The Boots My Mother Gave Me

by Brooklyn James

  “Ooh, it’s a report card. Harley’s third grade report card,” Kat said. “Mrs. Birch? I had her, too. She had those glasses with the chain, and she would look down over the lenses to see you. She always had a furrowed brow, like you did something wrong. Remember?”

  “Yeah. She would slap her ruler on her desk and insist we pay attention. ‘Look with your eyes, listen with your ears and shut your mouth,’ she would say,” I added.

  “Let’s see what ol’ Mrs. Birch had to say about Harley,” Kat teased, reading from the comments section, “‘Harley has a short attention span. She is a bit of a dreamer.’” She chuckled. “Well, I guess she had your number!”

  “Oh, okay. Let’s see what Katrina’s report card says,” I challenged, playfully digging through the box. My hand stopped, brushing against an unusual, yet familiar substance, plaster of Paris. I pulled the piece of a cast from the box with its one lone inscription, Get well soon, your friend forever, Miah.

  “You just had to keep that one little piece,” I heard Mom say, as I subconsciously embraced it to my chest.

  “Aren’t you going to miss him, Harley?” Kat asked. “Aren’t you going to miss us?”

  “Of course. But you’re coming to live with me after you graduate, right?” I affectionately tucked her hair behind her ear. “You can’t very well get your Fashion Design degree here in Georgia, PA.”

  “You were so stubborn with that cast. The thing covered your entire left leg from your toes to your thigh. You wouldn’t use your crutches. They only slowed you down. So you hopped everywhere on your right leg, even up and down the stairs,” Mom said, her tone reminiscent.

  “I had just made the first grade 8:30 Miler Club for gym class. You know, where you run a mile in eight minutes and thirty seconds or under, and you get your name on the wall. I didn’t want to fall behind,” I said. “That cast was a pain. My leg hurt so bad after they took it off. Oh, it ached.”

  “You used to cry out in the night. I thought you were having nightmares. I’d go in your room and there you would be, rubbing your leg. So I’d carry you into bed with me and your dad. I’d lay you on your dad’s chest and we’d rub your leg until you fell asleep.”

  “Dad, our dad?” Kat asked.

  “Well, yes...your dad, Katrina. How many fathers do you think you have?” I understood Kat’s skepticism. It didn’t sound like anything Dad would do, but he did. I remember.

  “He had his moments, Kit-Kat,” the words flowed freely from my lips, defending him.

  It’s amazing really, when I think about the psychology of it all. Dad could do a hundred rotten things, then turn around and do one good thing. Eager for his love and approval, I accepted that one good thing and forgave all the bad. No matter how many times he duped me, I always wanted to believe he was good and decent, that I came from something good and decent.

  Kat stood up from the box. “Well, I just can’t look at any more of this stuff. It’s making me sad. You’re leaving, Harley. What am I going to do?” Kat leaned against the attic wall, walking its length as she pilfered its contents. “I should pack up and go with you. What’s the big deal about a high school education anyway?”

  “The big deal about a high school education is that it leads to college and a career, allowing you to take charge of your life,” Mom said. “You girls will be educated, self-sufficient. You’re not going to have to depend on a man. I don’t ask for much, just get an education and don’t...”

  “Don’t ever get married,” Kat and I finished her sentence in unison.

  “Yeah, we know the rules, Ma.” I placed the piece of tattered cast back in the box, inscription side up, Jeremiah’s first grade handwriting staring back at me. I closed the lid on the box, trapping my childhood memories inside. Three days from now I would venture into a world unknown, and the last thing I needed was sentiment, something gnawing at me, holding me back.

  “What’s this?” Kat asked, snooping in another box as she sat down in front of it.

  “I fixed that up for Harley,” Mom said, walking to her.

  “What about you, Mom?” I asked. “Did you have a box? What happened to your dreams?”

  She thought a moment. “I guess I never had any, not like yours or Kat’s.”

  “Everybody has dreams, Ma,” I said.

