Horsekeeping (13 page)

I struggle to remember happy times with my mother, times that I didn't annoy her. “Your mother loved you, but she took a hard line,” my father said.

A therapist might say I have blocked good memories of my mother to blunt the loss. But I also learned how hard it is to be a parent, especially one with a short fuse, a trait I inherited from both sides. And, my mother was young herself—a parent at barely twenty and snuffed out by twenty-eight. When I reached that milestone age, it hit me, with the force of a punch, just how young it is both to be responsible as a parent and to die. From the perspective of nine, anything in the twenties seems geriatric, light years away. From the vantage point of forty-six, it is more shocking with each passing year. I have outlived my mother by nearly twenty years, and I still feel like a kid most of the time.

But I grasp the good memories when I reach, like her feeding me the chicken skin right from the soup pot as it boiled off the carcass. She would stand in her mini skirt, stockinged and heeled, with her “fall” hairpiece in a flip, towering over the stove, wooden spoon stirring. Craving fat, I also liked to eat butter, by itself, several sticks at a time if I could get it. In comparison the chicken skin seemed more legitimate as a stand-alone food, and I bounced, waiting as my mother stirred and caught the loosening skin. Bumpy, yellowy white and slimy, we called the pieces goose pimples. As she forked up each piece to cool, I'd turn up my head, just level to her hip and the blue/green flame under the pot,
and open my mouth like a baby bird. She'd slip the wormlike nourishment in and go back into the pot, fishing for more.

M & M's were another delicacy. Mom adored them. She would eat them in bed, and though I longed for some, that she didn't always share made those brown flattened spheres all the more precious. I'd eyeball her holding them loosely in an airtight fist, snug and long enough to melt them on the inside. Then she'd eat each one slowly and deliberately, her tongue pressing the still hard candy shell against the backs of her teeth for the burst of warm, velvety chocolate: a delicate click, click: a sweet caviar. I didn't begrudge her selfishness: rather, I took the message that parents sometimes take to counteract all the giving, and that you are responsible for your own happiness.

Christmas rituals were important, and we followed the many she created to the letter. The real evergreen wore silver icicles—never garland. Spacing the decorations precisely, she draped the tinsel close inside by the trunk before my dad and I were permitted to dress the easier branch tips. More than two or three strands at a time threatened an unforgivable clump and a redo. My allotment always tangled, no matter how carefully she laid it, even and glittering, across my eager palm. With a steamy grip that wrinkled the strands, I endeavored to get it right. I marveled at her poise then, and even now, when I trim our family tree, I tame my inclination to rush.

A romantic, she also kept a special dress for me, used only Christmas morning: long and flowery from the waist down with a green velvet bodice and Victorian buttons that trailed down the back with short, puffy elasticized sleeves that matched the skirt. My femininity, still reverberating around my aging dermis, was born from this magical gown. I knew not to attack the presents until properly attired. I wore that dress through three or four Christmases, but at eight, the buttons refused to meet and the elastic cut into my strengthening upper arms. I willed myself smaller, desperately trying to shrink my burgeoning self. I feared I might outgrow my mother's affection.

Photos help me remember. My glamorous mother stretched nearly six feet tall and rail thin. Her hair ran the gamut—I saw her as a blonde, dirty blonde, redhead and brunette styled from a long straight flip to a short wavy bob. Mostly I remember soft auburn curls, layered to her chin. She spent long minutes inclined towards the bathroom mirror, myopically close enough to expertly apply eyeliner, mascara, foundation and rouge before popping her contacts in. I would squeeze myself between the sink and the wall, resting my chin on the cool mauve-pink porcelain, all eyes. Her creamy even teeth balanced a straight, strong Italian nose. My grandmother “Nana” passed on her excellent bone structure: Mom's face angled beautifully atop her statuesque frame. Athletic, she moved smoothly. My father maintains she played competitive basketball two weeks before giving birth to me, her only child.

