The reason I was making the time capsule was because of the war, plus some other sad things that had happened in my family. They tried to keep those things from me but children are smart. They are always listening, especially if anything is being said in low voices, or being whispered. Especially if it makes their mother cry. Her father had died in the delta the year before. A few months later my paternal grandfather died in Alabama. My parents had looks on their faces that said it might not be safe in the world, no matter how many hours we spent on our knees at the Episcopal Church, praying for help from the skies.
It was coming from the skies all right. From the B-54 bombers my uncle was flying over the factories in Alsace-Lorraine, from the concrete runways my father was building as fast as they could be built, from the paper drives I had and the sugar my mother saved. I was a war girl. I helped with the war. If they had given me a gun I would have loved to shoot it at our enemies. When I see twelve-year-old boys learning war at camps in Palestine I know who they are. I was fierce like that and longing to participate.
So I buried a time capsule, just in case I should die and have no memorial. I wanted a memorial. I wanted the future to know I had existed.
I don’t know where I got the idea for a time capsule. Maybe from the newspapers my father and I read assiduously every morning. Maybe from a magazine although I don’t remember there being many magazines during the war. Perhaps I heard about time capsules on one of the radio programs Dooley and I listened to at night. Anyway, I thought up making one, dressed in my favorite red and green plaid dress, ate breakfast and went to work. By noon I was out in the yard digging the hole. I loved to dig in the earth and had spent my early childhood trying to make it down to China.
My father was an engineer and our tool shed was always full of shovels and posthole diggers. I remember the earth was very hard that day and I had to dig for a long time to scrape out a place deep enough for my box. I put it in, covered it up, patted down the earth and replaced a scrap of grass to keep it secret. Dooley was sitting on the back steps laughing at me but I didn’t care. He could take his chances with the future. I was making sure I’d be remembered.
I wonder what I would include if I were burying a time capsule today. A few of my books, photographs of my progeny, a pair of my old eyeglasses, what else? I’m sure it would contain the four teeth I had removed yesterday morning. I had been dreading and preparing myself for those extractions for days. Dozens of times I woke up in the middle of the night having magnified the occasion into great pain and suffering, dry sockets that would never heal, a future as a toothless hag, my cheeks sunken in, only will left to get me through a horrible old age with no smile, no teeth, or worse, some sort of prosthetic device in my mouth that would alter my speech. I would never be able to speak in public again. I would lisp. I would spit. Food would fall from my mouth. I would attempt to put soup in my mouth and the soup would dribble out and fall on my breast. Still, I am nothing if not a survivor. Go back to sleep, I would tell myself. I refuse to have bad dreams.
While I waited for the horrible day I exercised two hours a day. I wanted my body to be ready for the surgery, tuned up. I wanted my immune system to be at fever pitch. It was not as if a range of possibilities was open to me. I had four infected teeth that had had everything done to them that dental science could think of to do.
Every root had either been incised or had a root canal. There was nothing left to do but take the teeth out or die of infection. So the teeth were coming out. I was going to put as good a face on this as possible. I became adjusted to the idea of being a toothless hag. I began to like the idea. Think what a good example I will set for other people, I decided, when I refuse to be made unhappy by being a toothless hag. When I flaunt being a toothless hag. When I refuse to wear the miserably uncomfortable prosthetic device and go around toothless as in an old Greek play.
It has now been forty-eight hours since my teeth were removed. The whole procedure took thirty minutes. I only had to have one shot of Novocain. I was in absolutely no pain whatsoever. The device that had been made for me to wear in place of my teeth fit perfectly into my mouth. I like it! I can talk! I can eat! It fits! It stays there! It’s darling! It looks a lot better than those ugly, ugly, ugly teeth that I struggled so hard to preserve. And this is not even the permanent device. This is a temporary partial plate that I was supposed to find unwieldy and uncomfortable. And I never, never, never have to thread dental floss through the crown and bridgework again as long as I live which means I don’t have to watch television if I don’t want to. I used to have to watch television to amuse myself while I flossed. It was so boring to have to floss those old, terrible, crowned teeth that I would have to turn the television on while I did it. I became addicted to late afternoon news programs. I figured the totally boring activity of flossing my teeth plus the totally boring activity of watching the afternoon news programs would cancel each other out the way two minuses make a plus. Like two negative charges make a positive charge, only it didn’t work. All that happened was I got addicted to talking heads. By the time I finished flossing I would be caught up in some inane television program, filling my mind with murder, abused children, mayhem, civil riots. Now all I have to do is take this beautiful little piece of hardware out of my mouth and clean it, as I would a shoe with a brush.
