by Lois Cahall
“It’s a challenge. My mom liked to do lots of silly little things that didn’t cost any money. She always said, ‘The best things in life are free… free to be!’” I pause a moment before wailing, “I miss her smell. I miss her hands. I miss her eyes squinting a smile at me for whatever good news I told her, even when it wasn’t so good.”
“I know, honey,” says Alice.
“How am I supposed to live fifty more years without her? There’s so much more I wanted to say to her. I thought our time together would be longer.” Now I’m sobbing like a small child.
“Oh, sweetie….”
“But I don’t want to complain to you, Alice,” I say between sniffles. “You’ve been through something so much worse.”
“It’s all relative, Marla. I may have lost a child, but truth is, you were closer to your mother than I ever was to my child.”
“Still…” I say getting up and brushing the damp from the grass off my bottom.
“Don’t you have a meeting today?”
“Yeah, but how do you know?” I ask.
“You told me last week, remember?”
“I can’t stay long. I just didn’t want you hanging here wondering why I didn’t show. I’m meeting with the college advisor about my schedule for fall semester. Besides, I’m not in the mood for cemeteries. Not today.”
“Had one of those days last week. Today I’m better.”
“I used to read those ads in the newspapers—you know the ones people take out on the anniversary of some loved one, post a photo from when they were twenty-one, even though they died at like age seventy and say, ‘Gone but not forgotten’ and I’d think to myself, ‘It’s been twenty years since that person died, aren’t they over it yet?’ Little did I know. You never get over it.”
“You just learn to live with it,” we both synchronize. And then she slaps my back a single time and rises up.
“You’re almost through the holiday hurdles,” says Alice. “After Mother’s Day you’ve got about five months off until Thanksgiving rolls around.”
“The Fourth of July doesn’t count for much.”
“Unless you were the child of Thomas Jefferson.”
“No,” I chuckle. “I wish. But no relation.”
“Funny how we have to get through our holidays now instead of enjoying them.”
I head toward my car, pausing to snap a couple of lilac branches from a nearby tree. “You know, Alice, if I’d married Eddy, I’d have a husband now, a family to be there for me. You got me thinking about things. You ever think about the highlights and lowlights of your life, Alice?”
“I’m still working on them.”
I toss the bouquet of lilacs through my car window onto the passenger’s seat.
“Hey, you can’t do that,” says Alice. “Town property.” And then she winks.
“Yeah, whatever…” I shoo her off before waving goodbye.
“Bad girl,” she yells out. “So you can be daring after all…”
“If you call stealing lilacs a risky dare.” I say, opening my car door. “Look out world, here I come…”
“Hey, it’s a start,” she hollers after me. “See you next week.”
But I’ve already turned over the key to the ignition.
Chapter Ten
My eyes darted around, following the flight pattern of a red cardinal as it swooped down to his mate on the branch, hovered over the rotting porch. The groove worn in the old banister is the only sign that my grandma once sat here in her wheelchair.
My focus shifted to my mom standing before me, struggling to pin a Virgin Mary medal onto the lace collar of that gown that once belonged to Grandma.
“Stubborn thing,” said Mom, determined to attach it. Then, “There, got it,” patting my chest. “Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. Guess we got the blue and the old part right.”
“I wish Grandma were here.” And then I blurt out, “Okay, not really,” at the exact time Mom said it. We both laughed and then hugged tightly.
“She’d have hated you marrying Eddy,” said my mom, still holding me.
“Hated him,” I mimicked. “That part when the priest says, ‘is there anybody here today that can give good reason these two should not be wed?’ she’d have chimed in about Eddy’s Irish heritage, kicking and screaming as they removed her from the church.”
The slam of the screen door shifted our attention to two little girls who emerged, banana curls bouncing, puffy dresses floating, as they circled around me in a game of tag, tugging at my wedding gown.
“Girls! Now girls,” said my mom, hustling them back inside. “I want the two of you to go sit on the sofa like I told you. Where are your white gloves? You need to make pretty flower girls for Marla.” Then she looked directly into my eyes, searching, “And my Marla is so very pretty today…”
“What is it, Mom?”
“You sure you want this? Eddy, I mean. I’m happy for you but only if this is what you really want. If that’s the case, and you do want him then it’s the happiest day of my life, too.”
Somehow I could tell that Mom was leaving out a whole lot of words in that sentence. She wanted more for me than a postman named Eddy. “Grandma used to say that the difference between an excellent man and a common man is that an excellent man makes great demands on himself and the common man makes no demands. Grandma said that Grandpa was both.”
“Your father,” she paused, thinking twice, “Your father, Bernie, was a great man but, well, he was kind of half and half—half common and half excellent. He was a politician and…” her voice trailed away.
“What was he like? You never speak of my father…” Even the word “father” sounded strange coming out of my mouth.
“Well,” she let out a big sigh. “I wish he were here today to walk his daughter down the aisle. But I was always wishing. Used to wish he’d been there to see you take your first step, see you step up the school bus, see you step up to the podium at high school graduation… I wished so many times I’d look up and Bernie would be there at my desk at the shelter when all my girls were bickering and driving me crazy. He’d magically appear, take me by the arm and say, ‘Rosie, I changed my mind. You’re the one for me.’ Would have been good for the unwed mothers to see that, to have hope. But he never showed up. Only thing that showed up was my next case study.”