  “I guess I was just a boring child. I wanted to do things, basic rudimentary things. I did what was expected of a woman in the Sixties. I got married and had kids. That’s what we all did.”

  “Look at these old albums. Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Rolling Stones, Ike and Tina Turner,” Kat fumbled through the titles as if completely foreign, pulling the records from the box. “Where’d you get these relics?”

  “Relics?” I asked, offended. “They’re classics, freaking legends, little sister.”

  “Harley, watch your mouth,” Mom scolded.

  “Sorry, Ma.” I continued to Kat, “Remember, Dad saw those acts on R&R from Vietnam?” I knelt beside her taking the records delicately from her hands, regarding them as prized possessions.

  “Well, I did want to go into the military after high school,” Mom said, still pondering her dreams.

  “You did?” Kat looked at her wide-eyed.

  “Then I met your dad. And, well here I am.” She busied herself tidying up the corner of the attic as she continued, “I wanted to be a nurse, too. I signed up for the program, but I withdrew before it started. Your dad wouldn’t stand for me leaving the house every night for class. You girls were young. It just wouldn’t have worked.”

  I felt overrun with her continuous excuses. She never did this because of Dad. She never did that because of Dad. She never left Dad because of us girls. She even said she didn’t want to break up the family, because “broken homes mess up kids.” What! I guess it’s okay for kids to live in abusive, dysfunctional homes, as long as Mom and Dad hang in there? She had an excuse for everything. Maybe that’s the way she justified the entire scenario. To make an excuse sidesteps responsibility. But to make a choice automatically assumes responsibility. When exactly did my mother sacrifice the power to make her own choices? Who would give that up for excuses?

  “So, I helped with the farm, drove bus, and waited tables, whatever I could do to bring in extra cash. But you girls, your lives will be different. You’re of a different generation. You have options. You can go to college and have careers, be your own bosses,” Mom finished.

  “Sounds like a double standard,” I said, instantly wishing I could take it back. Why do we think we know everything as adolescents? I thought I was so smart.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You and Dad are just as capable as Kat and I. Why do you have higher standards for us?”

  I wanted to say, if she expects us to go to college, maybe she should have gone to college. And if she expects us to be independent, career-minded women, maybe she should have been. The old do as I say and not as I do routine never made any sense to me. If you expect certain behaviors from someone, shouldn’t you hold yourself to the same standard? People say children learn what they see. God, I hope not. I never knew two more capable, incapable people than my parents.

  “We want more for you girls. It’s only natural for parents to want more for their kids than they had.”

  What a load of crap. Just be honest, you expect more from your kids than you expect from yourself. That’s what I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “Maybe we want more for you and Dad.”

  “Well, that train has left the station.” She joined Kat and me setting on the floor. “Now it’s your turn. And soon Katrina’s,” she said solemnly, as she stroked Kat’s hair and reached for my hand.

  I reached out to her, holding her hand in mine, her fingers long and slender with pronounced knuckles from years of hard work. My parents, both tall and lean, graced with lengthy appendages, passed such traits on to Kat and me. Traits so definitive would never allow me to forget my lineage, even if I wanted to. I looked at her hand inside mine, one a co
py of the other. Despite everything, snapshots flashed before me of all the times she used those hands to bake my favorite chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting, to wash my dirty little body after a hard day at play, to mend boo-boo’s, to trace my cheek as she tucked me in at night, and how they held me when the world seemed too much, with comfort and love only a mother could provide.

  “You and Kat could come with me and start a new life. We don’t have to tell anyone where we’re going. Dad would never know,” I said.

  “Oh, Mom, could we?” Kat asked.

  Mom looked down at the floor momentarily before responding, “Do you remember that trip we took to Florida, you girls, your grandmother, and I? Harley, you were five and Katrina, you were barely potty-trained. At the end of the trip, I asked if you were ready to go home. Harley, you answered right away, ‘Yep Ma, I’m ready to get back to my ma-cherry mio.’ That’s how you pronounced ma cher amio from that Hank Williams song, Jambalaya, you and your dad used to sing together.” She chuckled affectionately.

  “I said that?”