Eventually topping out at five feet five, I slumped short and dumpy next to her and Nana. Mom tried to help me out through smocked dresses, elaborate buns twirling up my hair, and a flowery pin, but I persisted a pigeon-toed wreck and never did develop a sense of style. I slept in a metal brace supporting two old shoes with the toes cut out in a doctor's attempt to duck-foot me: a hideous contraption that tortured my body and mind. My beauty rehabilitation felt so hopeless that I fought it all, and my misery registered a sourpuss in every photo documenting the gussied up me. Shrinking in inadequacy in the shadow of these two swans, I clashed with Mom about clothes, about chores, about Dad, about everything.

My mother taught English to gifted junior high students, having gone back to complete her degree after my birth. I distinctly remember, at age four or five, attending her graduation from Kean College in New Jersey. Family and friends were extraordinarily proud since my dad truncated his college career. But her education gave her, what were then controversial, ideals. A passionate advocate of the Civil Rights movement, she regularly debated my father about black Americans' rights to get ahead in society, too often for household peace.

My parents spent most of their marriage in a house in Linden, New Jersey, that belonged to my father's mother Mary. About the time I was eight, my grandmother, prompted by her insecurity about money and her dying husband, wanted to move back in, essentially evicting us from a home that she had originally agreed to give to my father and aunt. My father begged her to reconsider because my mother was also gravely ill, having recently suffered a partial cerebral hemorrhage. Inoperable at the time, the doctors gave her six months to live, a diagnosis she was never told. But my grandmother stuck to her plan, and my father never fully forgave her. Making the most of a bad situation, my strong, six-feet four, soft-hearted Dad told my ailing mother to find a house she liked.

She fell for one on Parkway Drive in the nearby town of Clark. More upscale than Linden and with better schools for me, Clark's proximity to her school kept teaching an option once she, theoretically, recovered. Dad recognized the house as a nothing-but-work wreck, but my mother's enthusiasm for its rural aspirations on a winding road bordering a “forest” (a patch of woods and a stream) inspired him. He wanted my mother's last months to be joyful. We think they were. Later, he and I found some peace in her having kept a house of her own before she died.

So my father bartered his treasured boat for barn-red aluminum siding, and the house perked up. My ailing mother delicately hung wallpaper, organized cabinets and replanted the large yard that stretched out a new canvas for floral visions. A wooden privacy fence added to our feeling of insular, country living by blocking out the reality of suburban sprawl that engulfed eastern and central New Jersey. My father helped my mother shower and dress so she would not have to bend over and flow blood into her “healing” brain. He fretted and made excuses when she insisted on driving me someplace. I was told to help my mother recover by being good.

I was to have my own little oasis in our new house, too: the entire top floor as my bedroom. A roomy finished attic imitated a big girl apartment to my mind, though I baked in the summer up there under the
roof. Draping cold washcloths over myself I'd toss and turn on those humid New Jersey summer nights until Dad finally slipped a noisy air-conditioner into the window. As a compensatory act after Mom died, he encouraged my friends and me to magic marker the white slanted walls and ceiling. My artistic father (his brother John was a commercial artist), drew life-size cartoon characters interspersed with my less accomplished scribbling. Roadrunner, a kindly looking vulture, Hagar the Horrible and Bugs Bunny chomping a carrot were among the roguish character angels that watched over me as I slept. My friends made their marks, and during my teen years we posted many hearts with boyfriends' names, and “Roxanne loves . . .” with a succession of romancers (real and imagined) crossed out. Of course my friends thought our graffiti exceptionally cool, but so did the people who bought our house five years later, because they didn't paint over it.

Our dining room was a sunny, glassed-in porch overlooking an in-ground steel pool and a backyard shaded with mature trees that required endless autumn raking sessions. Big watery blisters that I couldn't resist breaking lodged between my thumbs and index fingers but yielded hours of leaf pile somersaults. The grassy yard approached a perfect square, and my best friend Bette Jo, my cousin Mari Ann, my next door neighbor Joanne and I spent whole days spinning cartwheels, round-offs and walkovers as we daydreamed ourselves the next Cathy Rigby or Olga Korbut. My mother never swam in our much-anticipated, refurbished pool. We moved in November, and by June, just days away from our inaugural swim, she was gone.