This is a moral lesson. I feel like a new person. I had my piano tuned. I don’t know what to do with myself. I think I’ll go to Europe. No, I’ll just stay here and learn to play Satie’s Gymnopédie, No. 1, on my piano. I have been sick and now I’m well.
OCTOBER 10, 2002
Living in the Shadow of a Beautiful Mother
IT ISN’T SO MUCH HER BEAUTY AS IT IS HER PERFECTION. IT IS always the classic moment with my mother; the exact right amount of perfume, the perfect nail color, the simple perfect bracelet, the ladylike hemlines. Of course, there was nothing left for me to do but rebel. To this date, at age fifty-six, mind you, nothing pleases me more than to be able to put on an obscenely short micro-mini and wear it out to breakfast on Sunday morning. What is a woman that old doing in a skirt that short? I imagine people saying.
I know my mother will hear about it, sooner or later, down in Jackson, Mississippi, where she is still wielding unquestioned editorial power over the hemlines and haircuts of my nine nieces, two sisters-in-law, three ex-sisters-in-law, and countless great-granddaughters and cousins. “I saw a picture of Ellen in People Magazine wearing some weird denim vest,” one of her bridge partners will surely tell her. “I guess she’s never going to cut her hair.”
The women in my family bring everything they buy to my mother’s house to model for her and await her judgment. She doesn’t even buy all those clothes for them anymore. Still, they await her approval like runway models getting the nod from Calvin. They do this with good reason. My mother is a fashion genius, descended from a long line of fabulous seamstresses. The foot-pedal sewing machines hum in her brain. She has an unerring eye for cut and style and color, and, like a good editor, she never tells a lie, even to spare the wearer’s feelings. “That color isn’t good for you,” she will say. Or, “that makes your hips look big.” Or, “you can do better than that, my darling. Take that back to the store.” It isn’t easy to win her approval. As I said, she stops at the classic moment.
Even though I live four hundred miles away, I am still not free from the compulsion to win her approval. When it comes to a big occasion, a public appearance in a town where I have friends, or, sometimes, just to report on a successful shopping expedition, I find myself calling to talk to her about clothes. I will describe the dress or outfit that I bought and answer questions about shoes, accessories, handbags, scarves, hose, jewelry, hemlines. “Don’t get it too short,” she will say several times, no matter how much I prevaricate on the answer. “Not above the knee. Don’t get it too short. It’s so common, honey.”
As I said, she is descended from a long line of seamstresses and she can envision cut and style and
line and color. She can envision hems. Her great-grandmother, who lived in perfect health until I was four, was a milliner from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. This woman came down the Monongahela and Ohio and Mississippi rivers after the Civil War and, with her husband and their companions, settled the little town of Mayersville, Mississippi. She brought with her patterns and knowledge of fashion and passed it on to her three daughters, who passed it on to my mother, who has tried to teach it to me.
Of course, the clothes and hats and hairdos and buttons and rick-rack and lace are all great fun, greatly beautiful, and undeniably an art form, but it would be a mistake to think they constitute the thing that was beautiful about these women or the thing that made them loved. The clothes were “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”
When we see something that is truly beautiful we know the maker created it out of love and we return that love. We know this because it is the way we operate ourselves. When we are happy and at peace with ourselves we create beauty. It is that impetus or inspiration that the viewer or watcher responds to. When we see a fabulous garden we share in the moments of inspiration and planning and creation. The same is true when we see a beautiful woman all dressed up with her makeup on and her hair done. The closer the inspiration was to pure happiness or joy, the closer the result will be to beauty. “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare,” Edna Millay wrote. “Fortunate they who though once only and then but far away, have heard her massive sandal set on stone.”
