When I was five, I got pneumonia and had to stay in the hospital. The hospital room was scary and plain. Serious, strange people in doctor clothes walked through the hallway outside my door. I could just barely see some cartoons painted on a wall next to the nurse's station and wished I could be out there instead of in here with the machines and "tent" that surrounded my bed to help me breathe.
I had coloring books, games, my pajamas from home, and a special gift from my mother: a stuffed owl from the gift shop downstairs. When she gave it to me, I immediately grasped it and did so during my entire hospital stay. The nurses had to pry it out of my hands to give me a bath. Never good at naming things, I called it Owly. Later, in the dark, breathing strangely into the tent, I would be comforted by Owly's presence, but for the moment I was comforted by my mother's.
There was another empty bed in the room, and I asked her if another little girl with pneumonia would be there. She said she didn't know. I asked her how long I would have to stay. She said a few days, the important thing was that I get better. I asked her if people die of pneumonia. She said most of the time they didn't, but it was possible. Although I wouldn't realize it until I got older, I appreciated her honesty.
2
When I was in fifth grade, I asked Mom if I could wear a bra. I didn't need one, but I wanted one. All my friends had started wearing them and, at 10, nothing was more important than what my friends were doing. She only reluctantly agreed to take me shopping.
We went to K-Mart. The lingerie department was somewhere between Automotive and Housewares. I was terrified that I might run into boys from school. Mom's face was swollen from crying over an argument she'd had with my stepfather earlier that day. She selected several varieties (all with blue bows - what's with the bows, anyway?) without soliciting my input, without explaining why one fabric was better than another, without describing the features and functions of a bra, information I would need for the rest of my life. The fluorescent lights shone luridly upon us.
We proceeded to the dirty and smelly dressing room. "Try this one," she said, tiredly, handing me one of the bras. I placed my arms through the straps as I'd seen her do a million times. She told me to lean forward. "It will fit better if you put it on that way," she said. What I realized years later was that, yes, it does help a bra to fit better if you lean over when you put it on - if you have breasts. I didn't, but I took this piece of advice because it was my mother who gave it to me. "How does it feel?" she asked, helping me fasten the hook.
"I don't know," I said. I suddenly began to panic. "I don't know what it's supposed to feel like." I started to cry.
"What are you crying about?" she snapped. "We don't have to do this, you know. I can take you home right now. I've got other things to do! Do you think I have money for things like this? Things you don't really need? DO YOU?" She trembled, her already swollen face turning red.
I had no idea how to respond to her. I looked at myself in the dressing room mirror. Who was I trying to kid?
"Is it pinching you anywhere? How about here?" She pointed to under-breast band. She had cooled down after her outburst, but her skin was still splotchy.
"No," I said, even though it was.
"Try this one," she said. I did as I was told. When asked, I said it was "fine." They were all "fine." She settled on a style and purchased two of them, figuring I wouldn't be wearing them every day.
When I did wear them, I felt as if I were playing dress-up. When I put a shirt on over my bra, I felt as though I were harboring a secret - the secret of my impending womanhood. I enjoyed being like my friends. But underneath my shirt, bra, and the stories I told myself about what they represented, were feelings of shame. What I really needed from bra shopping with my mother - pageantry, celebration, bonding, and her approval, delight, and blessing - I didn't get. And never would.
3
I don't know exactly where it came from, but it was ugly and if you hung it from the ceiling of a room with thirty or so other ugly marionettes, you could make a creepy movie. It was a girl, a Mexican girl, with a big head painted "Mexican Girl Brown" with a touch of "Mexican Girl Blue" and "Mexican Girl Red" for the eyes and lips respectively. The hair was thin and styled in two braids with a part down the middle. Peasant dress and flat peasant shoes.
There were strings attached to her hands and feet at one end and the crossed wooden sticks at the other. These strings always got tangled. And I always untied them, untangled them, and retied them. As a child, it was a revelation to find out I could actually just untie and retie the strings instead of trying to contort poor Mexican Girl unnaturally in order to manipulate the strings into their appropriate position.
It was Debbie who showed me this trick. Debbie was our favorite babysitter. She had braces and wore blue eye shadow. She was better than Lynn who once got so mad at us for getting gum stuck in her hair she didn't talk to us the rest of the night. And she was better than Alex who we disliked because he was a boy. She was much better than Gwen who sat around and ate potato chips and ignored us. Debbie talked to us and played with us and hung out with us.
It made us shriek with glee when she sang "Hit the Road Jack" and made the marionette dance to the tune. She made popcorn for us and participated in pillow fights. She answered our questions about TV shows we watched; it was she who explained to me what "resign" meant: "It means Nixon won't be the president anymore," she said sadly.
Against a backdrop of the chrome furniture, flowered carpeting, and "gold" and "avocado" appliances characteristic of our home's décor, Debbie was tolerant if uneasy when we inquired about things we - as pre-adolescent girls - had heard inklings of. There weren't any grown women in our lives we were close to other than Mom and Mom didn't tell us much. We asked her what was down the front of her shirt and hinted we knew what tampons were for. To the former, she said, "The same as every other woman." To the latter she responded, "Ask your mother about it."