Dad had many good friends from our large Catholic Czech/Polish community who helped him get by after my mother died. Becky, a broad, white-haired, always dark-suited, functional alcoholic knew Dad through my grandfather's gents' bar. When Dad took over Summer Street Tavern in Elizabeth, Becky, in his need, still came around. My father would be readying to open, around ten or eleven in the morning, and Becky would bring the best quality steaks from Barna the butcher
that they would fry up for breakfast. Saturdays I'd twirl on the bar stool next to Becky and listen to the men talk. It wasn't particularly memorable conversation to a nine-year-old girl, but the smoke-deepened, world-weary hum and intermittent laughter soothed. A life-long bachelor, Becky resembled a tipsy Santa Claus—pudgy of body and jowly of face, with venous red cheeks flanking a corpuscular nose, rheumy hound dog eyes and a heart of gold. He'd often palm money into my hand and tell me to go get some candy. At my mother's funeral, crying profusely, he pressed $10,000 cash into Dad's bear-paw hand.

“Becky, what are you doin'?” Dad asked.

“Take it, take it,” Becky insisted.

“Becky,” he said through tears, “I don't need it.”

“Just take it.”

My father refused that money ultimately, but he never forgot Becky's myriad kindnesses to us, often in the form of steaks and change, that helped us through our grief.

So did the swaying “Aunt” Marys who prayed for us, collective surrogate mothers rocking us in a sea of care. Their numbers required tagging—Mary with the gold teeth, Mary with the club foot, Mary with the daughter Anka, Mary P., Mary G. They weren't necessarily closely related to us, but broadly tied through my father's parents and the “old country.” We saw each other more or less regularly at Saint George's Byzantine Catholic Church and the Polish Home, where we danced the polka and ate pierogies, as well as at innumerable weddings and funerals that took place in the large hall above my grandfather's tavern.

I wonder how the priest, Father, later Monsignor Billy, kept the Marys straight. They were all bosomy, barrel-bodied women with tightly permed, dyed reddish hair and skinny varicose-veined legs bound in not quite flesh-colored support hose. Atop their thick necks perched wide, diabetic-flushed faces that wore the jolly look of a hard-earned better life etched over many a painful memory still echoing from across the ocean. They smiled, but their squinting, watchful eyes carried the sorrows of
those left behind in homes with dirt floors and one scrappy chicken in the yard. Lovable worriers, they were always shaking their heads and gossip-whispering in Czech about the health, marriage and drinking status of the other Marys' husbands and their extended families.

In those happy months in our new home my mother played up the idyllic aspects of our arborous patch of grass, a mere speck in the endless stretch of densely packed suburb. She adored nature and flowers, having learned to seriously garden from her grandmother. As an impassioned student of English, French and American literature, my mother fully absorbed the idealized notion of the pastoral and fashioned her house across from the woods as her own Virgilian Arcadia. Perhaps our fixer-upper's tired appearance afforded extra charm in the way a woodsman's ramshackle cottage adds to the foreground of a landscape painting.

We only walked together through the woods across the street a few times, but it was enough to have secured a deep connection of nature and motherly love that still carries me. I treasure this and the two “wilderness” adventures we took together, to Maine and the Florida Everglades. Though I grew bored literally to tears through many carsick hours of driving through endless New England forest, the trees awed her. To reach Florida we drove down the coast, and the Spanish moss that covered the southern states' arbors fascinated her. For years I kept the moss she had collected in a yellowing envelope, until it was crushed into dust from periodic handling. Florida provided me memories of alligator wrestlers, and my mother in sunglasses, tank tops and knee-length shorts down-shifting her dark green '66 Corvair.

But my mother's affinity for, and my exposure to the rural were further indemnified by our family visits to Franklin and Lillian Hudson's makeshift cabin deep in the woods of northwestern New Jersey. This was the real deal. Uncle Franklin and Aunt Lid were friends of my mother's mother. Tall and distinguished, bespectacled Franklin resembled FDR before the polio. Always respectably attired in a hat, suit jacket and thin black tie, even at the cabin, I still picture him with a pipe and a
book. An engineer and an intellectual, he was my mother's patron, paying her college fees. He shone the proudest at my mother's graduation.