White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  In spite of the mess, my mother encouraged us to have friends over. For a time, we did—­hosting slumber parties and even magic shows for friends and neighbors in our basement. The preparation for the events was always frenzied, my mother working for a pair of late nights on throwing mountains of debris into what had once been my father’s home office.

  But as the years passed and we became teenagers, we were less than enthusiastic about having anyone other than the closest of our friends enter the premises. My mother was fine with this until my high school graduation. That’s when she popped the big question that caused my heart to stop, my eyes to widen, my lower lip to tremble.

  “Why don’t we have a party?” she asked me one day in early May.

  “A what?!” I asked, choking on the Diet Coke I had been sipping at the time.

  “A graduation party,” she said cheerily, offering me a paper napkin to mop up the soda on my chin. “We can invite all of your friends and neighbors and ­people who have been important to you.”

  I looked around the kitchen—­at the floor littered with brown grocery bags that had not been entirely emptied after a recent trip to the store, at the countertops covered with unopened cans of cat food and two-­year-­old calendars—­and, to my surprise, she seemed to know what I was thinking.

  “Gail Fakes gave me a name of a cleaning ser­vice I can call. They’re called the Merry Maids. They’ll help straighten things out.”

  This sounded promising. In fact, my mother’s desire to hire a cleaning crew was the best news I’d heard in quite some time. Maybe this would be just what the doctor ordered to get our house back on track.

  I nodded my head slowly and smiled. “It could be fun. Thanks, Mom.”

  The last few weeks of high school were a blur to me. There was a final band concert, a final orchestra concert, a final edition of the school newspaper. There was a class picnic. My graduation party was scheduled on the Sunday prior to graduation. As the days wound down to the big party, my mother got things ready: She sent out invitations and encouraged me to do the same. She ordered food. And we oohed and aahed over the commencement dress. That sophisticated white dress. But the house remained a mess. By the Friday morning before the big day, my worry had escalated to a full-­throttle panic.

  “What happened to the Merry Maids?” I asked my mother in a tone that verged on shrieking. The party was to be spread between two floors of the house—­the kitchen, dining room, and living room on the main floor, and the finished basement on the bottom floor that consisted of a big open family den. Both floors remained piled high with clutter. The formal dining room hadn’t been used in at least five years, and that many years’ worth of papers and discarded mail and shopping bags containing Christmas gifts and baby gifts that were never given were piled high on the dining room table and buffet. The other rooms were no better.

  “I left a message for the Merry Maids,” my mother said, her eyes not meeting mine. I wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth or putting me off. “They never called me back.”

  My heart raced. My head spun. “What are we going to do?!” I cried.

  “I called your father,” my mother said lightly. “He wants to have you and Anthony over to his house in Appleton tomorrow for a pre-­graduation gathering. Your grandparents will be there. Why don’t you and Jamie Fakes go up to see him together?”

  My brother was completing his freshman year at Lawrence University, which was located in Appleton, where my father continued to live. Jamie was an old neighbor friend who had known my family for years.

  “But what about the house?” I asked, definitely shrieking this time.

  “I just need a little time and space and I’ll have everything together,” my mother said. “You know me—I work better on my own.”

  I looked at her, wanting desperately to believe her.

  “Really,” my mother said. “You’ll be amazed at how much I can get done in just a few hours.”

  She had occasionally surprised me in years gone by with her ability to tidy up the house in a matter of hours. One time when I was in the sixth grade I was astonished to wake up to a living room sans debris in honor of a party I was hosting that night. In that case, too, she’d put the cleanup off to the very last minute. Maybe she could work her magic this time as well. But what if she couldn’t?

  “Maybe we should cancel the party,” I said, wondering how, in that long-­ago age before e-­mail and cell phones, I could reach all of my friends in time.

  “No way,” said my mother. “The food is all set, and everyone can’t wait to see you.”

  I was looking forward to seeing my classmates, too. And several family friends had called to say they’d be there. But could I trust her to clean the place? And could I stomach seeing my father?

  My father’s bouts of depression had gotten no better over the years. He was way up for periods—­then way down. It all depended on what medication he was on and how much of it he had taken and how well his personal life was going at the time. His temper when he was down or felt betrayed knew no bounds. More often than not, he and I were at odds, especially when he insulted my mother.

  “How dare you treat her like this!” I cried the time when, during a particularly bad episode, he had snuck into the house when none of us were home and moved the entire contents of our kitchen—­table, chairs, dishes, glasses, even boxes of cereal—­into our already-­cluttered living room, in a bid to express his anger at my mother over a phone spat. It took us weeks to get everything back in place and his actions made our already messy house even more difficult to navigate.

  “She’s not married to you anymore!” I cried.

  “How dare you for being an ungrateful little bitch!” he screamed in return before storming out of the house.

  I was only eleven at the time, but already I couldn’t wait for college to provide me the opportunity to get away from him and his episodes.

  Nor could I wait to get away from his new life.