The thing that people find beautiful about my mother is her excitement and energy and grace, her awe, her love of flowers and children and small birds, her sense of order, the delicacy of her language, the kindness and thoughtfulness of her ways. “All along it was indwelling,” another poet, Denise Levertov, wrote. “A gold ring lost in the house.”
My mother doesn’t buy expensive clothes. She thinks it is terrible to spend large sums of money on herself when there are all those young women in the family to buy things for. She likes to shop carefully. She likes to pore over catalogs in the evenings, waiting to spot the exactly perfect dress. Then she will order it and hem it and look marvelous in it. It will be very simple, with simple classic lines and she will search around her perfectly ordered closet and find the exact right shoes and scarf and earrings to wear with it. She doesn’t make mistakes. I have never known her to buy anything she didn’t actually wear. But then she wears her best clothes all day long. She puts them on in the morning and wears them out into the garden and to the grocery store and just to sit in the den and talk to little children. “All along it was indwelling. A gold ring lost in the house.”
Great beauty always begins with great physical health. My mother got that in the genes from those same long-lived seamstresses and she takes care of her inheritance. At eighty-three she is still in perfect health and still perfectly beautiful. The natural beauty is there, of course, the high cheekbones, the gorgeous legs, the long graceful arms and hands. She was always a dancer and she moves with a dancer’s grace. My father first saw her dancing in a Charleston contest. He watched from the back of the auditorium, then went to work to make friends with her brother. Some weeks later he was brought to her house to be introduced. It was sixty-four years later, on a rainy night in Jackson, Mississippi, when my mother finally heard this story. My mother, my father, my son and myself were on our way to a seven o’clock screening of Crocodile Dundee. “Dundee,” my father said. “That’s the name of the town where we lived the first year we were married.”
“How did you meet Grandmother?” my son asked.
“I saw her dancing in a Charleston contest,” Daddy answered. “I said to a friend, who’s that girl?”
“That’s Aurora Alford,” he said. “Floyd Alford’s sister from the delta.”
“You never told me that,” my mother put in. “You saw me before Floyd brought you home?”
“Of course I did,” my father answered. “Why do you think I was there?”
Great beauty has its drawbacks, of course. Even the most beautiful among us fear the ravages of time. The last person I would ever have been able to imagine giving in to that was my mother. Yet even our mothers turn out to be human. (Feet of clay, I had a character say in a book. It’s a clay universe, another character answers.)
It is like the memory of a bad dream when I recall the time my mother went to get a facelift. This was twenty years ago when facelifts were still fairly unusual things to do. Her sisters were elated. They felt they had sent a scout to the cutting edge of the beauty business. But I was in a funk. There was my mother, my ground of being, propped up on the pillows in her pressure bandages. Her beautiful sisters were all around her, worshipping at her daring. “She did it,” they kept saying. “She really did it. Can you believe she did it?”
“No,” I said, getting furious. “Beauty is one thing. Elective surgery is another.” I dropped my flowers at her feet and stormed out of the room and I didn’t see her again until the bandages were off and she was almost healed. “How could you do that?” I said when I saw her. “How could a woman your age be that crazy?”
Now, years later, I am the age she was then and I wonder if my anger was at the danger I thought she had put herself in or simply that I knew no matter how much I wanted to, I would never have the courage to let someone cut into me that close to my eyes or my brain.
Of course she looked absolutely marvelous after the stitches healed. She looked ten years younger and never seemed to miss the time or money she had spent. I’m still jealous of this facelift business. Even if I wanted to do it, and if I had the courage, I would not be able to. My psychoanalyst won’t let me. He’s a hard man. No drinking, no smoking, no facelifts, no breast implants, if you want access to that office. He’s not as beautiful as my mother, but he’s a lot fiercer and even more protective.