  “Oh, yes, you thought the sun rose and set on your father for some time.”

  “Yeah, I did,” I said, wishing somehow I could still feel that way. “He would get his guitar out and ask me to sing along. That was so cool. I felt connected to him, as if I actually existed.”

  “Did I ever sing with them?” Kat turned to Mom.

  “You joined in here and there. Most of the time you just giggled, while Harley danced you around the room. Oh, you had a big time.”

  “And Dad let us do that?”

  “Sometimes,” Mom said. “We had some good times.”

  “What changed all of that?” Kat asked.

  “The truth,” I said reluctantly.

  Kids are amazingly resilient. I often wonder if it’s simply naïveté or if it’s our calculated design, a protective mechanism. I tolerated my father’s behavior as a child, forgiving with unconditional love and admiration. I wanted to be just like him. I followed him around, mimicking his every move. I thought he was the greatest thing, and I wanted him to think the same of me. I wanted him to love me, so desperate in my desire to be a daddy’s girl.

  I knew the difference between the truth and a lie as a kid, but I also saw a large gray area. As I matured, the truth manifested itself in a different form, one I could neither ignore nor accept. My standards changed, my expectations grew. Accepting the truth about my dad, my most difficult truth, stung.

  “That’s why those records mean so much to you,” Kat said. “The music, your voice, your love for it. You get that from Dad.”

  Bingo. The one thing I actually had some talent for, music, I inherited from my father, my range and tone identical to his. Maybe that’s why I loved it so much, because it’s something I shared with him. I hated that. Why did I even care after all this time? Sometimes, I would try to rebel against the music, boycotting it. No listening to it, no singing, no making music, nothing to do with music, period. As if I could will it out of me. But I always found my way back to it, drawn sometimes with the fervor of an addict. Something so powerful, music, was given to me by my father, the one person who often made me feel powerless.

  “What did I get from Dad?” Kat asked.

  Mom thought momentarily. “You got his dark hair and olive skin.”

  “That doesn’t count. I mean like a talent, an interest or something?”

  “Well, honey, I guess you’re just more like me.”

  Unsatisfied with Mom’s answer, Kat wanted more, some sort of connection with him. We often felt invisible as children in our home, my parent’s co-dependence filling the majority of their time. Their dysfunction took center stage. Kat and I, like movie extras, lingered in the background, hoping one day for our big break.

  “You know how Dad has the ability to do anything?” I asked. Unequivocally talented, our father picked things up at first glance, mostly self-taught.

  “Yeah,” she said, hopeful.

  “That’s what you got from him.”

  “Ya think? You really think I can do anything, Harley?”

  “No doubt, Kit-Kat, you got it in aces.” I carefully returned the records to the box.

  “I always had a solid role model,” she said, smiling at me. She pulled from the box a pair of tall, brown, vintage leather boots. “What are these?”

  “My old boots. I thought Harley might like them. Your dad bought those for me as a Christmas gift in 1976, back when he still did those things, bought me presents and stuff. Those boots are the best gift I ever got. Genuine leather uppers, the real deal.”

  “Try them on, Harley.” Kat jumped up, tugging on my arm to do the same.

  I stood, pulling my pant legs up to accommodate the height of the boot. I’ll never forget the initial contact my foot made with the sole. I felt like a tourist at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, where celebrities leave footprints in cement. Mom had worn the boots so much, her exact footprint furrowed in the sole. My heel fit perfectly in line with her imprint, the high arch supporting my own. The only thing askew, my toes, long like Dad’s, pressed snugly into the tip of the boot.

  People say you shouldn’t judge others until you have walked in their shoes. Here I stood, literally, in my mother’s shoes. A part of me was curious how she walked through life and found herself in the present. The other part remained frightened, should I ever find myself on the same path.

  Statistics, which disregard free will, show a high probability Kat and I will find ourselves in abusive relationships. It seems prophetic to me. It’s like telling someone they’re good or bad. If you tell them enough, they may eventually believe you and self-fulfill the prophecy. Would I end up like my mother? My father?