I’m not sure what I should have said at that moment, hoping the joy of my wedding day might over-ride her pain, so I said nothing.
“At least Eddy is there for you,” she continued. “I’ll give him that.” Still, her words were missing something. “C’mon. Can’t be late for your own wedding,” she said, tapping my back gently and then hollering: “Girls? Time for church! Let’s take a look at you.” The screen door slammed behind us. The two little girls stood like tin soldiers flashing their white teeth, suppressing tiny giggles at the precise moment the plastic cuckoos emerged from their tiny gingerbread houses. Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Eleven o’clock on the dot.
As the usher pulled the wrought-iron handle of the big wooden door, something that Sam, the owner of the hair salon had said while he ferociously ran his scissors over a customer’s head, came into mine. I hadn’t known what he meant, until now. “There is great practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.” I wasn’t sure if my wedding was about to be an early failure or the avoidance of one. I tried not to over-think it, doing instead what I was instructed in rehearsals, robotically moving my left foot forward on the white crepe-paper aisle, all the guests turned in my directions, their smiling eyes focused on me.
I could hear a few sighs about how pretty I looked—me—the girl in the understated satin mid-length dress. My mom couldn’t afford a full gown, but I still looked fabulous or at least felt fabulous.
My best friend Julia was already several feet in front of me in her lavender taffeta dress, the one from the same bargain basement as mine. Julia turned to stare at me over her bouquet of white roses.
I tried to work out if her expression was meant to conceal a giggle, or something more profound.
Maybe it was the way she was holding her flowers at a droopy level that told me that she was thinking about Charlie, the guy from the band, and how his funeral was in this very church, how life is too short for mistakes, how every moment counts. Maybe it was the change in my mom’s tone and way she stood tall in the first pew, a pasted smile on her face, her left hand clutching the railing more tightly than necessary, her right hand fiddling with the pearls around her neck. Long gone was the happy-go-lucky woman I once knew sipping martinis, dancing her drunken routines on the living-room floor. She seemed defeated.
But whatever it was, the minute that organ music played and I took ten steps down the same aisle that my friend Charlie’s coffin went down, I changed my mind.
By the time I reached Eddy at the altar in his crisp white tuxedo, all smiley and in-control like a man who had it all figured out, I burst into tears, lifted my veil and said to him very matter-of-factly, “I’m sorry, Eddy. But I just can’t do this.”
And with that, I turned and walked rapidly back down to the doors that seemed as far away as Dubai. About midway down, my heel tore the white crepe runner so I picked up my gown, flung off my white stilettos and just ran for it. I never glanced at the guests, not once, but I could hear the rise of commotion in their growing whispers. And I could feel my mom’s eyes on my back, telling me I was doing the right thing, just like in the living room. Except I wasn’t dancing, I was running.
Before I knew it, I had blown past the usher, plowed through those big wooden doors and was outside. “Free to be!” tossing my veil into the air as my bouffant hair came tumbling out of the bobby pins, blowing fifty directions into the wind.
Alice stood in the lavish guest room of Joy’s future in-laws’ home overlooking the veranda below. The garden was filled with fountains and flowers. “My, my, my,” said Alice, standing in the double French doorway. “Who do you suppose tends to those?”
“Gardeners, mother,” said Joy struggling to clasp the satin button row on her sleeve.
“Now that’s what I call something old, something new, something with a fabulous view!” said Alice, before turning to pin something blue on her daughter’s gown—an inservice medal that her father was awarded by the town mayor after the breaking-and-entering at Paulie’s Pizzeria, the night Joy was born. “Must be that Philadelphia is further south,” Alice rationalized, “So flowers grow faster from the warmer climate.” Joy just shrugged and pulled at the length of her gown, bringing it down over her curvy, but slimmer, hips. Today she just wasn’t interested in her mother’s botanical babble.
As Joy stood back to admire herself in the full length Louis XV mirror, Alice’s interests turned to the crystal chandelier that cast its glow on the hunter-green moiré draperies that hung next to an original Chagall painting. “Boy,” said Alice. “You suppose that painting is real? It could never fit in our dining room.”
“What dining room?” snapped Joy. “You used it as a sewing room. We ate at the kitchen counter, remember? And, yes, the painting is real, Mother.”
“Well excuse me, but I didn’t have time to entertain, let alone the money,” Alice’s tone was a little more defensive than necessary. “This is like out of some rich man’s movie!”
“Mother! Quiet down. It’s nice that Scotty’s parents footed the wedding bill, so c’mon…”
“Well, I appreciate their generosity,” she said a little too loudly, in case they were listening. “Me being a widow and all. A good man—and a rich man! What more could a mother ask for her daughter?” Of course there was more. But Alice knew it was too late. She’d never have her daughter back. She’d never really had her at all.
