Me and My mom, I think I am about 8 or 9.
You wouldn't think that your own mother makes your mothers day amazing but mine always does. sunday was no exception. She showered me with gifts including a huge retro umbrella printed to look like bingo cards. Because I know you would make your mom's mothers day awesome if she was here (she would probably be jealous of my umbrella) I thought I would share these pics of you beautiful ladies. I love you my motherless mother.
UPDATE: So I was gonna add this when I posted this but I was waiting on my mom to email it to me and what can I say I procrastinate. Anyway my mom is on her way to getting her bachelors degree as an English major and I am super proud of her. This story is from her recent memoir writing class and explains why I called her a motherless mother (and it's not cause I am harsh)
“Nay Nay, w’dya slow down? Cheese, yer gwonna g’me a bone spare.”
The voice came from behind me as I walked through the lingerie section of Von Maur’s department store, and I smiled because I immediately recognized the distinct, theatrical, New Jersey accent, cracked by time and cigarette smoke. I hadn’t heard the voice of Marge Marble for quite a while.
Her image flooded my brain, and I knew that if I could turn around and actually see her standing before me she would be eighty-four, and her eyes would be magnified by the thick lenses in her rhinestone studded eye-glass frames. The hair beneath her nylon scarf would be a bright Lucille-Ball-Red, and she would be smoking a Benson and Hedges 100, the tip colored coral pink from her lipstick. Her small frame would be slightly bent under the weight of a large, pink, patent-leather handbag, which would contain at least two or three embroidered handkerchiefs, a billfold stuffed with Walgreens coupons and family photographs, a tube of Avon honeysuckle hand lotion, and an extra-large-can of ‘Aqua Net” hairspray.
Of course, when I turned around Marge Marble was no where to be found. She is a phantom, the brain-child of my youngest daughter Emily, who provides the voice for this caricature of my mother, the real Marge Marble, a woman Emily never got the chance to meet.
Sensitive, inquisitive, precocious, Emily, the child who inherited Marge’s red hair, high cheek bones, and porcelain-like-skin, was never satisfied by my casual responses to her questions about her grandmother:
“What was her favorite color?”
“Pink.”
“Can I see the picture of her in Judy Garland’s dress?”
“It’s in the photo album.”
“How old was she when she came in second to Susan Hayward in the ‘Miss Red Head’ contest?”
“Nineteen.”
“How did she die?”
Slowly and painfully, over many long years, spent in and out of hospitals and nursing homes.
“She had cancer,” I said.
I knew Emily missed this woman who died ten years before she was born. Emily’s red hair and pale skin had always made her feel different from her brother and sister, who were never subjected to daily summer slatherings of sun screen, and who were tanned and freckle-free at the start of every school year.
But, talking about my mother was never easy for me. She was sick for so long, probably from the time I was four or five, when a disease cost half of her left lung. Later, when I was nine, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and went through countless radiation and chemo-therapy treatments, but the cancer kept spreading, until she finally died, alone, in a hospital room on a Sunday morning in June of 1974.
Many of my memories of her are obscured by her relentless illness – which my child’s mind transformed into a creature – a sort of a shadowy monster that lurked in the corners of our home. The monster kept my brother and me quiet, and made my father seem distant, and caused the neighbors to look at us with sadness in their eyes.
After her death, when I was fifteen, the monster grew to enormous proportions. I would see him reflected in the faces of my teachers and the women in the administration office. He followed me around the halls of Central High School, the same halls my mother had walked through, thirty-five years earlier, when she was young and pretty, and had no idea her life would take the twists that it would take.
A few months after Susan Hayward became Miss Red Head, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and my mother married her high school sweetheart, Hank Wilkens, just before he shipped out to fight the war in Europe. While he was gone she gave birth to my half-brother, Hal, and then became a riveter at the Rock Island Arsenal.
Ten years later she would leave Hank and marry my father, and in her mid-thirties she would give birth to me and my brother Billy, just ten months apart, and would decide to stay home with us, and try her hand at Den Mother and Bluebird Leader, for as long as her health would allow.
Marge died when she was fifty-one, and somewhere along the way I failed to pay attention. I didn’t gather enough information about her. All I have left are some glimpses – ideas, probably gathered from old photographs and little lies that grownups tell children whose mothers are dying. I have sanded down most of these, letting time wear the edges off them—making them pocket size, and easy to carry. What whole memories I do have play in my mind like a shaky home movie:
- I come home from school for lunch, and sit alone in the kitchen with her, eating Campbell’s Soup and drinking Hi-C while she smokes and reads. The house is filled with sunlight and a quiet peacefulness that is a calm and gentle contrast to the narrow, sharp-elbow-filled hallways of Fillmore Elementary school.
- I sneak out of my room, late at night, and curl up in a chair in the living room so that I can better hear my mother’s dice hit the table as she plays bunco alone, while she waits for my father to come home from his second shift job.
- And finally, toward the end of her life: I am sitting at a booth in a restaurant. There are coffee cups, and plates scattered about. It is raining hard outside. The window in front of me is foggy and the rain is a thousand thin rivers sliding down it. I rub the fog away and watch as my mother runs across the parking lot, using a newspaper for an umbrella. She slips inside a phone booth and the light above her head comes on, and I watch as she looks up a number in the telephone book and dials, and then the fog creeps over the phone booth windows, and I can’t see her anymore.
As Emily grew from a little girl into a young woman, these were the paltry offerings I had to give her. So, when she was in high school, and she first began to “read” me “excerpts” from the Times in a New Jersey accent, “Marge Marble cuts a rug with former alderman, Al Lefkowitz, on a recent Plus 60’s cruise to Alaska…” I thought she was just using her imagination and rapier-like wit to try and fill in the missing chapters of her ancestry. She was obviously taking bits of info she had about my mother and mixing them with complaints she heard my friends lodge against their living mothers. She then created this funny old woman who talked too loud in movie theatres, and scolded me when I was driving, and who played Go Fish with the two of us, and told us stories about Prohibition and The Depression, and all the things that happened “in her day,” while a cigarette dangled from her lips.
Emily is a grown woman with a young child of her own now, and I said to her not long ago, after she read to me of a recent escapade of Marge’s from the Sunday paper, “you realize that your grandmother was a very pretty, somewhat vain woman, born in Des Moines, to a staunch Swedish mother and a stern German father, and that she would probably be a little appalled by your odd depiction of her?”
Emily shrugged. “That’s ok, Mom. She makes you laugh.”
It was then that I realized that Marge Marble was never a make shift grandmother for a lonely child, nor was she some Saturday Night Live parody to satisfy a need for attention. She was a gift from a daughter who wanted to give her mother something she thought she should have: a mother who grew old, and told stories, and whose memory wasn’t obscured by the smell of hospitals, and out-of-focus-black-and-white photographs, and silver rivers of rain on a foggy restaurant window, a hundred million years ago.
