work on her novel in a new way. She made the sign, hung it on the door. She started telling the world to go away—I think maybe because she'd seen me do it, and I'd had a novel published, and that's what she wanted for herself.

She had shown me two sides of a writing life—desire and frustration. In return I gave her the example of obsession and almost maniacal discipline. By the time she died, she'd finished the draft of a novel, “Newport Blues,” and submitted it to my agent, who made encouraging comments. My mother glowed at the prospect of revising.

She never actually did the revisions.
Th
ere wasn't time, but also, I think she'd felt such an accomplishment by finishing her first draft, she could die in peace, as a writer.

I framed her drawing of the wee ferocious beastie. It hangs on the kitchen wall, right by the door where she once taped it as a warning to all visitors, in that same beach cottage where she lived and wrote and grew into being a mother, and where our family still gathers.
Th
e drawing reminds me of every single thing about her.