“You know money doesn’t matter to me, Mother. We weren’t raised that way. My idea of rich was having an inflatable pool in the backyard. The one you never bought me because it would interfere with your garden space.” Joy’s bare toes disappeared into the plush ivory carpeting, twirling them left and right. “But forget the inflatable pool, there was really only one thing I ever wanted, Mom, one thing that money couldn’t buy.” Her foot froze in one spot on the reversed direction of the raised, wool pile.
“Oh, you were plenty loved.”
“Was I? Really? Because I always felt like the mistake.”
“That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! You were the youngest—the baby who was babied. This isn’t the time to get into some crazy head game. Now put on your shoes. You’ll be late for your own wedding.”
Obediently, Joy went to put on the white Chanel white leather pumps that she’d been given by Scotty’s grandmother. Alice suddenly had terrible regret: for resenting her pregnancy with Joy, for resenting her dead husband’s lack of interest in their last child, for, well, so many things.
The organist had sprained his wrist, so at the last minute, one of Scotty’s brother’s wives played a harp. The gentle sound echoing from the Gothic cathedral walls enhanced Joy’s angelic qualities as she glided down the aisle on her oldest brother, Peter’s arm. All eyes were upon her in a big formal froufrou style dress with Scarlett O’Hara hoop skirt. At this very moment Joy was more pleased with herself than she’d ever been in her entire life. Maybe it was because her mother-in-law had let her have the most expensive dress in the store, even when she insisted they could go with the half-priced one on the sale rack. Maybe it was all those smiling faces giving her all the attention she had craved for so long, each of them nodding and acknowledging her with approval. Or maybe it was just because she’d finally lost all that baby fat and actually had a waistline. Whatever it was, it felt sensational! And Joy arrived at the altar, Scotty’s size six bride.
And later that evening there was the reception…
Joy’s father-in-law gave the champagne toast in crystal, fluted glasses—the very speech her father should have given. Joy noticed that her mother was too busy flipping over the plates to see who designed the dishes. You couldn’t get much better than Villeroy & Boch.
But what Joy didn’t know was that her mother-in-law across the room, glass raised in a toast, painted smile enhanced by collagen-injected lips, thought that it may have been better for the family business if her son had chosen a more suitable woman, to compensate for the faux pas of becoming a “lowly police officer” instead of taking over the family business. Scotty’s mother wasn’t at all sure that poor Joy, daughter-of-a-poor-Irish-brood-wrong-side-of-the-tracks, was the kind of girl to introduce at next year’s fundraiser.
When the band broke out with their first dance number, they accidentally played a bad rendition of “Daddy’s Little Girl.” Nobody noticed Joy swaying by herself in a corner while everybody else was cavorting and one-upping each other on the dance floor. Usually, girls who can’t dance insist that the band can’t play. But Joy saw it differently: she felt they were both at fault—the band and the dancer. Joy just chuckled at the thought, guzzling down her last sip of champagne, because all that mattered now was that she had finally arrived—better late than never. And with that thought, she put out her glass to the tray-carrying waiter, signaling an immediate refill.
Chapter Eleven
R. I. P.
Bargaining & Despair
For the first time in many Fridays, it’s Alice who’s beaten me to the cemetery on this perfect May morning. She roams the grounds, plucking up dead twigs making her way to where I lie, perfectly still under the elm tree, just to the right of where Mom’s casket is, six feet under.
“Oh, there you are,” says Alice, shading my face as she stands over me. My hands clutch grass blades inside my fists.
“Nobody ever warned me that ‘today’s the day you’re going to wake up and your mother is going to be dead.’”
“Ah… no,” Alice replies cautiously. “No, they don’t.”
“Is that all you can say?” I whimper, pushing myself up into a seated position.
“I will say anything you nee
d to hear and I will listen to whatever you need to say.”
“Oh, aren’t you poetic,” I say, not up for it. “It’s like I close my eyes and meditate Mom back, but when I open them, she’s never there. Why doesn’t she just show herself to me? My heart aches so badly that sometimes I feel my chest muscles are going to collapse. Do you know what that feels like?”
Alice squats down to my side before dropping full length next to my body. I sit up now, running my hand over the little humpback whale made of stone shimmied in between this year’s flowers.
Violently I snap blades of grass attempting to poke them between my teeth, chewing on their tips. “No, this just has to stop. All of it. I just can’t take it anymore.”
I stare numbly into the distance as though in the distance might provide me my mother’s return. “She died helping others—the very girls she loved. I used to be so accepting of sharing my mother with all those strays, but I should have been tougher and more protective of her. I should have kept her all for myself. No, I should have demanded that I kept her all for myself!”
“Are you ready to tell me about it? The day she died.”
I exhale deeply and then finally begin. “She was working with a young woman named Tessie Wright. Tessie was about eighteen when she had her child taken away by the system because she was prostituting to support her drug habit. My mom put six months of her life into straightening that girl out. Tessie was finally getting her baby back from foster care and was going to live with her aunt and start over—even go back to school. Anyway, in the middle of all this, my mom was walking around the corner of the shelter to the grocer to get some party food—she was going to surprise Tessie and celebrate with the entire staff—but the only trouble was Tessie’s pimp wasn’t up for any celebration and certainly not one that released one of his girls. He waited around the corner and began arguing with my mother. That’s what witnesses told me later.