  My father had finally come out to me when I was fifteen. His timing couldn’t have been worse. I had been gunning to earn a coveted National Merit Scholarship. The honors were doled out based on scores earned on the PSAT, a standardized test consisting of an endless series of multiple-­choice questions. The test was scheduled for a Monday in February. My father, aware of the test but oblivious to how much the results meant to me, decided to share the news with me on the Saturday prior, in the front seat of his company car. The timing was inexplicable—­as was his choice of location. It was dark and cold and, for some reason, we were in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store in the moments before he was supposed to drop me off back with my mother. Without much fanfare, he leaned over to inform me, almost whispering, that there was something he’d been meaning to tell me: “I’m gay.”

  I had suspected the news for some time. The nude male ­statues that dotted my father’s apartment had long seemed strange, as had his love of needlepoint and his adoration of Broadway show tunes. But suspecting your father might be gay is one thing. Knowing it, and knowing it with absolute certainty, is another. Especially in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.

  The reality was too much. And the morning of that damned PSAT exam my father and my shattered family were all I could think about. Try as I might, I couldn’t get any of it out of my mind—­my father and his “friends.” My poor mother’s shame. And what it would mean if any of this got out to the student body. I ran from the classroom mid-­test—­something I had never done in my history of test-­taking—­and retreated to a school bathroom where I sat, at first gasping for breath, then crying in silence, my head pressed up against the cool metal of the stall door. My dreams of winning a National Merit Scholarship were ruined. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst thing about my father’s admission was that there was no one, absolutely no one, whom I could tell. My best friend in the world during those years was
my next-­door neighbor, Kim. We had done everything together for the better part of ten years. But telling a best friend in a conservative small town that your father is gay? At the time, I worried that it would be the equivalent of social suicide. Word would travel fast, and I would no longer be known as Mary Pflum: She’s So Smart. I would be known as Mary Pflum: Her Father Is Gay.

  Looking back, I’m guessing that many already did say that about me when I walked down the hall, since my father had taken to all but flaunting his sexuality by the time he’d come out to me. Beginning in 1985, he refused to go anywhere without Franz, a bearded Austrian man my father always introduced as his “friend.” He came everywhere—­even to my school band concerts and my brother’s football games. My mother would be at those same games. To her credit, she never let on how uncomfortable she must have felt. She grinned and bore my father’s new boyfriend in the manner of the former grin-­and-­bear-­it nun who had long been taught that suffering was somehow good for the soul. My brother and I were less understanding. We’d already felt uncomfortable around Franz before my father came out. We felt even more so afterward. Especially when we watched our mother shift uncomfortably in her seat.

  So, no, I didn’t want to see my father for a graduation gathering that would inevitably include his friends. At this very special time of year I wanted to be around ­people who knew me, or who were at least sincerely interested in getting to know me. More often than not, my father’s friends—­some of whom he counted as good friends even though he’d only known them for a ­couple of months—­weren’t particularly interested in his teenaged children. They were interested in my father. And when they were around, my father was often more interested in them than in being a father. The same, of course, would have likely been true had he been straight. It was a common problem for children of divorce

  Still, as little as I relished time with my father’s friends, I didn’t want to run the risk of my mother not making good on her promise of at last straightening up our messy, messy house. So, in the end, I agreed to go to my father’s gathering. Jamie and I left on our drive at nine o’clock that Saturday morning. We returned around seven o’clock. Ten hours was more than sufficient time for my mother to clean the house, I told myself. It had to be.

  I knew as Jamie pulled into the driveway that the house might not be spotless upon my return. But I was unprepared for what I found. After saying good night to Jamie, I walked in the door, and the look in my mother’s soft brown eyes told me all I needed to know: they were filled with fear.

  Virtually nothing in the house had been touched. Yes, there were flowers in vases where there had been none before I left. But the flowers—­beautiful lilacs and lilies of the valley and peonies plucked from the yard—­did little to mask the mess that was our house.

  “You said you’d take care of it,” I said, my voice this time not a shriek, but a whisper. “You said to leave you alone and it would get done.”

  “Mary, it will get done,” my mother told me, her voice pleading.

  “When?” I asked, collapsing on the front stairs that, unvacuumed, remained littered with cat hair and fuzzies. “How? The party is tomorrow.”

  I put my head in my hands and started to cry. I was graduating. From high school. I had a beautiful dress to wear. I had written a fine address for my valedictory role. I was to sit on the stage with the principal. I had envelopes containing acceptance letters from nine reputable colleges, three of which had offered me full academic scholarships. The world, it would seem, was at my feet. But my feet couldn’t make their way through my own house.

  “We still have tonight,” my mother said. “Just wait and see what I can get done while you’re sleeping.”

  I shook my head. I wanted so badly to believe her—­but I knew better. I wanted so much to help—­but I didn’t know where to begin. My things I could take care of. But most of the things that were piled and strewn about were household items or stuff only she could decide what to do with: boxes of Kleenex, grocery bags filled with file folders pertaining to her students, unopened packages of cookies, legal pads, manila envelopes with important documents, pictures that had been developed but never found their way into photo albums because my mother hadn’t kept photo albums since my father left. I had learned a long time ago that to meddle with things my mother deemed her personal property was a bad idea, punishable by a harsh tongue-­lashing or, worse, grounding.