  I could feel my feet begin to sweat, suffocating under the weight of my thoughts. Should I keep these boots or were they a bad omen, like accepting an heirloom engagement ring that represented an ill-fated union? My every instinct chanted, take the boots off, take the boots off. I knew I did not want to walk, not even a day, in my mother’s shoes. Frantically, I bent to pull the boots from my feet, and caught a glimpse of Mom, a pleasurable and reminiscent gleam in her eyes as she looked at me, standing there in her shoes.

  “Oh, you don’t like them?”

  I stopped immediately upon seeing the disappointment on her face. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings because of my silly superstitions. I diverted my hands inside the bootlegs. “No, I love them. My socks fell down. Have to pull them up,” I lied.

  “I used to wear those all the time. I nearly had you on the dance floor in those boots, Harley,” Mom began. “We went to the Georgia Volunteer Fire Hall to dance the night away. I had my first contraction at the stroke of midnight. And a long eighteen hours later, I held you in my arms for the first time.” I looked at Mom, then at the boots, realizing the memories they must carry for her. Maybe they’re not that bad after all.

  “What kind of dances did they have back then? Did you guys do the hustle and the twist and the mashed potato?” Kat asked, going through the motions of each dance, causing me to giggle. She was a nut.

  “Well, yeah, I guess we did some of those. Mostly we just danced. The man led, the woman followed. Every now and then we would square-dance.”

  “Square-dance? You mean like, grab your partner, doe-see-doe?” Kat hooked her arm in mine, turning in a circle.

  “Something like that,” Mom said, shaking her head and smiling. “We jitter-bugged, some people call that swing dancing.”

  “Jitter-bug? You sure had some strange names for your dance moves, Ma,” Kat added.

  “No more strange than the names I hear you kids throw around. What’s that one you girls used to do, it sounded like a vegetable?”

  “The cabbage patch.” I demonstrated. Kat joined me until we collapsed from laughter, onto the floor beside Mom. We lay there, the three of us, side by side, our backs against the peak of the attic, looking up at the ceiling.

  “I remember you guys dancing, you and Dad
,” Kat said. “You looked happy.” She lay between Mom and me. With each hand, she took one of Mom’s and one of mine, holding them in her own. We were still and quiet.

  My best memories of my parents came from their dancing together. They actually looked like a couple in love. Dad’s hands held Mom tight and secure as they maneuvered around the floor. She smiled at him and he returned the gesture. She nuzzled her face in the crook of his neck and he would take her hand in his and hold it close to his chest, his heart. Sometimes I got caught up in it, forgetting those hands, the hands holding her devoutly as they danced, caused so much pain.

  The abrupt closing of the front door zapped my mind back to the present. “Marilyn, you in here?” I heard my dad’s deep, carrying voice. I sprang to my feet, offering Kat and Mom a hand to pull them from the floor.

  “Yes John, we’re up here.” Mom waved her hand over the attic opening in the ceiling.

  “Is Harley up there?”

  I began my descent, my foot searching for the ladder beneath me. “Yeah, I was just leaving.”

  He walked to the ladder, propping it up with his weight. “Careful now. I’m not trying to hurry you off.” Mom handed me the box, as I climbed down the rungs.

  “Ma told us about you rescuing her when she was pregnant with Harley. I like that story, Dad,” Kat called down to him, as she stepped onto the top rung of the ladder, waiting her turn. Boy these boots are slick, I thought as my foot slipped again on the last wooden rung.

  “What have you got on your feet, Harley?” Dad asked, as I found sure footing on the living room floor.

  “You gave those to Mom way back in the day, remember?” Kat asked excitedly as she joined me. Mom followed close behind, shutting the trap door on her way down.

  “Harley, pull up your pant leg,” Mom said. I didn’t have to; Kat beat me to it. Standing there beneath me, she busied herself pulling up both of my pant legs, exposing the boots to Dad.

  “Remember, Christmas of ‘76?” Mom steadied herself on Dad’s shoulder, stepping off the last rung of the ladder. He nodded his head in acknowledgment.