Being raised by a woman who worships beauty has other drawbacks besides the obvious one of not being able to measure up to the standard. Every Halloween of my life I have had to be a beautiful princess. I cannot imagine going to a costume party as a witch or a goblin or a joke. My mother always started weeks ahead making my Halloween costumes. I would be a beautiful antebellum princess or a beautiful princess out of King Arthur’s court, with a conical hat and tulle floating down and a blue silk dress with a train. Or I would be a beautiful Oriental princess or a flower girl or a junior bridesmaid or a bride.
Recently I was down on the Mississippi coast with my grandchildren on Halloween. My daughter-in-law, whose ancestors were scientists and artists in New Jersey, had dressed up my granddaughter as a pumpkin. I was shocked. Imagine a little girl not being a beautiful princess? A whole new world of possibilities opened before my eyes and I sat around all evening pondering the limiting aspects of perfectionism and beauty.
I remember a role I had in a fifth-grade play. The play was called Fire Hazards and was produced under the auspices of the fire department. I was chosen to play “Spontaneous Combustion.” All was going well until they told me I had to wear rags and sit in a garbage can on the stage. I quit the production. It was impossible for me to sit on a stage in such a guise.
I remembered the long mornings I would spend with my little friends Jean Finney and Donna Brummette playing dress-up with my mother’s old clothes. “Who is the most beautiful girl in the world?” I would demand. “You are, Ellen,” Donna and Jean would reply. Sometimes Donna would refuse to say it. Then I would sit on her until she did.
I even had to have beautiful dolls. Sometimes the dolls were beautifully dressed. If they weren’t, my mother would get out her sewing machine and begin to make clothes for them. Unfortunately, I liked naked dolls. The minute a doll arrived I would take off her clothes and put her to bed. “Stay there until I get back,” I would say. “I’ll be back in a little while.” I had a row of doll beds on the back porch piled up with naked dolls. My mother loves to tell the story of the day the Episcopal minister came to call and I took him out on the porch and introduced hi
m to all my naked children. I never have been able to see the humor in that story, although I suppose the point is that the minister, like any good Anglican of that time, wanted the savages to be fully clad.
Another story my mother loves to tell is about the Christmas of 1943, right in the middle of the Second World War, when everything was rationed and people made their Christmas presents. My mother and two of her younger friends had spent a month making a chest of doll clothes to accompany a beautiful black-haired doll an older friend was giving me. There were evening dresses and silk nightgowns and even a coat with a real fur collar and cuffs. Christmas came and there was my doll with her unbelievable wardrobe. They had also found somewhere a toy washing machine and painted and fixed it up for me. It had a real hose and could be filled with real water.
At two o’clock that afternoon my mother found me out on the back porch in the freezing cold weather happily stuffing the last article of doll’s clothes into the washing machine. The beautiful doll lay on the floor, asleep and naked, and the fabulous handmade wardrobe was now a wad of ivory soap and water. “I wept,” she says, when she tells the story. “It was right in the middle of the war.”
When I am thinking deeply and philosophically about beauty I try to ponder the question of illusion. My mother’s beauty is not illusory but the enhancement of it certainly is. And the true downside of this endless search for and insistence upon beauty is that it has taught me to judge things by appearances. I was thinking of this the other night. It was eleven o’clock and I had turned on the television to see if the world was still at peace before I went to bed for the night. I was switching channels and came upon a strange and interesting program I have seen by accident several times. A program on PBS called Thinking Aloud. It is a program of interviews with philosophers and gurus. The host had just introduced the night’s guest, an unattractive man with bad teeth and an awkward ungainly body. Ichabod Crane, I remember thinking. What a strange-looking man. Then the man began to speak. He had just come from spending years in a Zen monastery and had returned to the world to try to teach people to love themselves and one another. He spoke movingly of the possibilities for understanding, the hope that the human race would evolve into more profound and loving creatures. I was spellbound. For the next thirty minutes I barely moved as I listened to this lovely man talk about human dreams. I completely forgot his teeth or the structure of his face or his ungainly posture. He had captured my imagination at a level that was beyond appearances. He had given me the idea that mankind could become more gentle, that happiness and understanding were possible goals for an individual or the race.
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