But we couldn't ask our mother about it; that's why we had asked her.
She would put us to bed with whimsical stories about fairies and goblins and distant lands and then go back downstairs to watch TV. Sometimes I remained awake until my mother returned home. I pretended to be asleep, breathing into my hair-scented pillowcase, hearing her pay Debbie, lock the door, walk upstairs, check on my sister and me, and turn out the lights.
4
At 20, I dropped out of college. I needed to discover what I wanted in life. I thought I could find out by moving to Alaska with my boyfriend.
When she heard, Mom drove the 60 miles from Naperville to DeKalb just to chew me out. She arrived at my dumpy rooming house on a Saturday morning, unannounced. My boyfriend had spent the night and, in the tiny room, there was no way to conceal his presence. So I opened the door and let her in. She was a small woman - smaller than me, brunette, large brown eyes. Pretty, everyone who met her said. But I didn't always find her so. Her makeup was just slightly the wrong color for her skin. She was dressed in cheap, fashionable clothing. She cast a disapproving glance at the boyfriend and then one at me: "I want to talk to you."
We drove the boyfriend home with me making small talk in the car, trying to pretend I didn't feel like a child again.
She took me to a restaurant for breakfast. I drank coffee and ate little. I smoked just to piss her off. She ordered Sanka and toast. A train rolled past. Her hands shook. She acknowledged the boyfriend was "cute" but told me why I "couldn't" drop out: she had missed out on such an opportunity as a young woman; she had married too early; she had never fulfilled her intellectual potential.
She was beginning to sound like the adults in "Peanuts" cartoons and I was about to get up and walk home when she said something that caught my attention: "Look: Do you want to get pinched on the ass every time you turn around, working in some crappy office? Do you want to get called "Babe" by your supposed colleagues? Do you want to listen to sexist jokes day in and day out and get left out of conversations that matter? Do you want people leaving condoms and dildos on your desk? Well, my dear, that's what you can look forward to if you don't get a college degree."
I stared at her. Her lips were twitching.
I still dropped out.
5
When I received the call I knew was inevitable, I traveled from Colorado back to Illinois to be with her for her death. She had been diagnosed with cancer six months before.
When I arrived, I found her heavily drugged, to ease the pain. I asked her how she was. "I've been better," she joked. The family took turns sitting with her. Much of the time, she was incoherent, or talked about things that seemed irrelevant to everyone else. But every so often, she would say something lucid, like, "Your hair is different. It looks nice."
I've read death is actually quite a joyous experience, that you get to meet with your spirit guides and people you knew in life who have passed to the "other side." You meet with them, and you all decide whether or not it's the right time for you to go. If it is, they guide you along. I wondered, is Mom meeting with her own mother? Her grandparents? Her best friend who died of cancer three years ago? While lying next to her in her bed one night (I had taken over for my stepfather so he could get some sleep), I had a vision of vast darkness with twinkling lights - something like the night sky. I believed this was what she was experiencing and that she was somehow sharing it with me.
A week later, she was still hanging on. The hospice workers told us sometimes people need permission to leave. So, the immediate family gathered at her bedside and I delivered a speech we'd all more or less agreed upon: "We've heard you talking about taking a trip. We'll miss you, but if you need to go, that's okay. We'll be here for each other."
She died the next day. The last thing I'd said to her was, "I love you."
6
It is dark. It is late. Everyone else is asleep. I look in the mirror. I look just like her. Everyone says so. She still exists, in me and around me.
I don't know all the details of what happened between Mom and Dad before they got divorced. From what I've been able to piece together over the years, here's how I think it went: Mom was vivacious, smart, and pretty, but she was never encouraged to do anything that required brains - only things related to cooking, cleaning, and reproducing. She didn't do well in high school and never went to college. She could have, though. Had the intelligence.
Maybe she wasn't a "good girl," but maybe not such a "bad girl" either. Maybe she saved her virginity until marriage; maybe not. She found my dad and saw in him something that she loved or, at least, could love.
Around the third year of their marriage, she realized love wasn't enough. That was about the time her first child was born, so she had other things to keep herself occupied. But that wasn't enough either. She was unhappy and began therapy. She was unfulfilled and started working. She was emotionally bereft and had an affair. She came home one day and told Dad it was over. They split. She got the kids and the house. He got an apartment on the other side of town.
These events affected me in ways I would not discern until much later in my life. They survived as questions within me - questions that waited for, yet feared, resolution.
It's been easier to see her as a real person since she's been gone, easier to see her bravery and strength. To have had an affair and to divorce in the early seventies, when women couldn't even get a charge card in their own name, was an act of courage, one I didn't give her credit for when she was alive.
Sometimes she is here. And I converse with her about these things. As she did during my hospital stay, she comforts me.
Karen Marcus, a freelance writer living in Fort Collins, Colorado, dedicates this story to her late mother. Her two essays, "Invisible Signs of Aging" and "Why I Like Funerals Better Than Weddings" appear elsewhere on Moxie's website. In addition to running her business-writing company, Final Draft Communications www.finaldraftcommunications.com she is at work on her first good novel.