  I went to bed that night with a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. How could I get out of this party? How could I find a means of skipping over Sunday and going straight to Monday?

  When I awoke the next morning, my mother began barking orders at me to get dressed for church.

  “Mary, hurry up!” my mother cried. “You know we can’t be late!”

  It was baccalaureate. I needed to be at St. Peter’s early since the graduating Catholic seniors were being honored at that morning’s Mass.

  “But what about the house?” I asked weakly.

  My mother stomped off in silence. Her mood suggested that she was grumpy either from staying up all night cleaning or because nothing had been done and she didn’t want to deal with my shrieks.

  Upon entering the kitchen, I saw that it was the latter. I ran down to the basement. Nothing had been touched.

  “We’ll handle it after Mass,” my mother said calmly.

  But there would be no time to right the wrong. I hung my head. I had yelled. I had protested. I had cried. There was nothing more I could do.

  At Mass that morning, I prayed for the usual things: world peace, another report card of straight A’s, a future boyfriend. And I prayed for something more: a clean house. A blessedly, fantastically clean house.

  Following Mass, my mother and I came home to find my father and his side of the family waiting for us. More than a decade after he’d moved out, Dale Pflum still had a house key and had let all of his relatives in without waiting for my mother.

  On hand to greet us were my grandparents, my dad’s sister Mary Jo, and some cousins who had made the drive from southern Indiana in honor of my graduation. My mother sighed, as she increasingly did in the presence of my father’s family members, whom she believed still held her responsible for somehow turning my father gay.

  I shuddered as I watched them look over our house, their arms crossed, their lips pursed, staring in that awful judgmental way that screamed in silence, “Can you believe this house?!”

  “There’s no way you’re going to have a party here this afternoon,” my aunt Mary Jo, the older of my father’s two sisters, said, breaking the silence.

  I’d always been afraid of Mary Jo. She had never been especially warm to my brother and me, especially since the divorce. But on that Sunday, I had to give her credit for speaking the truth. I wondered if she thought the mess that was our house was somehow my fault. I hung my head in shame. I wanted to tell her how it really was: That I was seventeen. That I was a child who had been living in this filth for ten years. A full decade! I wanted to tell her that I wanted nothing more than a clean house, but that there is only so much a child of a well-­meaning but severely depressed mother can do. Especially when there was no extended family around who ever seemed to care. I wanted to tell her all of that. But I didn’t have the strength.

  Instead, I started to cry.

  “Everybody’s house looks like this,” my mother said lightly. She looked at me, but her words were meant for everyone in the room.

  “Nobody’s house looks like this!” I yelled, unable to keep my frustration bottled up any longer. “Only our house looks like this. Only our house is this kind of a mess!”

  My mother recoiled.

  Mary Jo looked at me, then at my mother.

  “Where do you want us to put everything?” she demanded.

  With a wave of her hands, my mother pointed to two rooms: the upstairs guest room, and a room in the ba
sement, my father’s old office.

  “What do you want us to do?” asked Mary Jo, incredulous at the lack of specific direction, never mind the lack of cleaning supplies. “Just throw things in there?”

  My mother nodded weakly.

  My aunt turned to me as if to ask whether my mother was mad.

  I shrugged my shoulders. What else was there to do? This was the modus operandi for the family. If someone was coming over, this was what my mother had instructed us to do for years at eleventh hours like this one: throw everything into a room, shut the door, say a prayer, and hope for the best.

  I helplessly joined in the frenzied pickup process that followed. We created a quasi assembly line—­me, my aunt, my father, my mother—­hurling newspapers and magazines and paper bags into the rooms.

  The frenzied process was still in high gear when the doorbell rang, and the first of my guests, some friends from my graduating class, arrived. I remember greeting them at the door with a mixture of relief at being given an excuse to leave the assembly line and dread at the idea that this secret home life I’d carefully guarded for years might be unveiled at just the moment when I could have made a clean getaway.

  I led the trio of friends down to the basement, where the door to the mountains of unloaded debris had been closed and an old toy chest had been not-­so-­discreetly placed in front of it. I would later nonchalantly tell my friends that the chest was in front of the door as a means to provide more places for ­people to sit. Little did they know of the heaps of junk that lay beyond.

  For the next three hours, the house was filled with the sort of chatter and laughter it hadn’t seen since my First Communion. There were neighbors in the kitchen. There were relatives and friends in the basement. There were my colleagues from the school newspaper staff and fellow members of the community orchestra scattered throughout. Also on hand were the families whose young children I babysat for. I flitted around, greeting well-­wishers, graciously accepting cards and flowers and hugs and pecks on the cheek, cuddling my young babysitting charges on my lap. One high school classmate gave me a beautifully inscribed leather-­bound copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Another presented me with a homemade trophy, lauding me for what he called my acts of heroism in guiding the school newspaper. A dear family friend had lovingly handstitched a quilt, made to match my bedroom. Was I excited? they asked. Was I nervous about being up on that stage graduation night?